Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

by Caroline Criado Pérez

Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth. Simone de Beauvoir

that men far outnumber women in example sentences

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.

Wikipedias found that articles about women include words like ‘woman’, ‘female’ or ‘lady’, but articles about men don’t contain words like ‘man’, ‘masculine’ or ‘gentleman’ (because the male sex goes without saying).60

multiplayer mode, some male players were pleased with the decision.69 Playing as a woman would alienate them from the game, they

At the turn of the twentieth century, award-winning British engineer, physicist and inventor Hertha Ayrton remarked that while errors overall are ‘notoriously hard to kill […] an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat’. She was right. Textbooks still routinely name Thomas Hunt Morgan as the person who discovered that sex was determined by chromosomes rather than environment, despite the fact that it was Nettie Stevens’ experiments on mealworms that established this – and despite the existence of correspondence between them where Morgan writes to ask Stevens for details of her experiment.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’s discovery that the sun is predominantly composed of hydrogen is often credited to her male supervisor.76 Perhaps the most famous example of this kind of injustice is Rosalind Franklin, whose work (she had concluded via her X-ray experiments and unit cell measurements that DNA consisted of two chains and a phosphate backbone) led James Watson and Francis Crick (now Nobel Prize-winning household names) to ‘discover’ DNA.

It just means that what may seem objective can actually be highly male-biased:

fact is that worth is a matter of opinion, and opinion is informed by culture. And if that culture is as male-biased as ours is, it can’t help but be biased against women. By default.

The history of humanity. The history of art, literature and music. The history of evolution itself. All have been presented to us as objective facts. But the reality is, these facts have been lying to us. They have all been distorted by a failure to account for half of humanity – not least by the very words we use to convey our half-truths. This failure has led to gaps in the data. A corruption in what we think we know about ourselves. It has fuelled the myth of male universality. And that is a fact.

For him, the way he saw the world was universal, while feminism – seeing the world from a female perspective – was niche. Ideological.

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.

that ‘what is essential goes without saying because it comes without saying: the tradition is silent, not least about itself as a tradition’.

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

data we do have makes it clear that women are invariably more likely than men to walk and take public transport.

Men tend to travel on their own, but women travel encumbered – by shopping, by buggies, by children or elderly relatives they are caring for.25 A 2015 survey on travel in London found that women are ‘significantly less likely than men to be satisfied with the streets and pavements after their last journey by foot’, perhaps reflecting the reality that not only are women more likely to walk than men but also that women are more likely to be pushing prams and therefore be more affected by inadequate walkways.

Valuing cars over pedestrians is not inevitable. In Vienna 60% of all journeys are made on foot, in no small part because the city takes gender planning seriously. Since the 1990s Vienna’s head of gender planning,

India’s public transport agencies also don’t separate their data by sex,

But if for these decision-makers the home is ‘a respite from paid labour’ and ‘a place for leisure’, that is far from its role in most women’s lives. Globally women do three times the amount of unpaid care work men do;42 according to the IMF, this can be further subdivided into twice as much childcare and four times as much housework.43 In Katebe, a town in central Uganda, the World Bank found that after spending nearly fifteen hours on a combination of housework, childcare, digging, preparing food, collecting fuel and water, women were unsurprisingly left with only around thirty minutes of leisure time per day.44 By contrast, men, who spent an hour less than women per day digging, negligible amounts of time on housework and childcare, and no time at all on collecting fuel and water, managed to find about four hours per day to spend on leisure. The home may have been a place of leisure for him – but for her? Not so much.

story.

First Gender Neutral 2. Same space but men has urinals 3. Women take more time, periods, pregnancy, kids... 4. Navigation...

authority.

Not just under report but no way to classify

Like transit environments, then, gyms are often a classic example of a male-biased public space masquerading as equal access.

What they found was revealing. It turned out that single large open spaces were the problem, because these forced girls to compete with the boys for space. And girls didn’t have the confidence to compete with the boys (that’s social conditioning for you) so they tended to just let the boys have the space. But when they subdivided the parks into smaller areas, the female drop-off was reversed.

When planners fail to account for gender, public spaces become male spaces by default.

Ninety per cent of Icelandic women took part in the strike. Twenty-five thousand women gathered for a rally (the largest of more than twenty to take place throughout the country) in Reykjavík’s Downtown Square – a staggering figure in a country of then only 220,000 people.2 A year later, in 1976, Iceland passed the Gender Equality Act, which outlawed sex discrimination in workplaces and schools.3 Five years later, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir beat three men to become the world’s first democratically elected female head of state. And today, Iceland has the most gender-equal parliament in the world without a quota system.4 In 2017 the country topped the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index for the eighth year running.5

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

women.

Tenure clock vs Biological clock

father.

nin transferable quota and daddy quota

The truth is that around the world, women continue to be disadvantaged by a working culture that is based on the ideological belief that male needs are universal. The vast majority of American homemakers (97% of whom are women) in a recent poll110 indicated that they would go back to work if they could work from home (76%) or if the job offered flexible hours (74%) – rather suggesting that while the majority of US companies claim to offer flexible working,111 the reality is somewhat

The implicit bias is clear: expense codes are based on the assumption that the employee has a wife at home taking care of the home and the kids. This work doesn’t need paying for, because it’s women’s work, and women don’t get paid for it. Bovasso sums it up: ‘You can get $30 for takeout if you work late (because your wife isn’t there to cook you dinner) or $30 for Scotch if you want to drink your face off, but you can’t get $30 for a sitter (because your wife is at home with the kids).’ In the event, Bovasso was able to get her company to cover the cost of her childcare – but as she points out, ‘these have been exceptions I’ve had to ask for’. Which is women all over: always the exception, never the default.

Studies have shown that a belief in your own personal objectivity, or a belief that you are not sexist, makes you less objective and more likely to behave in a sexist way.

Given the evidence that children learn brilliance bias at school, it should be fairly easy to stop teaching them this. And in fact a recent study found that female students perform better in science when the images in their textbooks include female scientists.54 So to stop teaching girls that brilliance doesn’t belong to them, we just need to stop misrepresenting women. Easy.

It’s much harder to correct for brilliance bias once it’s already been learnt, however, and once children who’ve been taught it grow up and enter the world of work, they often start perpetuating it themselves. This is bad enough when it comes to human-on-human recruitment, but with the rise of algorithm-driven recruiting the problem is set to get worse, because there is every reason to suspect that this bias is being unwittingly hardwired into the very code to which we’re outsourcing our decision-making.

Beyond its failure to account for female socialisation (girls are penalised for being antisocial in a way boys aren’t), the odd thing about framing an aptitude for computer science around typically male behaviour is that coding was originally seen as a woman’s game. In fact, women were the original ‘computers’, doing complex maths problems by hand for the military before the machine that took their name replaced them.56 Even after they were replaced by a machine, it took years before they were replaced by men. ENIAC, the world’s first fully functional digital computer, was unveiled in 1946, having been programmed by six women.57 During the 1940s and 50s, women remained the dominant sex in programming,58 and in 1967 Cosmopolitan magazine published ‘The Computer Girls’, an article encouraging women into programming.59 ‘It’s just like planning a dinner,’ explained computing pioneer Grace Hopper. ‘You have to plan ahead and schedule

Gild undoubtedly did not intend to create an algorithm that discriminated against women. They were intending to remove human biases. But if you aren’t aware of how those biases operate, if you aren’t collecting data and taking a little time to produce evidence-based processes, you will continue to blindly perpetuate old injustices. And so by not considering the ways in which women’s lives differ from men’s, both on and offline, Gild’s coders inadvertently created an algorithm with a hidden bias against women.

For example, quotas, which, contrary to popular misconception, were recently found by a London School of Economics study to ‘weed out incompetent men’ rather than promote unqualified women.

These are just two anecdotes, but there is plenty of evidence that the wording of an ad can impact on women’s likelihood to apply for a job.

Lady, phoneticist Henry Higgins is baffled when, after enduring months of his hectoring put-downs, his protégée-cum-victim Eliza Doolittle finally bites back. ‘Why can’t a woman be more like a man?’ he grumbles. It’s a common complaint – and one for which the common solution is to fix the women. This is unsurprising in a world where what is male is seen as universal and what is female is seen as ‘atypical’.

one.

Below is a concise summary of Chapter 5, “The Henry Higgins Effect,” with all the concrete examples Caroline Criado Perez uses to illustrate the systemic gender data gap in workplace design, health and safety: --- 1. Pregnancy and Proactive Design Sheryl Sandberg at Google (2014): Morning sickness, body swelling, feet up two sizes. Example: After Sandberg went to Sergey Brin, Google introduced reserved pregnancy parking. Implication: Until a pregnant woman raised the issue, no one recognized the need. 2. Office Temperature Model Standard Formula (1960s): Based on the resting metabolic rate of a 40-year-old, 70 kg man. Example: Offices run on average 5 °F too cold for women, who end up wrapped in blankets while men wear shirtsleeves. 3. Occupational Fatalities & Injuries Historic Fatalities: Early 1900s UK: ~4,400 work‐related deaths/year → 2016: 137. US 1913: 23,000 deaths (out of 38 M workforce) → 2016: 5,190 (out of 163 M). Rising Injuries Among Women: Beatrice Boulanger, home‐care worker: shoulder collapse after lifting heavy patients learned “on the job.” Required full shoulder replacement. French cultural-centre cleaner: Before indoor sinks, had to carry water upstairs and back → chronic strain. Karen Messing (2018): No biomechanics research on how breast size affects lifting technique and back pain. 4. Chemicals & Long-Latency Disease Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals (EDCs): Linked to breast, ovarian cancers; Hodgkin’s disease, multiple myeloma among cosmetologists. Jim & Margaret Brophy (auto-plastics): 10 years’ exposure → 42 % higher breast-cancer risk; under 50 → fivefold risk. Always menstrual-pad study (2014): Found styrene, chloroform, acetone in “green” products. Regulation Gaps: Canada: “mean all-person daily intake” still applied. UK: Shift-work breast cancer not on prescribed lists; asbestos-related ovarian cancer untracked. US: No federal requirement to list cleaning-product ingredients; 70 % of household cleaning done by women. 5. The “Reference Man” & Toxicology Default Test Subject: 25–30 year-old, 70 kg Caucasian man. Consequences: Safe radiation and chemical levels for him can be unsafe for women (thinner skin, higher fat %, hormonal differences). 6. Double-Shift Chemical Exposure Nail-salon workers (predominantly migrant women): Daily exposure to polishes, removers, gel, shellac, adhesives → cancer, miscarriages, lung disease. Then return home for unpaid domestic cleaning exposures (“cocktail of exposures”). 7. Tools and Equipment Designed for Men US Farm Operators (by 2007: 1 M women): Tractors, cement bags, bricks sized for men (women’s hands ~0.8 ″ shorter). Construction Carpenters (NYCOSH study): Women have higher strains/sprains of wrist and forearm than men—likely due to male-default tools. Wendy Davis & Women’s Design Service (UK): Photos of daughter vs. husband: adult-size bricks and cement bags needn’t be that heavy; brick sizes could be reduced. 8. Military & Aviation Gear Tactile Situation Awareness System (TSAS) vest: Designed for pilots with hairy, bony chests—vibrations less detectable on women’s bodies. Overalls with Single-Piece Zips (UK Coastguards): Peeing is “a major operation”—full strip-down → long searches and discomfort; management acknowledged a two-piece design but hasn’t implemented it. British Army Injury Rates: Women up to 7× more likely to suffer musculoskeletal injuries; 10× more hip/pelvic stress fractures. RAF Stride-Length Lawsuit (2013): Women forced to march at male stride length (30″) → pelvic fractures; reduced to 28″ in Australia → fractures fell. Rucksacks & Load-Carrying: Packs built for men’s upper-body strength → unstable on women; women hyperextend neck/shoulders → injury and shorter stride. Uniforms & Boots (US military): First women-specific uniforms only in 2011 (hip, breast, leg length, crotch redesign for peeing). Boots still designed for men’s wider feet and lower arches. 9. Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) Failures 2009 Women’s Engineering Society survey: 74 % of PPE designed for men. 2016 Prospect Union survey: 29 % of women in energy & 17 % in construction wore women’s PPE. 2017 TUC report (emergency services): Only 5 % of women never had their work hampered by PPE; body armor, hi-vis jackets unsuitable. Spanish Policewoman (2018): Disciplinary action for buying her own € 500 women’s bulletproof jacket. UK Civil Guards (Pilar Villacorta): Men’s jacket leaves women doubly unprotected—doesn’t cover breasts, impedes access to weapons/batons. British Female Police Officers: 1997: Officer stabbed and killed after removing body armor to use hydraulic ram. 700+ complaints over 20 years: kit-belt bruising, lack of space for breasts in stab vests → vests too short, leaving women exposed. --- Overarching Lesson (“Henry Higgins Effect”) > “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” —when institutions measure women against male norms and then seek to “fix” women rather than redesigning for all bodies. All these examples together reveal how deeply male-default design permeates workplaces, injuring, disenfranchising, and sometimes killing women—until data gaps are closed and that new data is put to work in policy, regulation, and design.

synthetic oestrogen can be carcinogenic in women:

‘It was ironic to me,’ says occupational health researcher Jim Brophy, ‘that all this talk about the danger for pregnant women and women who had just given birth never extended to the women who were producing these bottles. Those women whose exposures far exceeded anything that you would have in the general environment. There was no talk about the pregnant worker who is on the machine that’s producing this thing.’

The result is that workers know that if they demand better protections the response will be ‘Fine, you’re out of here. There’s ten women outside the door who want your job.’ We’ve heard factory workers tell us this in the exact same words,’ says Rochon Ford.

In 2015 the New York Times reported the story of manicurist Qing Lin, forty-seven, who splashed some nail-polish remover on a customer’s patent Prada sandals.8 ‘When the woman demanded compensation, the $270 her boss pressed into the woman’s hand came out of the manicurist’s pay’, and Lin was fired. ‘I am worth less than a shoe,’ she said. Lin’s story appeared in a New York Times investigation of nail salons which revealed ‘all manner of humiliation’ suffered by workers, including constant video monitoring by owners, verbal, and even physical abuse.9 Lawsuits filed in New York courts include allegations of sixty-six-hour weeks at $1.50 an hour and no pay at all on slow days in a salon that charged manicurists for drinking the water.

Nail salons are the tip of an extremely poorly regulated iceberg when it comes to employers exploiting loopholes in employment law. Zero-hour contracts, short-term contracts, employment through an agency, these have all been enticingly rebranded the ‘gig economy’ by Silicon Valley, as if they are of benefit to workers. But the gig economy is in fact often no more than a way for employers to get around basic employee rights. Casual contracts create a vicious cycle: the rights are weaker to begin with, which

arrangement’.

1. Feminist Epistemology (Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway) Situated Knowledge & Strong Objectivity: Perez’s examples illustrate the necessity of recognizing women's lived experiences to achieve reliable, representative science and regulation. Ignoring occupational exposure embodies Haraway’s critique of "the god-trick"—pretending neutrality while perpetuating biases and injustices. 2. Judith Butler – Precarity & Vulnerability Butler emphasizes how bodies are made precarious by social and institutional structures. The narrative of women workers, precariously positioned both economically and medically, vividly demonstrates this theoretical framing. 3. Michel Foucault – Biopolitics & Power-Knowledge Regulation practices and research biases reflect institutional power that defines whose health matters. The selective visibility (consumer safety vs. worker safety) is a manifestation of biopolitical control over vulnerable populations. 4. Amartya Sen – Capabilities Approach Precarious employment and lack of workplace safety fundamentally undermine women’s capabilities to achieve health, economic independence, and bodily integrity.

It probably does feel like magic for the companies that use his software to boost profits by shifting the risks of doing business onto their workers. It probably also feels pretty great for the increasing number of managers who are compensated on the efficiency of their staffing. It feels less great, however, for the workers themselves, particularly those with caring responsibilities. Jannette Navarro, a barista at a Starbucks in San Diego, showed the New York Times her upcoming algorithm-produced schedule.33 It involved working until 11 p.m. on the Friday, reporting again at 4 a.m. on Saturday, and then starting again at 5 a.m. on Sunday. She rarely learned her schedule

Perhaps most staggeringly simple, participants in the Brophys’ research ‘suggested that they be permitted to have their last names removed from their name tags – at their employer’s expense – as a safety measure’. This

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 it 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. 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

was the Danish economist Ester Boserup who first came up with the plough hypothesis: that societies that had historically used the plough would be less gender equal than those that hadn’t. The theory is based on the relative female-friendliness of shifting agriculture (which is done using handheld tools like hoes or digging sticks) versus plough agriculture (usually driven by a powerful animal like a horse or an ox), the idea being that the former is more accessible to women.

gap.

Key Points of Perez’s Critique: Data Uncertainty: Evidence for the plough hypothesis is mixed. In Ethiopia, traditional folklore associates farming with men, yet lighter ploughs don't strictly necessitate upper-body strength, suggesting cultural and historical factors beyond mere physical strength influenced gender divisions. Systematic Underreporting of Women’s Work: Agricultural labor statistics often systematically overlook women's extensive contributions, classifying their tasks (like livestock rearing, gardening, or food processing) as secondary or domestic—leading to significant data gaps. Definitional Biases: Surveys define agriculture narrowly as “fieldwork,” excluding the extensive agricultural activities predominantly performed by women. Misinterpretation of Women’s Productivity: Official data often show women as less productive farmers due to structural barriers (limited access to credit, land, education, and technology). These constraints are systematically ignored, perpetuating gender inequity and obscuring women's true agricultural contributions. Mechanization's Gendered Effects: Agricultural mechanization tends to benefit male laborers, pushing men toward lucrative, non-agricultural employment, while often increasing women’s manual workload or excluding them entirely due to male-centric machine designs. Failure of Development Initiatives: Extension services and agricultural training programs overwhelmingly target men, rarely considering women's time constraints, literacy barriers, mobility restrictions, or actual agricultural practices—resulting in ineffective and inequitable interventions