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 … this bias, in time, money, and often with their lives.
Celebrated feminist advocate Caroline Criado Perez investigates 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.
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Powerful stories that explain how the world is designed for men as primary users. If ever we need proof of why we need diversity in design and business leadership, this book offers it in spades.
Geez Louise. I mean, I knew the world was a bit more inconvenient for women than men, but didn’t realize the extent to which that is a matter of design. I loved it when in 1975, the women in Iceland decided to take a day off. “On 24 October, no woman in Iceland would do a lick of work. No paid work, but also no cooking, no cleaning, no child care. Let the men of Iceland see how they coped without the invisible work women did every day to keep the country moving.” 90% of the women took part in the strike. Men REALLY don’t understand what it means to do “women’s work” until they have to do it. A University of Michigan study found that husbands create an extra seven hours of housework a week for women. I certainly believe that! Single women live longer, too. But that’s just the humorous stuff. The book made my blood boil with all the egregious slights, omissions, neglect, and hostility that women face every day. These days, it’s getting worse. “Analysis of how gender affected support for Trump revealed that ‘the more hostile voters were toward women, the more likely they were to support Trump’. In fact, hostile sexism was nearly as good at predicting support for Trump as party identification.”
Unequal treatment is rarely about individuals. It resides in systems of oppression and invisibility. That’s why everyone interested in equality should read this book and think about the ways the rules of society have been written by men to advantage men.
I read Invisible Women hoping to do a presentation at work for our Women’s Development forum, but holy crap, how in the world do you boil down such a densely filled book into 10-15 slides and a clean summary?
IT CAN’T BE DONE.
Well, it can, but it wouldn’t come close to doing justice to this vastly important book. “Gender data gap” would sound too much like a buzz word, and the message could never penetrate as it should.
Instead I am submitting this as a book club choice at work, but hoping we can read it in the background, over the course of a quarter, not a month. Each woman will wish to sip, not chug, this book as we may for many of our less weighty novels and business books.
An amazing book that’s just won the Financial Times business book of the year. I’m quoting from a Guardian article here: “Criado Perez has assembled a cornucopia of statistics – from how blind auditions have increased the proportion of female players hired by orchestras to nearly 50%, to the good reasons why women take up to 2.3 times as long as men to use the toilet. This is a man’s world, we learn, because those who built it didn’t take gender differences into account. Most offices, we learn, are five degrees too cold for women, because the formula to determine their temperature was developed in the 1960s based on the metabolic resting rate of a 40-year-old, 70kg man; women’s metabolisms are slower. Women in Britain are 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack: heart failure trials generally use male participants. Cars are designed around the body of “Reference Man”, so although men are more likely to crash, women involved in collisions are nearly 50% more likely to be seriously hurt.
Gender-blindness in tech culture produces what Criado Perez calls the “one-size-fits-men” approach. The average smartphone – 5.5 inches long – is too big for most women’s hands, and it doesn’t often fit in our pockets. Speech-recognition software is trained on recordings of male voices: Google’s version is 70% more likely to understand men. One woman reported that her car’s voice-command system only listened to her husband, even when he was sitting in the passenger seat. Women are more likely to feel sick while wearing a VR headset. Another study found that fitness monitors underestimate steps during housework by up to 74%, and users complain that they don’t count steps taken while pushing a pram.”
Invisible Women is about the gender data gap, which, it turns out, affects all kinds of things in our lives that we don’t know about. Everything from medical research to traffic studies tends to leave out women, to our detriment. But the more women who are engaged in the workforce and the more men who understand this problem, the more women are included. You’ll be fascinated by this book. Oh, and consider listening on audio! The author reads it herself.
A devastating case for the inclusion of women in all fields of endeavour. Terrifying, brilliant and very, very annoying
Meticulously researched and full of revelations that will make you want to bang your head against the wall, this book explores the dangers of considering the male experience to be default and failing to collect data on the experiences of women. A must read!