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

Storm

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.

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Rebekka Jörg

Anna Oeltjenbruns

We have to start recognising that the work women do is not an added extra, a bonus that we could do without: women's work, paid and unpaid, is the backbone of our society and our economy. It's about time we started valuing it.

Syrina

Irritating, certainly. Unjust, undoubtedly.

A 2015 study identified the top five words used to refer to people in human-computer interaction papers published in 2014 and found that they are all apparently gender neutral: user, participant, person, designer and researcher."" Well done, human-computer interaction academics! But there is (of course) a catch. When study participants were instructed to think about one of these words for ten seconds and then draw an image of it, it turned out that these apparently gender-neutral words were not perceived as equally likely to be male or female. For male participants, only designer was interpreted as male less than 80% of the time (it was still almost 70% male). A researcher was more likely to be depicted as of no gender than as a female. Women were slightly less gender-biased, but on the whole were still more likely to read gender-neutral words as male, with only 'person' and 'participant (both read by about 80% of male particinants as male) being about 50/50.

To be fair, it's not an entirely unreasonable assumption: often it really is a he. A 2007 international study of 25,439 children's TV characters found that only 13% of non-human characters are female (che figure for female human characters was slightly better, although still low at 32%).5 An analysis of G-rated (suitable for children) flms released between 1990 and 2005 found that only 28% of speaking roles went to female characters - and perhaps even more tellingly in the context of humans being male by default., women made up only 17% of crowd scenes.

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?

In 2012, a World Economic Forum analysis found that countries with gender-inflected languages, which have strong ideas of masculine and feminine present in almost every utterance, are the most unequal in terms of gender.

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’

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.

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