Caroline Criado Perez

Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development, to healthcare, to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, because it treats men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And women pay tremendous costs for this bias, in time, money, and often with their lives. Celebrated feminist advocate Caroline Criado Perez investigates the shocking root cause of gender inequality and research in Invisible Women​, diving into women's lives at home, the workplace, the public square, the doctor's office, and more. Built on hundreds of studies in the US, the UK, and around the world, and written with energy, wit, and sparkling intelligence, this is a groundbreaking, unforgettable exposé that will change the way you look at the world.

Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

Invisible Women

duha

We all know about heavy lifting in construction - what the weight limits should be, how it can be done safely. But when it comes to heavy lifting in care work, well, that's just women's work, and who needs training for that?

It's not entirely clear why the tech industry is so afraid of sex-aggregated employment data, but its love affair with the myth of meritocracy might have something to do with it: if all you need to get the "best people' is to believe in meritocracy, what use is data to you? The irony is, if these so-called meritocratic institutions actually valued science over religion, they could make use of the evidence-based solutions that do already exist.

Which raises the question: is women's unpaid work under valued because we don't see it – or is it invisible because we don't value it?

And as women have increasingly joined the paid labour force men have not matched this shift with a comparative increase in their unpaid work: women have simply increased their total work time, with numerous studies over the past twenty years finding that women do the majority of unpaid work irrespective of the proportion of household income they bring in.

When planners fail to account for gender, public spaces become male spaces by default. The reality is that half the global population has a female body. Half the global population has to deal on a daily basis with the sexualised menace that is visited on that body. The entire global population needs the care that, currently, is mainly carried out, unpaid, by women.

But all too often the blame is put on women themselves for feeling fearful, rather than on planners for designing urban spaces and transit environments that make them feel unsafe.

The complexes seem designed with privacy rather than community in mind. For the families used to the intimacy of the favela where, explains Williamson, 'your kid doesn't necessarily even need childcare after a certain age, because everybody is always watching them', this often translates into isolation and fear of crime.

Storm

Female biology is not the reason women are raped. It is not the reason women are intimidated and violated as they navigate public spaces. This happens not because of sex, but because of gender: the social meanings we have imposed on male and female bodies. In order for gender to work, it must be obvious which bodies elicit which treatment. And, clearly, it is: as we've seen, "the mere sight of a woman' is enough for the viewer to immediately elicit a specific set of associated traits and attributions'. To immediately class her as someone to speak over. Someone to cat call. Someone to follow. Someone to rape.

The evidence is clear: politics as it is practised today is not a female- friendly environment. This means that while technically the playing field is level, in reality women operate at a disadvantage compared to men. This is what comes of devising systems without accounting for gender.

The trouble with traditional stoves if that they give off extremely toxic fumes. A woman cooking on a traditional stove in an unventilated room is exposed to the equivalent of more than a hundred cigarettes a day…worldwide, indoor air pollution is the single largest environmental risk factor for female mortality and the leading killer of children under the age of five.

Women working as caters and cleaners can lift more of in a shift than a construction worker or miner… And unlike the construction workers and miners, these women often don't go home to rest, but instead go home to a second unpaid shift where there is more lifting, more lugging, more crouching and scrubbing.

We know all about heavy lifting in construction - what the weight limits should be, how it can be done safely. But when it comes to heavy lifting in care work, well, that's just women's work, and who needs training for that?

Then there's the standard office temperature. The formula to determine standard office temperature was developed in the 1960s around the metabolic resting rate of the average forty-year-old, 70kg man.

For example, quotas, which, contrary to popular misconception, were recently found by a London School of Economics study to ‘weed out incompetent men’ rather than promote unqualified women.

Recent research has emerged showing that while women tend to assess their intelligence accurately, men of average intelligence think they are more intelligent than two-thirds of people.

Brilliance bias is in no small part a result of a data gap: we have written so many female geniuses out of history, they just don't come to mind as easily. The result is that when brilliance' is considered a requirement for a job, what is really meant is 'a penis'. Several studies have found that the more a field is culturally understood to require brilliance or raw talent to succeed - think philosophy, maths, physics, music composition, computer science - the fewer women there will be studying and working in it. We just don't see women as naturally brilliant. In fact, we seem to see femininity as inversely associated with brilliance.

"Staying up all night doing something is a sign of single-mindedness and possibly immaturity as well as love for the subject. The girls may show their love for computers and computer science very differently. If you are looking for this type of obsessive behavior, then you are looking for a typically young, male behavior. While some girls will exhibit it, most won't.

Schools are teaching little girls that brilliance doesn't belong to them. No wonder that by the time they're filing out university evaluation forms, students are primed to see their female teachers as less qualified.

An analysis of 248 performance reviews collected from a variety of US-based tech companies found that women receive negative personality criticism that men simply don’t. Women are told to watch their tone, to step back They are called bossy, abrasive, strident, aggressive, emotional and irrational. Out of all these words, only aggressive appeared in men’s reviews at all…

A 2010 Swedish study found that a moth- er's future earnings increase by an average of 7% for every month of leave taken by the father.

OECD level of one in five fathers taking any parental leave at all - falling to one in fifty in Australia

A recent Australian analysis found that the optimum length of paid maternity leave for ensuring women's continued participation in paid labour was between seven months to a year, and there is no country in the world that offers properly paid leave for that length of time.

An Australian study similarly found that housework time is most equal by gender for single men and women; when women start to cohabit, ‘their housework time goes up while men's goes down, regardless of their employment status’

And as women have increasingly joined the paid labour force men have not matched this shift with a comparative increase in their unpaid work: women have simply increased their total work time, with numerous studies over the past twenty years finding that women do the majority of unpaid work irrespective of the proportion of household income they bring in. Even when men do increase their unpaid work, it isn't by doing the routine housework that forms the majority of the workload, instead creaming off the more enjoyable activities like childcare.

Lindy B

This book really succeeds in conveying the deep, systemic aspects of misogyny and the breadth of work needed to rectify them.

*THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER* ‘HELL YES. This is one of those books that has the potential to change things – a monumental piece of research’ Caitlin Moran Imagine a world where... · Your phone is too big for your hand · Your doctor prescribes a drug that is wrong for your body · In a car accident you are 47% more likely to be injured. If any of that sounds familiar, chances are you’re a woman. From government policy and medical research, to technology, workplaces, and the media. Invisible Women reveals how in a world built for and by men we are systematically ignoring half of the population, often with disastrous consequences. 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 profound impact this has on us all. Discover the shocking gender bias that affects our everyday lives. ‘A book that changes the way you see the world’ Sunday Times ‘Revelatory, frightening, hopeful’ Jeanette Winterson **Winner of the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize 2019** **Winner of the Readers' Choice Books Are My Bag Award 2019** **Winner of the FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2019 Book of the Year Award 2019** **The Times Current Affairs Book of the Year 2019**

Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

Marcy Pursell 

This book takes a deep dive into the lack of data on women, how the majority of data is based on men. This is a must read for everyone, and was fascinating to listen to! Just when I thought things were bad, they would get worse!

*THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER* 'HELL YES. This is one of those books that has the potential to change things - a monumental piece of research' Caitlin Moran Imagine a world where... · Your phone is too big for your hand · Your doctor prescribes a drug that is wrong for your body · In a car accident you are 47% more likely to be injured. If any of that sounds familiar, chances are you're a woman. From government policy and medical research, to technology, workplaces, and the media. Invisible Women reveals how in a world built for and by men we are systematically ignoring half of the population, often with disastrous consequences. 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 profound impact this has on us all. Discover the shocking gender bias that affects our everyday lives. 'A book that changes the way you see the world' Sunday Times 'Revelatory, frightening, hopeful' Jeanette Winterson **Winner of the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize 2019** **Winner of the Readers' Choice Books Are My Bag Award 2019** **Winner of the FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2019 Book of the Year Award 2019** **The Times Current Affairs Book of the Year 2019**

“The fact is that worth is a matter of opinion, and opinion is informed by culture. And if that culture is as male-biased as ours is, it can't help but be biased against women. By default.”
--------------------

I cannot be the only person, who is ready to head butt anyone and anything out of sheer frustration after reading this book.
How?? How did we manage to build a world where we ignore half the population with such significant and fatal consequences? Well, don’t answer that, because this book does only too well.
In an incredibly well researched, articulated, and explained way that delivers the root of all these frustrations with numbers and references.

The “male-unless-otherwise-indicated” bias permeates so deeply on every aspect of our lives and culture, from how we perceive and analyze history, to how we live in and travel through our cities, culture (art, literature, music, traditions), economy, medicine, design, language, and politics.
And Criado Perez takes a deep dive into that gender data gap, while still writing in an accessible and very readable way.
I would really recommend this book to everyone. Read it. Make everyone else you know read it. There is such valuable information that feels both obvious and shockingly unknown, that I promise you that you will find something new and eye-opening in it.

Also, a quick shout-out to the random lady at the bookstore who recommended this book to me in the first place. You a real one.

"The history of humanity. The history of art, literature and music. The history of evolution itself. All have been presented to us as objective facts. But the reality is, these facts have been lying to us. They have all been distorted by a failure to account for half of humanity-not least by the very words we use to convey our half-truths. This failure has led to gaps in the data. A corruption in what we think we know about ourselves. It has fueled the myth of male universality. And that is a fact."

Amelia Lang 

I really wanted to like this book more. 
It was very enlightening and it reshaped how I saw my everyday life. It brought to light so many insidious ways that women are discriminated against that I hadn't recognized or been aware of. Criado-Perez' framework spans class, minority communities, different cultures and languages, and so on. I was really impressed at the breadth of her research. Unfortunately, it was insufficient. 
I find the exclusion of trans women/non-binary people somewhat undermines the book. It's ironic that, in criticizing a "gap in our knowledge", Criado-Perez contributes to another data gap- one that erases the experiences of non-cis people. It may be argued that conversations around gender identity would just complicate her thesis, but feminist authors today almost always include trans women in their discussions. Further, this author seems to have a track record of ignoring woc/trans voices and criticisms of her work. As Audre Lorde famously put it, "there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives." Every issue talked about in this book also impacts trans women, and often in worse ways than cis women. Feminism cannot be furthered without the inclusion of marginalized individuals as well.

Caramel Constellations

Relentless. There was a point where I had to put this book down and take a break because of how overwhelming it is. It could definitely be more intersectional when it comes to trans women and non-binary folk, but I do think it deserves praise for its intersectionality in terms of women of different backgrounds (i.e.: women of color, women from non-Western countries, lower-class women, and disabled women specifically). I was reading another feminist book at the time, Dangerous Books for Girls, and unlike that book, Invisible Women had more scope and perspective, which is why it was a better read for me.

I feel like I've learned so much because of this book, but I'll need to re-read it in the future to truly digest everything Invisible Women discusses. Incredible. It's 4.25 stars now, but upon a second read, it could easily become a five-star.

An informative read about sexism in places you may not think about, but I wish it did more to be trans-inclusive and at least acknowledge that these issues affect many trans and non-binary people as well.

Mataia

This felt very concise, very focused and to-the-point. It makes for great reference material while also prompts the reader to thing about things previously not considered, even something as small as why women are more prone to motion sickness.

I wish it had managed to model the language a bit better to avoid falling into what sounded like gender essentiallism in place, since it itself pointed out it was aware of this.

This felt very concise, very focused and to-the-point. It makes for great reference material while also prompts the reader to thing about things previously not considered, even something as small as why women are more prone to motion sickness.

I wish it had managed to model the language a bit better to avoid falling into what sounded like gender essentiallism in place, since it itself pointed out it was aware of this.

Mani Mohan

A brilliant book with a LOT of data that can feel a bit overwhelming at times. A little bit of self-reflection/mindfulness while reading this can uncover a lot of unconscious bias.

Eitan Hershkovitz

A must read for everyone. Many problems are invisible because we (men) didn't even know they existed...or try to even uncover their existence.

Olivia De Souza

2.5 

This engaging and informative book by Caroline Criado-Perez aims to show how the lack of sex-disaggregated data disadvantages cisgender women. Pulling examples from fields like urban planning, tech development, medicine, and public health, she presents some alarming statistics and makes a solid case for how increased data collection could provide insights that have the potential to significantly improve the quality of life for women. However, as other reviewers have pointed out Criado-Perez irresponsibly conflates sex and gender and the feminism she advocates is not inclusive or intersectional. It wasn’t until after I finished the book that I did a bit more research and found out she’s got a history of supporting transphobic views. While initially I gave the benefit of the doubt, I'm less convinced that the non-inclusive language was unintentional. 

Throughout the book, Criado-Perez explains that the data gap stems from a failure to move beyond the idea that the default human is a cisgender male. While making the case for increased data collection on the ‘other’—in this case cisgender women—she fails to acknowledge the existence of communities outside this binary that would suffer a similar fate with their needs ignored due to a lack of data collection. Overall, I do think that the book contains some valuable and important information about the impact of the data gaps and I would recommend it to others, but I also encourage readers to reflect on the problems that arise when sex and gender are thought of as binary concepts.

Bilge Ince

Routinely forgetting to accommodate the female body in design – whether medical, technological or architectural – has led to a world that is less hospitable and more dangerous for women to navigate. It leads to us injuring ourselves in jobs and cars that weren’t designed for our bodies. It leads to us dying from drugs that don’t work. It has led to the creation of a world where women just don’t fit very well. 

I can’t express well enough my feelings after this book. But I learnt well enough that women doesn’t count in almost anything. I feel overwhelmed and motivated at the same time to make this mistake right.

Teeeeeesha

Eye opening and definitely worth the read. It shows through statistics and thorough research about how the world is designed for men. My only criticism is that it didn't take trans people into account

Wynter

I’m pretty sure that this book served as a launching point in research for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver’s episode on bias in medicine. If you don’t specifically look for it, unconscious male bias in everything from medical research to safety gear, to availability of toilets seems like a far-fetched concept. But then you start thumbing through hundreds of pages of supporting evidence, it’s hard to remain sceptical. Everything in this book just makes sense. The only criticism I have is how overwhelming the data becomes after a while. Chapter after chapter of thorough statistics and unmistakable frustration tucked in between the lines can be quite an exhausting read.

Colleen

4.5 Stars
 
*An insightful look at why it is so important to examine and question societal norms*
 

Invisible Women is an incredibly important and relevant book that everyone should read. It explores vital observations on why it is critical to examine our assumptions and societal norms. The premise of this book is that women suffer widespread and long-term harm due to most of the world viewing the “male” experience as default “human” experience. If you asked most people what problems are caused by gender-based discrimination, you would probably get a lot of answers about pay gaps and sexual harassment. But the problems are much deeper seated than that. From city planning to relief aid to healthcare to public safety, women are continually put at a disadvantage for living in a world build by and for men. The infrastructure of our world was literally built for men.


  “The fact is that worth is a matter of opinion, and opinion is informed by culture. And if that culture is as male-biased as ours is, it can’t help but be biased against women. By default.”

I’ll admit that when I first picked up this book, I was worried that it might turn into a whiny Feminazi rant. I was curious but hesitant. But the book stays mostly objective and professional. And having read this book, I agree that Pérez has compiled an impressive amount of data to support her claim.

You might notice that I said “mostly.” There were moments when Pérez sounded like your typical obnoxious SJW troll. I did not like the parts where she discussed her own social reform campaigns which seemed to revolve around a lot of soapbox preaching and getting into fights with people on Twitter. While this is an important and eye-opening book, I wouldn’t want to ever meet the author in person.

The other caveat I will mention is to always remember that data is easy to misconstrue. I work in analytics, and believe me, “facts” are easy to misconstrue. You can easily provide true information out of context or in such a way that the viewer is led to misinterpret or sensationalize the information. One example of poorly presented data in this book was the comparison of wages for coal mining and housekeeping. Pérez presented that as an example of the pay gap for men’s unskilled labor (aka blue color) versus women’s unskilled labor. But coal mining has a high mortality rate and a higher rate of associated health problems. So their average wage reflects that. It was incredibly reductive to compare coal mining and housekeeping wages directly and twist that into a statement of gender pay discrepancy. So although the gender pay gap is a very real problem, the choice of example was inaccurate and damaging. 

Despite taking issue with a couple of data points / how that data was interpreted, the premise of Invisible Women is undeniably true to anyone willing to look beyond society’s ingrained bias. There was a lot of numerical data in this book (which some people may find off-putting). But a well-researched examination requires a bevy of facts. Pérez did pull data from a large variety of sources and professional studies. And I appreciate that it was not restricted to UK/US data like many social studies are. The extensive range of topics and geographically varied source data painted a compelling picture of how widespread and unquestioned the gender data gap is. The truth is that longstanding assumptions and neglect for accurate data have built a flimsy foundation for our lives.

Many of the problems that result from the gender data gap are not the result of deliberate discrimination. But our society is continuing on a course that was set up when women had virtually no legal rights and their well-being was not considered when setting up infrastructures, laws, and societal norms. I think we can agree that if women had had a say back in the day, there is no way in hell tampons would ever have been classed as a “luxury good.” No one menstruates for the fun of it, folks. And lack of access to feminine hygiene products causes health issues for women both in developed and undeveloped countries.

Some of the problems raised in this book may seem frivolous at first. But when you really look into the issues, it is clear that the effects are serious. The average smart phone is too large for the average woman’s hand: which can lead to carpal tunnel syndrome and other joint and tendon stress. The average staircase is built for the average man’s stride: which makes women more likely to fall down stairs. The average store or office building is kept at temperatures based on men’s body temperatures: which causes physical problems beyond just “being uncomfortable.” The bottom line is that we live in a One Size Fits All world where the One Size is based on the average male body.


  “When we exclude half of humanity from the production of knowledge we lose out on potentially transformative insights.” 

But there are even scarier issues mentioned. I found the sections on car safety and medical care to be particularly alarming both because of the deadly results and because these are areas where women’s safety is deliberately excluded so as to not “complicate” the data and cut into companies’ profits. Despite what some car commercials imply, crash test ratings are done almost exclusively on male-sized dummies and they are primarily focused on the driver’s safety. The law makes almost no requirements to test for women and children. So even top safety rated vehicles are less likely to protect women in car crashes. And if you are pregnant, then your chance of injury is even higher. But many companies don’t even run tests for women or children. And why would they? The law doesn’t require them to, and they know the data will just make them look bad.


  “Like so many of the decisions to exclude women in the interests of simplicity, from architecture to medical research, this conclusion could only be reached in a culture that conceives of men as the default human and women as a niche aberration. To distort a reality you are supposedly trying to measure makes sense only if you don’t see women as essential. It makes sense only if you see women as an added extra, a complicating factor. It doesn’t make sense if you’re talking about half of the human race. It doesn’t make sense if you care about accurate data.” 

There are similar problems in the medical and pharmaceutical fields. Women are far more likely to experience misdiagnoses and delays in diagnoses simply because of not being believed. Men complaining of pain are more likely to be prescribed pain medication whereas women are more likely to be given a psychological diagnosis (in other words, they are accused of exaggerating or imagining pain, being hysterical, etc.). When you dig into the world of prescriptions drugs, things get even more alarming. I already knew that Big Pharm are greedy and corrupt as hell, but until I read Invisible Women, I didn’t realize that most drugs are primarily tested on men. And why? Because women’s hormonal fluctuations make the data too messy. It’s easier to just test on men and assume the medication will work just as well on women. And there are all kind of legal loopholes for the pharmaceutical companies to dodge responsibility as well as many medications that predate the FDA and were grandfathered in without having to go through proper medical trials.

This bias in medical testing and treatment hit very close to home for me. I recently fell down the rabbit hole of the horror that is our healthcare system. And the information in this book rang so true to my own experiences. My diagnosis of a life-threatening medical condition was delayed for over a year because of doctors not believing me. A second medical condition was delayed in diagnosis for another ten months after that for the same reason. Then I experienced horrible side effects to the medication they prescribed me. Again, those symptoms were completely disregarded. It has taken two years, multiple doctors, and thousands of dollars in medical bills to get my body back to a reasonable level of health, and it still continues to be an ongoing struggle for which I feel no confidence in my healthcare providers. 

So the data in this book made me wonder about my medication. The doctor's reaction to my heavy side effects was to ask repeatedly if I was taking it correctly then to simply say they'd make a note in my file. But reading Invisible Women made me wonder if my medication had been tested specifically on women for differing side effects. So I checked... And the answer is NO. It was one of the drugs grandfathered in because it pre-dated the FDA, so it has not been through any modern drug trials let alone any that specify differing effects on men and women. So this book is spot on, unfortunately. 
 

  “For millennia, medicine has functioned on the assumption that male bodies can represent humanity as a whole. As a result, we have a huge historical data gap when it comes to female bodies, and this is a data gap that is continuing to grow as researchers carry on ignoring the pressing ethical need to include female cells, animals and humans, in their research. That this is still going on in the twenty-first century is a scandal. It should be the subject of newspaper headlines worldwide. Women are dying, and the medical world is complicit. It needs to wake up.” 

The topics I have mentioned so far primarily focused on the physical harm done to women because of gender bias. (The fact that women have a longer average lifespan is pretty miraculous considering how widespread the danger is. But then again, it is important to distinguish between lifespan and quality of life.) But there are many areas of harm caused that don’t relate directly to physical things. And Invisible Women delves into those as well. Being paid less, given fewer job opportunities, being harassed, and overall being devalued are constant struggles for women around the world. Some of these problems have easy solutions. (I loved the case study about snow plowing!) Others require serious overall of policies, laws, and infrastructures. But these are undeniably questions that people should be asking.


  “And so, to return to Freud’s ‘riddle of femininity’, it turns out that the answer was staring us in the face all along. All ‘people’ needed to do was to ask women.”

I recommend that everyone read this book regardless of gender or interests. It raises issues that desperately need to be addressed. Even if you don’t agree with everything in the book, there is valuable food for thought within its pages.


RATING FACTORS:
Ease of Reading: 5 Stars
Writing Style: 4 Stars
Level of Captivation: 5 Stars
Attention to Details: 5 Stars
Plot Structure and Development: 5 Stars
Objectivity: 4 Star

Ali Angco

An amazing data forward book on the impact of leaving women out of planning considerations, decision making, and life in general. So many examples of how women simply weren’t considered in certain aspects of life and how it changes lives of women!! WILD. 

Kyra Cracchiola

LOVED. this book. Such an amazing and in-depth analysis of gendered data bias and how it changes our world and our lives.

Kadison Cole

Epsita

this book took me so long to read because i had to take breaks to calm down 

Joana

Shona Tiger

Blown away. What an important book! And eminently - no, incredibly readable. Learnt so much, and my perspective has been completely shifted. Also grateful to see so much put into words (and shown in figures) that I've seen and experienced both personally and professionally.

Micah

The thing that really got me about this book is that it tackles the popular rebuke of feminism, "you don't need feminism in a modern democracy because women are already free," without ever actually stating it. A huge portion of the data presented in this book pertains to the "civilized," "democratic," and rich countries like the USA and the UK and how that data, or lack thereof, is still putting women at unnecessary risk. All because men still believe women are inferior, lesser, too complicated, too unimportant, too not male women are dying and getting hurt in rich countries and exploited countries. This should be mandatory reading for every person who uses human data.

Ben Jenkins

A bit statistic-dense at times but otherwise very good.

Invisible Women Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

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