Imagine a world where your phone is too big for your hand, where your doctor prescribes a drug that is wrong for your body, where in a car accident you are 47% more likely to be seriously injured, where every week the countless hours of work you do are not recognised or valued.
Invisible Women shows us how, in a world largely built for and by men, we are systematically ignoring half the population. It exposes the gender data gap - a gap in our knowledge that is at the root of perpetual, systemic discrimination against women, and that has created a pervasive but invisible bias with a profound effect on women' lives. From government policy and medical research, to technology, workplaces, urban planning and the media, Invisible Women reveals the biased data that excludes women. Award-winning campaigner and writer Caroline Criado Perez brings together for the first time an impressive range of case studies, stories and new research from across the world that illustrate the hidden ways in which women are forgotten, and the impact this has on their health and well-being. In making the case for change, this powerful and provocative book will make you see the world anew.
Caroline Emma Criado Perez (born 1984) is a British feminist author, journalist and activist. Her first national campaign, the Women's Room project, aimed to increase the presence of female experts in the media. She opposed the removal of the only woman from British banknotes (other than The Queen), leading to the Bank of England's swift announcement that the image of Jane Austen would appear on the £10 note by 2017. That campaign led to sustained harassment on the social networking website Twitter of Criado Perez and other women; as a result, Twitter announced plans to improve its complaint procedures. Her most recent campaign was for a sculpture of a woman in Parliament Square; the statue of Millicent Fawcett was unveiled in April 2018, as part of the centenary celebrations of the winning of women's suffrage in the United Kingdom. Her 2019 book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men was a Sunday Times bestseller. (Wikipedia)
This book is a must read for ANY HUMAN. Don’t let the title fool
you, it is not a book that concerns only women. It literally
revolutionised my view of the world.
Do you drive a car? Do you use public transportation? Do you run
errands through the city? Do you use public toilets? Then the book
is for you. Whether you work in academia, healthcare, business,
politics… it covers it all.
As a woman in tech I get bombarded by campaigns about women in
leadership, mentorship programs for young girls in STEM, or women
networks. I never really got the point of them as much as after
reading the entire book. All humans should take the mission of
addressing and acting on data bias at heart, either by taking
initiative or actively listening and supporting, because it really
does concerns us all. And personally I understand more the
importance of representation.
Big thanks to the author Caroline for her terrific work to unveil
and collect all this information, investigating such diverse sectors
and domains. She’s a true inspiration for me, and I hope to
contribute to her work by exposing and acting on data bias in my
field.
“Perhaps most galling from a gender-data-gap perspective was the finding that females aren't even included in animal studies on female-prevalent diseases. Women are 70% more likely to suffer depression than men, for instance, but animal studies on brain disorders are five times as likely to be done on male animals.” ― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
“So with that substantial sex difference in mind: how many drugs that would work for women are we ruling out at phase one trials just because they don’t work in men?”
“since the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act, workplace fatalities in the UK have dropped by 85%. But there is a caveat to this good news story. While serious injuries at work have been decreasing for men, there is evidence that they have been increasing among women.7 The rise in serious injuries among female workers is linked to the gender data gap: with occupational research traditionally having been focused on male-dominated industries, our knowledge of how to prevent injuries in women is patchy to say the least.”
“The formula to determine standard office temperature was developed in the 1960s around the metabolic resting rate of the average forty-year-old, 70 kg man.1 But a recent study found that ‘the metabolic rate of young adult females performing light office work is significantly lower’ than the standard values for men doing the same type of activity. In fact, the formula may overestimate female metabolic rate by as much as 35%, meaning that current offices are on average five degrees too cold for women. Which leads to the odd sight of female office workers wrapped up in blankets in the New York summer while their male colleagues wander around in summer clothes.”
“Employment procedures that are unwittingly biased towards men are an issue in promotion as well as hiring. A classic example comes from Google, where women weren’t nominating themselves for promotion at the same rate as men. This is unsurprising: women are conditioned to be modest, and are penalised when they step outside of this prescribed gender norm.”
“But male universality is also a cause of the gender data gap: because women aren't seen and aren't remembered, because male data makes up the majority of what we know, what is male comes to be seen as universal. It leads to the positioning of women, half of the global population, as a minority. With a niche identity and a subjective point of view. In such a framing, women are set up to be forgettable Ignorable. Dispensable - from culture, from history, from data. And so, women become invisible.”
“male bias is so firmly embedded in our psyche that even genuinely gender-neutral words are read as male.”
“Failing to collect data on women and their lives means that we continue to naturalise sex and gender discrimination – while at the same time somehow not seeing any of this discrimination. Or really, we don’t see it because we naturalise it – it is too obvious, too commonplace, too much just the way things are to bother commenting on.”