She started looking for data on how many women in the United States were murdered by men each year. She wanted to put a link in her online comments, a gateway to a definitive account of the information she thought might make people see what she saw: a national crisis. “Look at all these freaking women!” she remembers wanting to scream. “Pay attention to this!”
But the data wasn’t there. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracked murders using a reporting system with hundreds of potential attributes, such as whether domestic violence was a factor, but the information wasn’t publicly accessible. FBI figures relied on voluntary reporting from thousands of law-enforcement agencies, and some years yielded more robust data than others.
Wilcox also considered the data grossly incomplete because it was anonymous; it didn’t include information about who the victims were. Someone needed to document the women—to name them, describe them, and honor them. And if no one else was doing it, Wilcox decided that she would.
She opened a spreadsheet and got to work. Each successive row would contain the details of a woman’s murder. Wilcox started labeling columns: Name, age, location of death. Whether there were postmortem injuries, and whether the crime was a murder-suicide. The killer or suspected killer’s name—if it was available—and his relationship to the victim. Soon Wilcox had labeled more than thirty columns.
[…]
Femicide entered the lexicon in 1976, when radical feminist scholar Diana Russell used it to describe “the killing of females by males because they are female.” Russell wanted to push back against the normalization of women’s murders, especially in a domestic context, as private misfortunes or crimes of passion. In much the same way that defining genocide clarified the intent behind an atrocity, describing misogynistic murders as femicide demanded that the crimes be recognized as uniquely motivated. “We must recognize the sexual politics of murder,” Russell wrote. “From the burning of witches in the past, to the more recent widespread custom of female infanticide in many societies, to the killing of women for ‘honor,’ we realize that femicide has been going on a long time.”
Almost as soon as the term was coined, women began tabulating femicides. Between January and May 1979, twelve Black women were murdered in Boston, six within a two-mile radius, prompting an activist group called the Combahee River Collective to publish a pamphlet entitled “Six Black Women: Why Did They Die?” The public feared a serial killer, but the victims were bound by their gender, race, and personal circumstances, not by who took their lives. Just two of the women were killed by the same man. With each printing, the collective struck out the old number in the pamphlet’s title to reflect new murders of Black women in the city. A decade later, in 1989, a man shot and killed fourteen women, most of them engineering students, in Montreal. Before the massacre he yelled, “I hate feminists.” In response, activist Chris Domingo created the Berkeley Clearinghouse on Femicide, where she collected stories about similar killings.
[…]
As Women Count USA gained recognition, researchers asked Wilcox to track keywords or trends for their own work. In 2020, Danielle Pollack, a policy manager for the National Family Violence Law Center, requested that she flag cases of girls killed by fathers from whom their mothers had separated. Pollack wanted to use the figures to lobby for changes in family-court systems to protect children. More recently, Alison Marganski, a criminology professor at LeMoyne University, began reviewing Wilcox’s data. She was looking for trends in coercive control, stalking, and abuse that preceded murders—behaviors that, if properly identified, could have prompted police or other individuals to reach out to victims before it was too late.
Marganski told me that she admired Wilcox’s research because it presented a fuller picture of femicide than government data did. That quality gap could widen further. In 2025, the Trump administration removed questions related to gender identity from the National Crime Victimization Survey, a project of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Federal agencies have deleted thousands of online datasets, including ones related to public health and safety. It’s uncertain to what extent, and how reliably, the federal government will continue to collect crime data. “It’s a very precarious time,” Marganski said, “which maybe makes the case for the grassroots stuff to have a particular role.”