More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
One of the most important things to say about the gender data gap is that it is not generally malicious, or even deliberate. Quite the opposite. It is simply the product of a way of thinking that has been around for millennia and is therefore a kind of not thinking. A double not thinking, even: men go without saying, and women don’t get said at all. Because when we say human, on the whole, we mean man.
when we are designing a world that is meant to work for everyone we need women in the room.
The female-specific concerns that men fail to factor in cover a wide variety of areas, but as you read you will notice that three themes crop up again and again: the female body, women’s unpaid care burden, and male violence against women.
the female body is not the problem. The problem is the social meaning that we ascribe to that body, and a socially determined failure to account for it.
male bias is so firmly embedded in our psyche that even genuinely gender-neutral words are read as male.
The result of this deeply male-dominated culture is that the male experience, the male perspective, has come to be seen as universal, while the female experience – that of half the global population, after all – is seen as, well, niche.
These white men have in common the following opinions: that identity politics is only identity politics when it’s about race or sex; that race and sex have nothing to do with ‘wider’ issues like ‘the economy’; that it is ‘narrow’ to specifically address the concerns of female voters and voters of colour; and that working class means white working-class men.
When you have been so used, as a white man, to white and male going without saying, it’s understandable that you might forget that white and male is an identity too.
designing the female half of the world out of our public spaces is not a matter of resources. It’s a matter of priorities, and, currently, whether unthinkingly or not, we just aren’t prioritising women. This is manifestly unjust, and economically illiterate. Women have an equal right to public resources: we must stop excluding them by design.
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.
Nevertheless, the main and repeated recommendation of the report was to fix the women, rather than the stoves. The women needed to be educated on how great the ‘improved’ stoves were, rather than stove designers needing to be educated on how not to increase women’s already fifteen-hour average working day.48
the problem is not the women. It is the stoves:
But female representation is about more than a specific woman who does or doesn’t get a job, because female representation is also about the gender data gap.
And it’s not always easy to convince someone a need exists if they don’t have that need themselves.
The male body was an ideal women failed to live up to.
The change was dramatic: 67% of women given just oxytocin went on to give birth vaginally, but this rose to 84% if they were given bicarbonate of soda an hour before. As Wray pointed out, the bicarb dose wasn’t tailored to body weight, it wasn’t tailored to the amount of acid in the blood, and the women weren’t given repeated doses. So the efficacy could turn out to be even higher.
Bad data leads to bad resource allocation. And the data we have at the moment is incredibly bad.
It’s a rationale that is clearly a function of sexism, a symptom of a world that believes women’s lives are less important than ‘human’ lives, where ‘human’ means male.
15 In other words, as ever, the presence of women fills in a data gap – and an important one: recent quantitive data analysis has found ‘compelling evidence’ that countries where women are kept out of positions of power and treated as second-class citizens are less likely to be peaceful.16 In other words: closing the gender data gap really is better for everyone.
It’s not the disaster that kills them, explains Maureen Fordham. It’s gender – and a society that fails to account for how it restricts women’s lives.
that the case for closing the gender data gap extends beyond women’s rights.
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.
The solution to the sex and gender data gap is clear: we have to close the female representation gap.
