Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

by Caroline Criado Pérez

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.

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.

When Apple launched their AI, Siri, she (ironically) could find prostitutes and Viagra suppliers, but not abortion providers.17 Siri could help you if you’d had a heart attack, but if you told her you’d been raped, she replied ‘I don’t know what you mean by ‘I was raped.’

Over the next decade Michelle sought help from two more doctors and two (male) gastroenterologists, both of whom told her that her problems were in her head and that she needed to be less anxious and stressed. At the age of twenty-six Michelle was referred to a female GP who scheduled her for a colonoscopy: it revealed that the entire left side of her colon was diseased. She was diagnosed with both irritable bowel syndrome and ulcerative colitis. ‘Funnily enough’, Michelle says, ‘my colon is not in my head.’