Invisible Women Quotes

“You don’t have to realise you’re being discriminated against to in fact be discriminated against.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Some call women’s segregation into low-paid work a choice. But it’s a funny kind of choice when there is no realistic option other than the children not being cared for and the housework not getting done.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“The evidence that women are being let down by the medical establishment is overwhelming. The bodies, symptoms and diseases that affect half the world’s population are being dismissed, disbelieved and ignored. And it’s all a result of the data gap combined with the still prevalent belief, in the face of all the evidence that we do have, that men are the default humans. They are not. They are, to state the obvious, just men. And data collected on them does not, cannot, and should not, apply to women. We need a revolution in the research and the practice of medicine, and we need it yesterday. We need to train doctors to listen to women, and to recognise that their inability to diagnose a woman may not be because she is lying or being hysterical: the problem may be the gender data gaps in their knowledge. It’s time to stop dismissing women, and start saving them.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“But if in Silicon Valley meritocracy is a religion, its God is a white male Harvard dropout.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“He’s also been told that actually many women opt for larger phones, a trend that was ‘usually attributed to handbags’. And look, handbags are all well and good, but one of the reasons women carry them in the first place is because our clothes lack adequate pockets. So designing phones to be handbag-friendly rather than pocket-friendly feels like adding injury (more on this later) to insult.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“We have to understand that when it comes to government the best doesn’t have to mean ‘those who have the money, the time and the unearned confidence from going to the right school and university’. The best when it comes to government means the best as a whole, as a working group. And in that context, the best means diversity.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“There is a better way. And it's a pretty simple one: we must increase female representation in all spheres of life.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Research published in 2018 by Boston Consulting Group found that although on average female business owners receive less than half the level of investment their male counterparts get, they produce more than twice the revenue.9 For every dollar of funding, female-owned start-ups generate seventy-eight cents, compared to male-owned start-ups which generate thirty-one cents.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Take the issue of women being interrupted. An analysis of fifteen years of Supreme Court oral arguments found that ‘men interrupt more than women, and they particularly interrupt women more than they interrupt other men’.73 This goes for male lawyers (female lawyers weren’t found to interrupt at all) as well as judges, even though lawyers are meant to stop speaking when a justice starts speaking. And, as in the political sphere, the problem seems to have got worse as female representation on the bench has increased. An individualist solution might be to tell women to interrupt right back74 – perhaps working on their ‘polite interrupting’75 skills. But there’s a problem with this apparently gender-neutral approach, which is that it isn’t gender-neutral in effect: interrupting simply isn’t viewed the same way when women do it. In June 2017 US Senator Kamala Harris was asking an evasive Attorney General Jeff Sessions some tough questions. When he prevaricated once too often, she interrupted him and pressed him to answer. She was then in turn (on two separate occasions) interrupted and admonished by Senator John McCain for her questioning style.76 He did not do the same to her colleague Senator Rob Wyden, who subjected Sessions to similarly dogged questioning, and it was only Harris who was later dubbed ‘hysterical’.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“But we aren’t starting the studies now. Instead, we continue to rely on data from studies done on men as if they apply to women. Specifically, Caucasian men aged twenty-five to thirty, who weigh 70 kg. This is ‘Reference Man’ and his superpower is being able to represent humanity as a whole. Of course, he does not.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Men are more likely than women to be involved in a car crash, which means they dominate the numbers of those seriously injured in car accidents. But when a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured than a man, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured,46 even when researchers control for factors such as height, weight, seat-belt usage, and crash intensity.47 She is also 17% more likely to die.48 And it’s all to do with how the car is designed – and for whom.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“The female body is not the problem. The problem is the social meaning we ascribe to that body, and a socially determined failure to account for it.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Like so many of the decisions to exclude women in the interests of simplicity, from architecture to medical research, this conclusion could only be reached in a culture that conceives of men as the default human and women as a niche aberration. To distort a reality you are supposedly trying to measure makes sense only if you don’t see women as essential. It makes sense only if you see women as an added extra, a complicating factor. It doesn’t make sense if you’re talking about half of the human race. It doesn’t make sense if you care about accurate data.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“A UK Department for Transport study highlighted the stark difference between male and female perceptions of danger, finding that 62% of women are scared walking in multistorey car parks, 60% are scared waiting on train platforms, 49% are scared waiting at the bus stop, and 59% are scared walking home from a bus stop or station. The figures for men are 31%, 25% , 20 % and 25%, respectively. Fear of crime is particularly high among low-income women, partly because they tend to live in areas with higher crime rates, but also because they are likely to be working odd hours and often come home from work in the dark. Ethnic-minority women tend to experience more fear for the same reasons, as well as having the added danger of (often gendered) racialised violence to contend with.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Woman the Gatherer’, anthropologist Sally Slocum challenged the primacy of ‘Man the Hunter’.2 Anthropologists, she argued, ‘search for examples of the behaviour of males and assume that this is sufficient for explanation’.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“The average female handspan is between seven and eight inches,2 which makes the standard forty-eight-inch keyboard something of a challenge. Octaves on a standard keyboard are 7.4 inches wide, and one study found that this keyboard disadvantages 87% of adult female pianists.3 Meanwhile, a 2015 study which compared the handspan of 473 adult pianists to their ‘level of acclaim’ found that all twelve of the pianists considered to be of international renown had spans of 8.8 inches or above.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“PMS affects 90% of women, but is chronically under-studied: one research round-up found five times as many studies on erectile dysfunction than on PMS.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Tech’s love affair with the myth of meritocracy is ironic for an industry so in thrall to the potential of Big Data, because this is a rare case where the data actually exists. But if in Silicon Valley meritocracy is a religion, its God is a white male Harvard dropout.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“It is no accident that those who are most likely to believe in the myth of meritocracy are young, upper-class, white Americans.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Female professors are penalised if they aren’t deemed sufficiently warm and accessible. But if they are warm and accessible they can be penalised for not appearing authoritative or professional. On the other hand, appearing authoritative and knowledgeable as a woman can result in student disapproval, because this violates gendered expectations.38 Meanwhile men are rewarded if they are accessible at a level that is simply expected in women and therefore only noticed if it’s absent.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“From development initiatives to smartphones, from medical tech to stoves, tools (whether physical or financial) are developed without reference to women’s needs, and, as a result these tools are failing them on a grand scale. And this failure affects women’s lives on a similarly grand scale: it makes them poorer, it makes them sicker, and, when it comes to cars, it is killing them. Designers may believe they are making products for everyone, but in reality they are mainly making them for men. It’s time to start designing women in.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Failing to include the perspective of women is a huge driver of unintended male bias that attempts (often in good faith) to pass itself off as 'gender neutral'.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“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”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Several studies have found that the more a field is culturally understood to require 'brilliance' or 'raw talent' to succeed - think philosophy, maths, physics, music composition, computer science - the fewer women there will be studying and working in it. We just don't see women as naturally brilliant.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Perhaps most galling from a gender-data-gap perspective was the finding that females aren’t even included in animal studies on female-prevalent diseases. Women are 70% more likely to suffer depression than men, for instance, but animal studies on brain disorders are five times as likely to be done on male animals.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Female biology is not the reason women are raped. It is not the reason women are intimidated and violated as they navigate public spaces. This happens not because of sex, but because of gender: the social meanings we have imposed on male and female bodies.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Men (women were not found to exhibit this bias) who believe that they are objective in hiring decisions are more likely to hire a male applicant than an identically described female applicant. And in organisations which are explicitly presented as meritocratic, managers favour male employees over equally qualified female employees.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“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.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Journalist Sarah Ditum has little time for this argument. 'Come on now,' she chided in a column. 'You've played games as a blue hedgehog. As a cybernetically augmented space marine. As a sodding dragon tager. [...B]ut the idea that women can be protagonists with an inner life and an active nature is somehow beyond your imaginative capacities?”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Designing passive tracking apps as if women have pockets big enough to hold their phones is a perennial problem with an easy solution: include proper pockets in women’s clothing (she types, furiously, having just had her phone fall out of her pocket and smash on the floor for the hundredth time).”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men