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Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

Caroline Criado-Pérez

4.45 · Rating details · 10,710 ratings · 1,787 reviews

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. If any of this sounds familiar, chances are that you're a woman.

Invisible Women shows us how, in ...more

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Hardcover, 411 pages

Published March 12th 2019 by Harry N. Abrams (first published March 7th 2019)

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Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Pérez

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May 30, 2019 Trevor rated it it was amazing

Shelves: behavioural-economics, social-theory, gender

I really dislike conspiracy theories – in fact, few things make me angrier. The reason is that a conspiracy generally involves people plotting and planning and those people who are assumed to have the power to bring the conspiracy into effect generally have been shown in history to be pretty stupid – in fact, far too stupid to do the conspiracy and keep quiet about it. Conspiracy theories also tend to involve improbable leaps of faith along the way, you know, like the one that the US government I really dislike conspiracy theories – in fact, few things make me angrier. The reason is that a conspiracy generally involves people plotting and planning and those people who are assumed to have the power to bring the conspiracy into effect generally have been shown in history to be pretty stupid – in fact, far too stupid to do the conspiracy and keep quiet about it. Conspiracy theories also tend to involve improbable leaps of faith along the way, you know, like the one that the US government was involved in bringing down the Twin Towers at 9/11. These theories become so convoluted and improbable that eventually it would be easier to just blame aliens.

But the real reason I hate conspiracy theories is that a conspiracy implies that the bad shit that happens in our world is hidden from us by powerful elites – and the fact is that the really, really bad shit in our world isn’t hidden from us at all. I think conspiracy theories have an appeal to us because they basically pardon us for our inaction. How were we supposed to do something about stuff we didn’t even know was happening? – Damn you, you evil conspirators! But really, whether it be climate change, third world debt, HIV/AIDS, American gun laws, the Iraq war, the slaughter and man-made famine in Yemen, the pollution of our oceans, referring to fossil fuels as ‘freedom fuels’ (no, I didn’t make that one up, even though I wish I had https://www.sbs.com.au/news/us-rebran...) – none of this is hidden from us. None of this needs a conspiracy to explain it. All of the murder, all of the destruction, all of the ‘let’s end all life on the planet for a bit more money’ is done in broad daylight with our noses pushed right up into it. And all of this is a million times more terrifying than the idea that the US government blew up a couple of buildings. Yet we watch our nightly news, yawn, roll over and fall back to sleep.

This book is about one of those non-conspiracies we sort of know about but do stuff all to fix. The way we treat women is so breathtakingly appalling it would be nice if there was some sort of conspiracy theory involved here to relieve us of our complicity. This book argues that how women are treated isn’t really due to the evil patriarchy, a bit like the Elders of Zion plotting the overthrow of the Tzar, but that how our society ignores women makes how they are treated inevitable. It says that many of the reasons that women are so badly treated in our society is because most of the people with power, most of the people who get to make the decisions that make a difference in the world, are men – and it isn’t that men consciously go out of their way to make life shit for women (even though you would have to wonder sometimes) but rather, they do this because they are men, and as such they design the world to work for them. And when that world simply doesn’t work for women, these men don’t even notice because they simply don’t inhabit the same world that women inhabit. There is no conspiracy theory required – just neglect, self-interest, and perhaps a little dose of wilful blindness based on those with power focused solely on their own needs.

The author blames a lot of the problems here on gaps in the data. There were lots of things I didn’t know. I didn’t know that car crash dummies are mostly ‘male’ – particularly driver dummies – and that they are based on what you could call ‘middle man’, about the average in terms of weight and height and everything else. I didn’t know that many drugs that are often almost exclusively given to women (think antidepressants say) are often almost exclusively trialled on men. I didn’t know that Viagra could potentially help cure PMT, but that the drug companies don’t want to put it through the clinical trials to do this since it is such a profitable drug that if they find out it causes problems in women it might cause problems that would kill the goose that laid the golden egg. There are lots of examples here of instances of things like men getting free condoms and women not having access to sanitary products that just make your blood boil. When it is pointed out it is hard to not come to the conclusion that we men really are arseholes.

This book gets depressing very quickly. There is just case after case of things that made me say, ‘Oh, for god’s sake – who makes this shit up?’ Like how women are often excluded from drug trails altogether because they have hormones that change over the month and so that might make testing the drug a bit more difficult. Which is a bit like designing trousers for men assuming they don’t have penises because, well, it just makes it easier. And before you laugh, the author gives at least half a dozen examples where things are poorly designed to fit women because women have the audacity to grow breasts.

This is an infuriating book. We are effectively murdering women – in fact, often we are actually murdering women and too often we do this by paying no attention at all to the physiological, social, cultural and power differences that exist between the sexes.

There was a bit early on in this book where I got a bit worried. She started to discuss the problems associated with women in academia – what has become my world – and while all of these problems are very, very real, I was worried that this book might end up a kind of ‘glass ceiling’ book. And after reading Feminism for the 99% A Manifesto – I’m going to have to get around to reviewing that eventually – I’m worried about ‘feminist’ books that only notice the issues that impact rich, white women. But this book brought intersectionality into its analysis too – you know, if you are black and female, you might want to travel out of the US to give birth, I’m just saying.

This book ought to make you angry. Not least because the answer to many of the problems identified would simply involve listening to women. I knew many of the things discussed here. For instance, that many more women than men died in the tsunami in 2004. The reason? Women look after children and old people, women are often in locations where they can’t hear the warnings signals, women are less likely to learn to swim, women are less likely to learn to climb trees, women are constrained by ‘modesty’ in clothes that make escaping rising water almost impossible – and if they do escape they are likely to be raped and possibly bashed by men. If you are not made angry by this book you have no humanity left. But the solution is often also painfully simple. We need to listen to women. We need to place them in positions of power. We need to involve them in decision making processes that impact them. I know, radical ideas, but we might as well start big and work down from there.

The instance that will stay with me from this book was about public transport – it had just never occurred to me. Most public transport users are women. Men drive cars, women catch the bus. But public transport systems are designed by men. So, they are designed to radiate out from the centre of cities – much like fingers splayed out from the palm of a hand. Which is great for men going to work and then back home again – but not so great for women who might need to get the kids off to school, check on their aging parents, and then work in three part-time jobs that are close enough to home to collect the kids again from school, all of which might not be in a direct line into the centre of the city. Public transport systems are designed by men to suit the needs of men, but are mostly used by women, and so often don’t meet the needs of the majority of its users. Shit like that has really got to stop.

Thanks Avolyn for recommending this to me. ...more

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Mar 22, 2019 Becky rated it it was amazing

Do not read this if you are suffering from high blood pressure, because it is absolutely rage inducing. However EVERYONE should read this at some point, it looks at things that I had never even considered, genuinely brilliant.

Second Read- so.... my Feminist bookclub have this on the list, so gave it a reread- just as goddamn rage inducing on the second read.

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Nov 08, 2019 Science (Fiction) Nerd Mario rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 5-social-criticism

Simply said, if someone is in power, he tries to make a policy that meets his wishes and reflects the image of the society, company, etc he wants to build. This can be done in a direct, evil way by treating minorities, women, atheists, etc. with repression until imprisonment, torture and death if they misbehave and in these cases, it is an obvious crime.

It gets more subtle when bigotry and indoctrination kick in and lead to both politicians and managers that are not all direct, misogynic ...more

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Mar 14, 2019 Gwen rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This is a book about unconscious bias. It's not about men deliberately excluding women when considering things like uniforms, city travel, or treatments for medical conditions ... although it's true that once the bias is pointed out, it's not always top of the list to make safety adjustments. And that's really one of the most important points of the book: it endangers women if you design and build the world without considering women's needs and habits. Women are built in a particular way, and This is a book about unconscious bias. It's not about men deliberately excluding women when considering things like uniforms, city travel, or treatments for medical conditions ... although it's true that once the bias is pointed out, it's not always top of the list to make safety adjustments. And that's really one of the most important points of the book: it endangers women if you design and build the world without considering women's needs and habits. Women are built in a particular way, and they are socially conditioned in a particular way, and they're treated in a particular way - comparing all this to men's situation is useful only to a certain extent because it is so easy for everyone to slip into the mindset that men are the default human, and women are, as the author notes, "niche". We design things for people, but really only think of men and their needs because - and companies and designers are open about this - women are harder, with our non-linear bodies and hormones meaning that more sophisticated (and more expensive) research needs to be done.

We also design things for men because men are the designers for the most part. They have no experience being women of course, and don't really look into it because, for the most part, it doesn't occur to them. If you're a woman, just think about all the books you've read through the years about male experience, with a male protagonist, and presented - or even taught - to you as "human experience". We do it all the time, and I read books regularly with male protagonists sorting out their stuff (if you follow me here, you'll see plenty of ex-Navy-SEALS running around). But women's experience in novels and poems? That's women's experience only. My point here is that while women are trained to identify with both men and women, and indeed possibly favor the male experience, men aren't trained to look at - or think about - women's experience.

Criado Perez has really done her research, but what could have been a very statistic-heavy book is in fact very readable, engaging, and so enlightening. The Introduction should really be published on its own - it's magnificent. This is a book to buy and keep, and get some of those sticky notes because you'll want to mark pages for future reference! ...more

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Jul 03, 2019 Joanne Harris added it

This is a long-delayed, hugely important book, which people of ALL genders should be reading. Sadly, more people seem to be discussing it than have actually read it. It's not just about crash test dummies, or voice recognition software, or airline seats, or toilet queues, or medical research. It's about the systematic way in which data on women has been ignored, neglected and downright erased, whereas data on men is not only abundant, but recognized as the universal norm. The needs of the ...more

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Sep 26, 2019 Krista rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nonfiction, 2019

Invisible Women is the story of what happens when we forget to account for half of humanity. It is an exposé of how the gender data gap harms women when life proceeds, more or less as normal. In urban planning, politics, the workplace. It is also about what happens to women living in a world built on male data when things go wrong. When they get sick. When they lose their home in a flood. When they have to flee that home because of war.

My husband is not a knuckle-dragging caveman, but he is a

Invisible Women is the story of what happens when we forget to account for half of humanity. It is an exposé of how the gender data gap harms women when life proceeds, more or less as normal. In urban planning, politics, the workplace. It is also about what happens to women living in a world built on male data when things go wrong. When they get sick. When they lose their home in a flood. When they have to flee that home because of war.

My husband is not a knuckle-dragging caveman, but he is a middle-aged, white, Canadian male, totally oblivious to the privileges afforded to him by our society (admittedly, many of those privileges are granted to me as well). We were in the car, listening to the radio over the summer, and “It's a Man's World” began to play. Dave chuckled and said, “Boy, things have changed, eh?” And I replied: “And boy, have they stayed the same.” And this stunned him. “You can't believe that,” he said. “Here's a story for you then. A young girl at work...” I cut him off. “Young girl? What, is she eight or nine?” And then he was flustered. “You know what I mean. I'm just trying to tell you a nice story.” He paused like he was going to punish me by not telling me the story after all but soon continued: “Rebecca, who is probably twenty-five and on my team, was asked by HR to assemble some slides for a presentation on the industry and she asked me if she could present it to me first. She reads off the first slide, which is about the gender pay gap, and before she went to the next slide she frowned, looked at her notes, and said, 'This is probably American data.' Because she knows that there's no gender pay gap in our office, and if anything, there are more women than men in senior positions, and more women on a management track.” He looked proud of himself – and he should, I know that this non-caveman, the father of my daughters, is not a sexist or a chauvinist – but still I pushed my point: “If this had been a twenty-five year old male in your story, would you have started off with, 'This young boy at work...?' Because that's what hasn't changed, and no matter what you consciously do to promote the careers and the welfare of the women you know, it's the subconscious biases that are harder for us to navigate because you don't even know what you're doing that's holding us back.” Dave, “shocked” to discover I felt this way, wanted more details about these “subconscious biases” of which I accused him. And while women know that the systems are rigged against us, it's hard to be specific – until now. Caroline Criado Perez has assembled a collection of shocking and eye-opening stories in Invisible Women, very clearly making the point that men, for the most part, aren't consciously trying to hold women back; for the most part, men don't think about women, and the fact that our needs might differ from their own, at all. From medicine to safety devices to public transit, everything is designed and tested to suit the typical male's body and needs, with women's very different bodies and needs considered niche or secondary or “the same but smaller”. It is mostly about the gender data gap: the fact that nearly all studies and research, even medical testing, isn't disaggregated by sex, so there is next to no data about how anything in our societies, which tend to be designed by men for men, affects women differently than men. And where this is no data, a thing – in this case, women – is in effect invisible to those who do the planning – in most cases, men. Informative, shocking, and usefully prescriptive, Invisible Women is a must read for men and women everywhere.

The specifics are fascinating – dysmenorrhea (extremely painful periods) was found to be completely alleviated without side effects in the early stages of Viagra testing, but its manufacturer stopped that direction of testing when it found the drug's more profitable application; women in police forces and armies around the world are forced to wear male body armour that doesn't account for breasts and hips and therefore leaves them vulnerable to attack and more prone to workplace injury (a female police officer in Spain was disciplined for acquiring her own made-for-women bulletproof vest); NGOs tend to ask the male heads of household what is required in the aftermath of a disaster, which has, more than once, led to the construction of homes without kitchens in them – but it would take a book-length review to list everything fascinating in this book. I'll just add some of Criado Perez's conclusions regarding the invisibility of women in public planning:

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 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. These are not niche concerns, and if public spaces are truly to be for everyone, we have to start accounting for the lives of the other half of the world. And, as we've seen, this isn't just a matter of justice; it's also a matter of simple economics.

The invisibility of women in the workplace:

Women have always worked. They have worked unpaid, underpaid, underappreciated, and invisibly, but they have always worked. But the modern workplace does not work for women. From its location, to its hours, to its regulatory standards, it has been designed around the lives of men and is no longer fit for purpose. The world of work needs a wholesale redesign – of its regulations, of its equipment, of its culture – and this redesign must be led by data on female bodies and female lives.

And the invisibility of women in the political sphere:

The data we already have makes it abundantly clear that female politicians are not operating on a level playing field. The system is skewed towards electing men, which means that the system is skewed towards perpetuating the gender gap in global leadership, with all the attendant negative repercussions for half the world's population. We have to stop willfully closing our eyes to the positive discrimination that currently works in favour of men. We have to stop acting as if theoretical, legal equality of opportunity is the same as true equality of opportunity. And we have to implement an evidence-based electoral system that is designed to ensure that a diverse group of people is in the room when it comes to deciding on the laws that govern us all.

The first step to true equality of opportunity and outcome would be to close this gender data gap – wherever there is evidence of inequality, decent people do tend to advocate for change – but this will take more women in decision-making roles (it's disheartening to read of the many researchers who can't get grants to study issues that affect only women as they are too “niche”) and that takes time. I remember back in the 80s my mother complaining that the medical world tended to treat women like small men instead of maybe, just maybe, something not the same as men. So, yeah, that was a long time ago and it's still a man's world. ...more

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Jun 12, 2019 Anna rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommended to Anna by: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandst...

Shelves: nonfiction, feminism, economics, technology

I decided to read ‘Invisible Women’ after coming across an extract from it in the Guardian and associated discussion on twitter. Both focused on how practically everything is designed for the mythical ‘average man’. I'm very aware of this due to being only 5ft tall. I cannot reach any overhead racks in trains, hanging straps in buses, or top shelves in supermarkets. I’ve given up on backpacks because they’re never comfortable and find smart phones incredibly unwieldy to use, one of many reasons I decided to read ‘Invisible Women’ after coming across an extract from it in the Guardian and associated discussion on twitter. Both focused on how practically everything is designed for the mythical ‘average man’. I'm very aware of this due to being only 5ft tall. I cannot reach any overhead racks in trains, hanging straps in buses, or top shelves in supermarkets. I’ve given up on backpacks because they’re never comfortable and find smart phones incredibly unwieldy to use, one of many reasons I hate them. The desk and chair I work in are too high for me to sit comfortably, so I have to adjust my posture all the time. Constant minor inconveniences of this kind are something I’ve just learned to live with. Such relatively trivial examples are useful to highlight a much more serious point: the world is still largely designed by and for men. Perez considers the impact of this in a variety of specific areas including politics and healthcare, repeatedly highlighting the lack of data on women’s experiences and need for this to understand and improve them.

While I found the book very readable, after a while this started to feel slightly more like a weakness than a virtue. By this I mean that any given section could be lifted out and published as a high quality thinkpiece. Perez cites more supporting evidence than most, however I felt that the book had rather a loose thesis and didn't make very strong suggestions for solutions. Perhaps I am merely quicker to blame capitalism than she is? (I tend to blame capitalism for practically everything - probably because practically everything is capitalism’s fault.) For example, one chapter criticises GDP as an inaccurate measure of economic activity, which it is, then suggests economic growth could be achieved by encouraging more women into paid work through better childcare and tax policy. This felt like a rather simplistic summary of the many flaws in GDP, notably its disregard of environmental costs, and of women in work, as underpaid bullshit jobs aren't necessarily liberating. That said, I share her incredulity that big pharma has no interest in researching period pain and PMS. So many women, including myself, would pay good money on a regular basis for some over-the-counter solution to the nightmare of periods. Nurofen just doesn’t cut it and GPs have little to offer. Come on, markets, supply a good to meet our needs!

To put my griping in context: I found the book well-argued and written, however it is definitely a piece of longform journalism rather than a work of feminist economics, politics, or theory. Personally, I would have preferred a bit more depth over breadth. That is just my preference, though, and it would be very unfair to criticise the book for not being something it never claimed to be. The topic is vast and Perez has chosen a good range of examples to illustrate key areas. Thus it’s very depressing to read if you regularly experience what it describes. This hit me particularly hard, as it summarises my first year as a junior lecturer:

But their unpaid work inside the workplace doesn’t help either. When students have an emotional problem, it is their female professors, not their male professors, they turn to. Students are also more likely to request extensions, grade boosts, and rule-bending of female academics. In isolation, a request of this kind isn’t likely to take up much time or mental energy - but they add up, and they constitute a cost on female academics’ time that male academics mostly aren’t even aware of, and that universities don’t account for. [...] The inequity of women being loaded with less valued work is compounded by the system for evaluating this work, which is itself systematically biased against women. [...]

Less effective male professors routinely receive higher student evaluations than more effective female teachers. Students believe that male professors hand marking back more quickly - even when that is impossible because it’s an online course delivered by a single lecturer, but where half the students are led to believe that the professor is male and half female. Female professors are penalised if they aren’t deemed sufficiently warm and accessible. But if they are warm and accessible they can be penalised for not appearing authoritative or professional. On the other hand, appearing authoritative and knowledgeable as a woman can result in student disapproval, because this violates gendered expectations. Meanwhile men are rewarded if they are accessible at a level that is simply expected in women and therefore only noticed if its absent.

You really can’t win in academia. Anecdotally, I’ve observed a pattern of senior male professors taking on postgraduate supervisees, then being so inaccessible that these orphan students turn to more junior female professors for guidance. Rather than tell such students to send their supervisor another email I try to help them, effectively taking on work that’s being shirked by men paid twice as much as me.

The book didn’t just cover sexism that I was already aware of on a daily basis. The chapter on international development and disaster response was eye-opening and, inevitably, deeply depressing. Perez recognises the important racial as well as gendered elements there and at other points, which is helpful. I found her introductory definitions of sex and gender rather unsatisfactory, though. They are unnecessarily biologically essentialist, and thus surprisingly old-fashioned in tone. This doesn’t undermine Perez’s arguments as such, but it’s a bit disappointing as with only slight editing they could have been much more inclusive.

Regarding exciting new manifestations of sexism, I really liked the discussion of how automation via algorithms amplifies bias in training datasets. It’s interesting to compare Perez’s suggestion of more granular data-gathering and rigorous testing of algorithms with the fundamental critique of Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. There’s a lot more to be said about how crude and reductive data mining can be; sexism is by no means the only form of inequality that can be reproduced through automation. By looking for correlations in big data without any interest in causation, analytics will find gendered behaviour patterns without providing any explanation for why they might differ, let alone whether these differences are fair.

I’d highly recommend ‘Invisible Women’ to men as a readable evidence base for 21st century gender inequality. I’d recommend it to women with the caveat that it’s a reminder of the many ways that being female sucks (albeit to different degrees depending on ethnicity, wealth, nationality, etc). The Guardian extract is an accurate representation of the book as a whole - it has the readability and passion of high quality journalism, without the systematic insight of more academic work. ...more

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Sep 05, 2019 Rob rated it liked it

I don't know who would possibly want a man's opinion on a book about the problems with male default bias, but... here's my review.

This is essentially a collection of statistics which entail how systems made by men and for men are minimizing and marginalizing the other 50% of the population. It does this by breaking the statistics down into chapter-spanning categories and creating a cohesive narrative to explain how all of these events are related and come back to the same basic problem.

I would I don't know who would possibly want a man's opinion on a book about the problems with male default bias, but... here's my review.

This is essentially a collection of statistics which entail how systems made by men and for men are minimizing and marginalizing the other 50% of the population. It does this by breaking the statistics down into chapter-spanning categories and creating a cohesive narrative to explain how all of these events are related and come back to the same basic problem.

I would recommend this book to any man who identifies as "not sexist." Because this makes it clear that even treatment that men believe is fair, un-sexist, and in the best interest of women, is still entirely subjective to their inherently male worldview. This book really shook up my views on what equal consideration for both men and women should look like. To anyone who thinks, "Why can't women be more like men," or that women should follow the exact same rules and be given the exact same treatment, read this book. You will develop a very thorough understanding of how, both now and historically, one-size-fits-all rules generally conflate what favors society as a whole with what favors the men who write them. Consequently, equal consideration to both men and women often requires unequal treatment, because, surprising as this may be to many men, women don't necessarily have the same needs.

I listened to the audiobook, which happens to be narrated by the author. This, I think, was a huge benefit, as the tones and inflections of the author convey the feeling and intended meaning of every word. This does, of course, mean that the author's (understandably) frustrated bias often comes through in the subtext, but I think that's important in order to glean not only the data and statistics, but an actual woman's perspective on them. It doesn't blur the actual data being presented, so I think the book is better for it.

My one complaint is that the information in this book was borderline overwhelming. A majority of the content entails half-hour cascades of one statistic after another, and I found that my proverbial eyes would glaze over occasionally and I would have to back up and try again. This is unfortunately inevitable, as there are only so many ways to convey this information to the reader. It also draws to light the sheer volume of the unconscious and invisible discriminations that happen every day, and I commend the author's ability to gather and present them so entirely.

Another side effect of the volume of information is that I don't feel particularly empowered to personally incite a change. I often found myself nodding along with most of the book, but I'm left feeling very unclear as to what to do next. I do, however, believe that I am armed with facts that I didn't have before, and I can use this knowledge to call out the injustices that occur within my sphere of influence.

As a whole, most of this book felt like a persuasive essay along the lines of, "You want proof that male privilege exists, that most systems of governance are biased toward men, and that women are literally dying because of it? Well here's your proof."

And the proof is appalling. Point taken. ...more

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Apr 10, 2019 Kelly added it

Shelves: non-fiction, read-in-2019

Read this if you're ready to get mad about how basically every research study done and used to create solutions to problems for "all people" are based on the average white male. Not surprising, but infuriating to see it laid out so plainly. I've always been so angered about technology being not useful for my tiny hands, and it's relieving -- and again, angering and frustrating -- this is just a norm of being female when research completely excludes the fact your body isn't the average white ...more

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Mar 30, 2019 Olivia rated it it was amazing

Since I've picked up this book, I've recommended it to everyone I've talked to, and now I'm recommending it to you. This is an extremely well-researched and comprehensive look at the gender data gap in all aspects of life, ranging from the utterly absurd to the life-threatening. The sub-subtitle of this book could be "but wait, there's more" as Criado Perez delves deep into the social construction of the gender data gap with both conscious humour and appropriate outrage. I cannot recommend this ...more

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Jan 09, 2020 Melanie (Mel's Bookland Adventures) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2020-nonfiction

You know the feeling when you have known something all your life but everyone else thinks your mental when you talk about it. How often I have been told to be exaggerating when I pointed out bias against women. I mean most people will agree that it exists, but when I go on about how systematic it is, stacked against us in a way that it feels impossible to win or even pull a draw... then eyes start to glaze over. In comes @ccriadoperez excellent book that I recommend everyone to read especially ...more

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Jan 29, 2020 BrokenTune rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: reviewed, non-fiction

Utterly brilliant.
What an infuriating, thought-provoking, well-researched, well-presented investigation into the gender data gap and the problems this causes with respect to women being represented in all parts of life.

The breadth and level of detail that the author covers is fantastic. The referencing to research alone makes this book stand out for me as it does back up what often is communicated as anecdotal evidence - i.e. is usually disputable - with something far more concrete. The Utterly brilliant.
What an infuriating, thought-provoking, well-researched, well-presented investigation into the gender data gap and the problems this causes with respect to women being represented in all parts of life.

The breadth and level of detail that the author covers is fantastic. The referencing to research alone makes this book stand out for me as it does back up what often is communicated as anecdotal evidence - i.e. is usually disputable - with something far more concrete. The statistics are staggering and infuriating. Not as maddening, tho, as the apparent apathy towards the gender data gap - i.e. the lack of data based on women.

For example, medical research is mostly done using men. The results are then applied to all people as if there were no biological differences in how treatments and medications work, which is mad because there are differences.

Criado-Perez covers too many aspects of life to list, but her argument - and it is a strong argument - boils down to this: There is a lack of data that not only includes women (of which there seems to be a severe lack) but there is an equal and related lack of data that actively differentiates results to data collected based on men. And this lack of data and the lack of even acknowledgement that this data is important is one of the main reasons that we still cannot speak of gender equality, even in what people refer to as the developed world.

I'm so glad my colleague lent this to me.
I have also just ordered my very own copy so I can lend it to other people.

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. It’s the irony of being a woman: at once hyper-visible when it comes to being treated as the subservient sex class, and invisible when it counts – when it comes to being counted.
There is one more trend I kept coming across while writing this book: the excuses. Chief amongst these is that women are just too complicated to measure. Everyone was saying this, from transport planners, to medical researchers, to tech developers: they were all knocking their heads up against Freud’s riddle of femininity and coming away baffled and defeated. Female bodies are too unharmonious, too menstrual and too hormonal. Women’s travel patterns are too messy, their work schedules are too aberrant, their voices are too high. Even when, in the early twentieth century, influential Swiss architect Le Corbusier was devising a standard human model for use in architecture, the female body was ‘only belatedly considered and rejected as a source of proportional harmony’, with humanity instead represented by a six-foot man with his arm raised (to reach that top shelf I can never reach).
The consensus is clear: women are abnormal, atypical, just plain wrong. Why can’t a woman be more like a man? Well, apologies on behalf of the female sex for being so mysterious, but no, we aren’t and no we can’t. And that is a reality that scientists, politicians and tech bros just need to face up to. Yes, simple is easier. Simple is cheaper. But simple doesn’t reflect reality. ...more

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Jan 02, 2020 Diane S ☔ rated it really liked it

Shelves: nfr-2020

Thoughts soon.

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Mar 19, 2019 Zoe Obstkuchen rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I wish I could make everyone read this book in the hope that every man could actually see how insignificant women are in a male-oriented world. Quite simply, we do not exist.
When I was 13 I adored reading Sherlock Holmes stories but I soon worked out that when a man refers to ‘people’ what he actually means is ‘other men’. Every single thing that impacts on the lives of women has actually been designed by men for the benefit of men. From cars to taxes, from medication to disaster relief time and ...more

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Jan 11, 2020 Donna Backshall rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science, on-audible, non-fiction, need-to-revisit, history, on-overdrive, insightful, linguistics, cultural, current-events

I read this 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 ...more

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May 09, 2019 Katie Lumsden rated it really liked it

A really strong and interesting read. It's a very powerful, somewhat depressing but entirely eye-opening look at how women and data surrounding women is left out of the system we live it. I would highly, highly recommend.

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Jan 04, 2020 aPriL does feral sometimes rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, unbearably-sad, non-fiction, science, illuminating, females-are-denied-rights, academic-notations, feminism, woman-warrier, very-very-disturbing-to-me

'Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men" by Carolyn Criado-Pérez spectacularly describes factually and scientifically every problem all women have in navigating every society in the world using scientific Big Data, and small data.

Criado-Pérez goes deep describing the issues of Men thinking about Women and the results of that thinking: from physical safety to using tools/machines/weapons to difficulties in networking to harmful stereotypes to body-shaming. I was reminded of the ...more

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May 27, 2019 Avolyn Fisher rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, data, 2019

The popular feminist phrase, 'the future is female,' may make me cringe, but this book makes it abundantly clear that the past and arguably the present, are still very much male.

This book is one of the few books I've come across whose description doesn't even scratch the surface of what's to come. I can't think of a book that I've read that was so well researched and written as this, and I'm someone who loves this type of nonfiction work, and has read every one of Malcolm Gladwell's books, The popular feminist phrase, 'the future is female,' may make me cringe, but this book makes it abundantly clear that the past and arguably the present, are still very much male.

This book is one of the few books I've come across whose description doesn't even scratch the surface of what's to come. I can't think of a book that I've read that was so well researched and written as this, and I'm someone who loves this type of nonfiction work, and has read every one of Malcolm Gladwell's books, written in a similar investigative style.

I think this book goes far beyond what it even needed to cover, I'm impressed that at no point did Criado Perez decide 1/3 or 1/4 of the way, that she had written enough for a book, as many books have been published on far less.

Victim mentality has always bothered me, and unfortunately, as this book points out, women are often made to feel like they're playing a victim role by simply observing a bias or injustice towards them. Or we are treated as either too sensitive or imagining our circumstance. I've been fortunate enough to have never faced what so many women on this earth face in simply attempting to escape as refugees, find a safe place to use the restroom, etc. But the pieces about being told to be 'more like a man' despite research showing that the behavioral benefits men enjoy from certain behaviors simply do not transfer when a woman tries them on for size. And times when I've been treated differently than my peers, and expected to do more work for equal recognition and praise, I was told I'm making excuses. And as this book highlights, when did we decide that women had to be more like men? Isn't that telling in itself.

Whether you agree that women are treated differently or not, I encourage anyone to read this book as I doubt you'll find something written or produced with the same level of rigor and research. So at the very least, if you read this book and decide to disagree with its findings, or maintain any stance you have against equality and supporting women, you will at least be educated in your opinion. ...more

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Mar 29, 2019 K.H. Leigh rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nonfiction

Everybody needs to read this book. Everybody. Female, male, nonbinary, everybody.

The introduction perfectly articulated and validated many of my own anecdotal observations - the pervasive idea that female is somehow a deviation of human, rather than the base model. The first few chapters, which deal largely with social impacts - community planning, workplace dynamics, etc. - were fascinating, insightful, and compelling.

But then as the book progresses, Criado-Perez slowly ups the ante. By the ...more

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May 02, 2019 Lior rated it liked it

Shelves: research

This is a really good comprehensive investigation of how a failure to account for gender based needs and requirements results in a bias towards cis men.
This is exactly why the casual cissexism embedded in it is so unfortunate and harmful.
Perez critics the continuous overlooking of women and women's needs, but is herself continuously overlooking trans and nonbinary people. She also keeps switching between sex and gender as interchangeable.
The most problematic claim is that a lack of ...more

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Jan 12, 2020 Silvana rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Everyone

Shelves: nonfiction, mine-mine-mine, audiobooks, reading-with-friends, female-authors, nonfic-2020-challenge

Shocking. Terrifying. Exasperating. And to me, life-changing. I know I am in a marginal group (at least in my country's and cultural context), but I did not know that I'm being marginalized in every aspect of my life, from the cellphone I use until the fact that I have been doing many care work without remuneration.

This is the story of systematized marginalization of half of the world population just because they have vagina. This book makes me angry. My own city does not care about my mobility Shocking. Terrifying. Exasperating. And to me, life-changing. I know I am in a marginal group (at least in my country's and cultural context), but I did not know that I'm being marginalized in every aspect of my life, from the cellphone I use until the fact that I have been doing many care work without remuneration.

This is the story of systematized marginalization of half of the world population just because they have vagina. This book makes me angry. My own city does not care about my mobility as a woman and prefer to separate women from men instead of educating everyone that sexual harassment is against the law. My transport app does not care if their bikes are too high for me to ride on. When I am sick, most drugs I use were made with men as trial subjects. My family forces me to do all the cleaning stuff since they said 'it's a girl's job'. The cars I (could) drive have better protection for men because it's designed for men's body in the driving seat. The voice recognition in my phone was designed for mostly men. The chance of me getting a loan for my hypothetical start-up is minimal because I'm a woman, and so on and so forth.

That's just me, but what about millions of women who are not as lucky as I am (who has a decent job and still can go on vacations)? THEY, WE LIVE IN THE WORLD MADE BY MEN AND FOR MEN.

According to the data from UN Women https://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do... Women bear disproportionate responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work. Women tend to spend around 2.5 times more time on unpaid care and domestic work than men.

Did you know what if you got married/living with a men, then your care and domestic work burden will increase up to 70%? while men, most of the times, have more times to pursue their hobbies. I used to scoff at those young mothers with their babysitters in the malls (one babysitter per child) but now I think they're 1) smart 2) lucky to afford the sitters since they have more time for themselves. So, make sure if you decide to cohabitate, all tasks and chores would be divided equally.

The Non Fiction Book Club is still discussing this book and we have plenty of examples on these unpaid work women do because of misplaced gender role in the household. That list goes on and on.

"There is no such thing as a woman who doesn’t work. There is only a woman who isn’t paid for her work.”

I will never look at my married male diver friends the same again. They are able to spend a long dive vacations because their wives are at home taking care of everything. Women always takes the burden and we let ourselves doing that.

This book is also infuriating especially since even the developed countries still have a bad record when it comes to recognizing women's needs and voices. If they still got it bad, how about us here in the developing world, where patriarchy is the norm? where even affirmative action remains cosmetic?

"The presumption that what is male is universal is a direct consequence of the gender data gap. Whiteness and maleness can only go without saying because most other identities never get said at all. 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 the global population, as a minority. With a niche identity and subjective point of view. In such a framing, women are set up to be forgettable. Ignorable. Dispensable - from culture, from history, a from data. And so, women become invisible.”

Thank you Caroline Criado-Pérez for writing this important book that everyone should read and for opening my eyes to the stark and grim reality. Now excuse me, I need to call my mom and offer her any vacation she wants because I could never thank her properly for every sacrifices she made for me when she had to cope with her career and making sure the house (and me) was in one piece. ...more

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Jun 01, 2019 Sarah rated it really liked it

Shelves: favorites, wishlist, nonfiction, feminism, worthington-completed-staff-picks

Solid. Informative. More evidence that I should resist doing the dishes.

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May 15, 2019 Sippy rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: maatschappij, ongelijkheid, un-barely-finished, onderzoek-statistiek-methodiek-etc

Had a hard time reading this, skipped, scanned, got bored with the ranting and the constant portaying women as victims and mothers. They are many times, but especially in western countries they have and can do more than is suggested in this book. Underwhelming. And yes: I am a feminist. ...more

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Aug 30, 2019 Pooja rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 100-pages, non-fiction

I want this book to be a sensation.

If it is the only one non fiction book you will read this year, then it has to be Invisible Women.

Many important lessons are here to learn for everyone, for humanity itself. Facts after facts are brought into light, a well researched work and I'm sure that no matter what your profession or interest is, you will find at least one new thing from this book.

I thank the internet and my own curiosity that I came across this book. It was a huge learning experience ...more

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Nov 10, 2019 Becky rated it it was amazing

Shelves: politicalish, non-fiction, reviewed, audiobook, i-want-this, library-books, highly-recommended, 2019

You'd think that by this point, having read as much on this and similar topics as I have, that I wouldn't be shocked anymore at how little women are considered or valued in society... but apparently not. This book was eye opening and yet, completely unsurprising.

This is a book about how the Default Human is man. Throughout history, men have been the form around which everything was based. Men were and are the arbiter of value, and as such, designed society and infrastructure around their own, You'd think that by this point, having read as much on this and similar topics as I have, that I wouldn't be shocked anymore at how little women are considered or valued in society... but apparently not. This book was eye opening and yet, completely unsurprising.

This is a book about how the Default Human is man. Throughout history, men have been the form around which everything was based. Men were and are the arbiter of value, and as such, designed society and infrastructure around their own, ignoring the needs of the other half of the population. Men are the default, the standard, the objective normal... and women are the exception, the outlier, the anomaly.

The term "man", used generally, is supposedly representative of humanity. Humanity, which, you may be aware, has more than one biological sex. And yet only one of those sexes is called "man". This isn't a mistake. This is by design. Man is MANkind. Man is huMAN. WoMAN is a "deformed version of a man" according to Aristotle, apparently. WoMAN is simply allowed to live in a man's world - an inconvenient other, except when necessary for the continuation and care of mankind. These are bold statements, but it's not like we have to look far for evidence.

This book is about the data gap that exists when it comes to women. All too often, studies and plans fail to include women, so women's needs are not taken into account. This ranges from everything from neighborhood planning and infrastructure, to bus lines and schedules, to phone size, to health care (see my review on how women's needs in health care are not being met), to car safety testing, to job opportunity, to retirement planning.

Crash test dummies are modeled after men's average height and weight, and for a long time were the only model, and would only be tested in the driver's seat, where the man usually would be. Female representative models have only recently been added, but are usually tested in the passenger seat, meaning that women in the driver's seat are still not taken into account for safety - something seriously lacking when one considers that women, being usually shorter, will have the seat closer to the steering column and more upright, and so will naturally fare differently in an accident. Even seatbelts are designed for men - certainly not anyone with boobs or a potentially large pregnant stomach. I have to use a seatbelt adjuster so that I'm not strangled to death (or beheaded should I get into an accident) by the seatbelt that rides up over my chest because my pesky breasts are in the way of where it wants to naturally lie.

Firefighter/police/coast guard/military/et al safety gear is still designed and made for men, despite women having held these positions for decades at least. The "standard issue" "safety" equipment designed for male bodies does not protect female bodies effectively, and is often more detrimental to women's safety than just not wearing it. And women die because of it.

Aside from death, though, lack of correctly fitting equipment prevents female opportunity. This year, (as a reminder, it's 2019), we saw the first all-female spacewalk scrapped in March because there were not enough suits sized for the women available. They later clarified and said "Oh, well we DO have enough, but they'd require some adjustment, and it's just easier to send a man instead." (Paraphrasing.) So, of course, there was backlash, and now, 7 months later NASA finally got it right and allowed two women to venture outside of the atmosphere of men for the first time in history. It only took 50 years.

Let's not forget all of the hate and abuse and threats and shit aimed at women in... oh, pretty much any industry that's typically been done by men. Doctors, programmers, scientists, gamers, military, any elected official... you name it, and women take shit for daring to do it. And all too often, violence against women is seen as expected, normal, and accepted. What do we expect, stepping out of the kitchen like that? Unless it's stepping INTO a kitchen, which apparently men also dominate in the restaurant industry. How very DARE we.

Women's value and worth and competency is all too often conflated with our likability. But it's a lose/lose situation. Because if we are too likable, too pretty, too nice, too polite, we're not seen as capable. If we're not likable or demure or modest enough, if we dare show ambition or come across as too matter-of-fact or stern, then we're a bitch, hysterical, unpredictable, untrustworthy, two-faced, vindictive... etc. Men don't face these hypocrisies. If a man yells and screams or interrupts or bangs his fist on the table, he's "passionate". If a woman does it, she's "emotional" and "unhinged".

If a working woman has a family, she's still almost always expected to be the primary caregiver - and is penalized for it as she's seen as "not committed" to her career. But a man who has a family is expected to be the primary earner outside the home, and he can be and is expected to be career-driven... since usually he has a wife doing all of the heavy lifting behind the scenes. Women do an extraordinary amount of unpaid work to keep our families and society functional, and at every turn, that work is devalued, undermined, and ignored. We are generally the caregivers, the cookers, the cleaners, the errand runners, the homework helpers, the pet minders. We do gardening and house maintenance and menu planning and then shopping and then loading and unloading and putting away the groceries before we cook it. We are the laundry service, the find-the-item-sitting-in-plain-sight service... on and on and on. And that's just the normal stuff. All unpaid. "Women's work".

This book covered a HUGE array of areas where women are ignored or invisible to society, and my review can't cover it all or do it proper justice. I highly recommend this book. It was fascinating, and really shows how far we have come, and how far there is still to go to achieve true equality. ...more

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Apr 25, 2019 David Dinaburg rated it liked it

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men overflows with facts and examples of how women are discounted or completely ignored in modern social, academic, and commercial applications. The two or three times I noticed it dip into the speculative feels unwieldy: why include weak studies whose findings are still in dispute when you have so much good data that proves your thesis? Why include, “[M]ale-default thinking may also be behind the finding that research perceived to have been ...more

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Aug 22, 2019 LynnDee (LynnDee's Library) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: social-issues, non-fiction

Fuck the patriarchy.

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Mar 12, 2019 Zoë rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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 doesn't make sense if you're talking about half the human race. And it doesn't make sense if you care about accurate data.

And there you ...more

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Sep 27, 2019 Marcela rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, feminism

My major critique is that I would've liked to see more intersectionality. The author explains that there's very little data out there about women of color, which is part of the problem, but I also would've liked to hear information about the ways the gender data gap also works against queer women, trans women, disabled women, etc. Basically, this book could likely have been three times this size.

The most frustrating thing overall is that I suspect it's mostly the choir reading this book: ...more

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Jul 30, 2019 Laura Noggle rated it it was amazing

Shelves: women-fiction, 2019

Every woman needs to read this book. Full stop.

*The consequences of living in a world built around male data can be deadly.*

From safety features in cars, to medicinal doses and typical signs of a heart attack—all data is by default based on men and the average male physique.

Criado Perez does an excellent job addressing the male cultural bias, delineating the data gap in our male centric world, and tackling the myth of meritocracy.

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