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

by Caroline Criado Pérez

‘The phylogenetic roots of human lethal violence’, which claimed to reveal that humans have evolved to be six times more deadly to their own species than the average mammal.

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.

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

This observation may go some way to explaining why a Finnish study26 found that single women recovered better from heart attacks than married women – particularly when put alongside a University of Michigan study27 which found that husbands create an extra seven hours of housework a week for women.

Working moderately long hours (forty-one to fifty hours per week) was ‘associated with less risk of contracting heart disease, chronic lung disease, or depression’ in men. By contrast, such hours for female workers led to consistent and ‘alarming increases’ in life-threatening diseases, including heart disease and cancer. Women’s risk of developing these diseases started to rise when they worked more than forty hours per week. If they worked for an average of sixty hours per week for over thirty years, their risk of developing one of these diseases tripled.

This all leaves women facing extreme poverty in their old age, in part because they simply can’t afford to save for it. But it’s also because when governments are designing pension schemes, they aren’t accounting for women’s lower lifetime earnings. This isn’t exactly a data gap, because the data does mostly exist. But collecting the data is useless unless governments use it. And they don’t.

is women’s unpaid work under valued because we don’t see it – or is it invisible because we don’t value it?

An analysis of 248 performance reviews collected from a variety of US-based tech companies found that women receive negative personality criticism that men simply don’t.7 Women are told to watch their tone, to step back. They are called bossy, abrasive, strident, aggressive, emotional and irrational. Out of all these words, only aggressive appeared in men’s reviews at all – ‘twice with an exhortation to be more of it’. More damningly, several studies of performance-related

completely fails to account for it. Brilliance bias is in no small part a result of a data gap: we have written so many female geniuses out of history, they just don’t come to mind as easily. The result is that when ‘brilliance’ is considered a requirement for a job, what is really meant is ‘a penis’. Several studies have

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Senior women at Google started hosting workshops ‘to encourage women to nominate themselves’, Laszlo Bock, head of people operations, told the New York Times in 2012.67 In other words, they held workshops to encourage women to be more like men. But why should we accept that the way men do things, the way men see themselves, is the correct way? 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.68 This being the case, perhaps it wasn’t that women’s rates of putting themselves up for promotion were too low. Perhaps it was that men’s were too high.

Then there’s the standard office temperature. The formula to determine standard office temperature was developed in the 1960s around the metabolic resting rate of the average forty-year-old, 70 kg man.1 But a recent study found that ‘the metabolic rate of young adult females performing light office work is significantly lower’ than the standard values for men doing the same type of activity. In fact, the formula may overestimate female metabolic rate by as much as 35%, meaning that current offices are on average five degrees too cold for women. Which leads to the odd sight of female office workers wrapped up in blankets in the New York summer while their male colleagues wander around in summer clothes.

These data gaps are all inequitable, not to mention being bad business sense – an uncomfortable workforce is an unproductive workforce. But workplace data gaps lead to a lot worse than simple discomfort and consequent inefficiency. Sometimes they lead to chronic illness. Sometimes, they mean women die.

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 it.

Rachael Tatman, a research fellow in linguistics at the University of Washington, found that Google’s speech-recognition software was 70% more likely to accurately recognise male speech than female speech20 – and it’s currently the best on the market.21 Clearly, it is unfair for women to pay the same price as men for products that deliver an inferior service to them.

‘The fact that men enjoy better performance than women with these technologies means that it’s harder for women to do their jobs. Even if it only takes a second to correct an error, those seconds add up over the days and weeks to a major time sink, time your male colleagues aren’t wasting messing with technology.’

Thankfully for frustrated women around the world, Tom Schalk, the vice president of voice technology at car navigation system supplier ATX, has come up with a novel solution to fix the ‘many issues with women’s voices’.26 What women need, he said, was ‘lengthy training’ – if only women ‘were willing’ to submit to it. Which, sighs Schalk, they just aren’t. Just like the wilful women buying the wrong stoves in Bangladesh, women buying cars are unreasonably expecting voice-recognition software developers to design a product that works for them when it’s obvious that the problem needing fixing is the women themselves. Why can’t a woman be more like

For millennia, medicine has functioned on the assumption that male bodies can represent humanity as a whole. As a result, we have a huge historical data gap when it comes to female bodies, and this is a data gap that is continuing to grow as researchers carry on ignoring the pressing ethical need to include female cells, animals and humans, in their research. That this is still going on in the twenty-first century is a scandal. It should be the subject of newspaper headlines worldwide. Women are dying, and the medical world is complicit. It needs to wake up.

Perhaps the greatest contributor to the numbers of women dying following a heart attack, however, is that their heart attacks are simply being missed by their doctors. Research from the UK has found that women are 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack (rising to almost 60% for some types of heart attack8). This is partly because women often don’t have the ‘Hollywood heart attack’ as it’s known in medical circles (chest and left-arm pains).9 Women (particularly young women) may in fact present without any chest pain at all, but rather with stomach pain, breathlessness, nausea and fatigue.10