Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

[Abigail]

1. How did you feel about the book and its information? Like love hate?

2. Was Perez's use of both statistical data and personal anecdotes an effective way to deliver her argument about the consequences of the gender data gap? Why or why not?

3. Did any specific facts or statistics within the book resonate with you?

4. “It’s time for women to be seen” How can we help other women in our community feel more seen?

5. “Designing the female half of the world out of our public spaces is not a matter of resources but of priorities.”
How can we advocate for ourselves(women) to be prioritized and not just acknowledged?

6. “Women’s work, paid and unpaid, is the backbone to our society and our economy. It is about time we start valuing it.” The current structure of our society depends on women’s work, especially the unpaid kind. I feel like it’s an interesting brain exercise to just to sit for a minute and imagine what the world would look like and how it would run without women’s paid/unpaid work. What differences did you see between that world you imagined and today’s society?

7. Perez discusses the fact that women's unpaid work often goes unrecognized and uncounted. How has this dynamic played out in your own life or in the lives of women you know?

8. “You do not have to realize that you’re being discriminated against to, in fact, be discriminated against.” Looking back do you feel like there was a time that you may have been discriminated against, but did not realize until later?

9. Caroline Criado Perez states in her book that the data gender gap “is not generally malicious, or even deliberate.” What do you think she means by this? How do factors like workforce development, education, and gender representation historically contribute to creating a gender data gap?

10. Can you give an example of how the gender data gap has had an impact on your daily life or routine?

11. What do you think the author means by her statement: “There is no such thing as a woman who doesn’t work. There is only a woman who isn’t paid for her work.”

12. In addition to the gender data gap, can you think of any other groups who may be impacted by a gap in data and research?

13. Were there any aspects of the book that made you reexamine your own decision making? Or the decision making of your employer, community leaders, or elected officials and policy makers?

14. When have you encountered design or systems that seemed "gender neutral" but actually favored male users? How did you adapt to handle these situations?

15. Finding an example of how snow clearing can be altered to better serve women and children and subsequently preventing injuries was interesting. It makes me think of whether the government(US) care enough about women/children injuries enough to change infrastructure willingly. Considering how only big cities typically have public transport to begin with, I don’t think they would. I feel like this chapter has been an example that there is bias and effects from that bias even in the areas of life where you would think that gender wouldn’t need to be a consideration.

16. It’s interesting(as you said before, read:disgusting lol) that when they found bones of a woman and that instead of visualizing a woman as a warrior they instead started to wonder why a woman would be buried with weapons.

17. Gendering and being programmed to automatically call something male. I feel guilty of doing this myself even with items that have no gender and work on correcting myself or using female pronouns to offset the innate programming we have. (Example: I’m calling my beafsteak tomatoes coming in “beafsteak baddies” lol.)

18. Author discussed that not only are women not considered in public planning which is inconvenient for women but that it also has more detrimental effects and compromises women’s safety in their everyday lives. The example of having multiple/larger exits from a park felt like a good example in proving that taking women into consideration doesn’t even require a huge reformation of the current system (though that would probably help 😝.)