Invisible Women Quotes

“And as an added bonus, not forcing women to march in time with men has not, as yet, led to the apocalypse.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“some modern ‘labour-saving’ devices might more precisely be labelled ‘male labour-saving’ devices. A 2014 study in Syria, for example, found while the introduction of mechanisation in farming did reduce demand for male labour, freeing men up to ‘pursue better-paying opportunities outside of agriculture’, it actually increased demand ‘for women’s labour-intensive tasks such as transplanting, weeding, harvesting and processing’.20 Conversely, when some agricultural tasks were mechanised in Turkey, women’s participation in the agricultural labour force decreased, ‘because of men’s appropriation of machinery’, and because women were reluctant to adopt it. This was in part due to lack of education and sociocultural norms, but also ‘because the machinery was not designed for use by women’.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“when they get sick. To be paid less. To go part-time when they have kids. Failing to collect data on women and their lives means that we continue to naturalise sex and gender discrimination – while at the same time somehow not seeing any of this discrimination. Or really, we don’t see it because we naturalise it – it is too obvious, too commonplace, too much just the way things are to bother commenting on. It’s the irony of being a woman: at once hyper-visible when it comes to being treated as the subservient sex class, and invisible when it counts – when it comes to being counted.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences, in every page; the men so good for nothing and hardly any women at all – it is very tiresome. Jane Austen”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“And in any case, while there is evidence that women can to a certain extent accept men as role models, men won’t do the same for women. Women will buy books by and about men, but men won’t buy books by and about women (or at least not many).”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“It’s a rationale that is clearly a function of sexism, a symptom of a world that believes women’s lives are less important than ‘human’ lives, where ‘human’ means male.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“One of the most convincing aspects of Stoffregen’s theory is how it finally explains why I get car sick in every seat other than the driving seat: it’s all about control. When you’re walking, you are in control of your movements. You know what’s coming. On a ship, or in a car, someone else is in control – unless you’re the driver. ‘The driver knows what the motion of the car is going to be and so the driver is able to stabilise his or herself in what we call an anticipatory fashion,’ explains Stoffregen, ‘whereas the passenger cannot know in quantitative detail what the car is going to be doing. And so their control of their own body must be compensatory. And anticipatory control is just better than compensatory control. You know, that ain’t no rocket science.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“In the US it is a truth universally acknowledged that its soccer team has never won the World Cup or even reached the final – except it has. Its women’s team has won three times.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Money continues not to be shared equally between couples, and money controlled by women continues to be more likely to be spent on children than money controlled by men.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“nurses are subjected to ‘more acts of violence than police officers or prison guards’.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“US analysis has found that framing human rights issues as women’s rights issues makes male politicians less likely to support legislation, and if a rights bill is mainly sponsored by women, it ends up being watered down and states are less likely to invest resources.63 It seems that democracy – in so far as it pertains to women – is broken.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“An analysis of G-rated (suitable for children) films released between 1990 and 2005 found that only 28% of speaking roles went to female characters – and perhaps even more tellingly in the context of humans being male by default, women made up only 17% of crowd scenes.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“This was not to be the only time Apple completely forgot about at least 50% of their users. When Apple launched their AI, Siri, she (ironically) could find prostitutes and Viagra suppliers, but not abortion providers. 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.’ These are basic errors that surely would have been caught by a team with enough women on it – that is, by a team without a gender data gap.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“in medical research is a data gap. And as I will show, failing to include the perspective of women is a huge driver of an unintended male bias that attempts (often in good faith) to pass itself off as ‘gender neutral’. This is what de Beauvoir meant when she said that men confuse their own point of view with the absolute truth.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“In the EU, 25% of women cite care work as their reason for not being in the paid labour force. This compares to 3% of men.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“The vascular-system poster did, however, include a small ‘female pelvis’ off to one side, and me and my female pelvis were grateful for small mercies.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

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

“There is plenty of data showing that women have, on average, smaller hands than men,1 and yet we continue to design equipment around the average male hand”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Upper-body mass is approximately 75%3 greater in men because women’s lean body mass tends to be less concentrated in their upper body,4 and, as a result, men’s upper body strength is on average between 40-60%5 higher than women’s (compared to lower-body strength which is on average only 25% higher in men6). Women also have on average a 41% lower grip strength than men,7 and this is not a sex difference that changes with age: the typical seventy-year-old man has a stronger handgrip than the average twenty-five-year-old woman.8 It’s also not a sex difference that can be significantly trained away: a study which compared ‘highly trained female athletes’ to men who were ‘untrained or not specifically trained’ found that their grip strength ‘rarely’ surpassed the fiftieth percentile of male subjects.9 Overall, 90% of the women (this time including untrained women) in the study had a weaker grip than 95% of their male counterparts.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“humans have evolved to be six times more deadly to their own species than the average mammal.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“When planners fail to account for gender, public spaces become male spaces by default. The reality is that half the global population has a female body. Half the global population has to deal on a daily
basis with the sexualised menace that is visited on that body. The entire global population needs the care that, currently, is mainly carried out, unpaid, by women. These are not niche concerns, and if public spaces are truly to for everyone, we have to start
accounting for the lives of the other half of the world. And, as we've seen, this isn't just a matter of justice: it's also a matter of simple economics.
By accounting for women's care responsibilities in urban planning, we make it easier for women to engage fully in the paid workforce - and as we will see in the next chapter, this is a significant driver of GDP. By accounting for the sexual violence women face and introducing preventative measures - like providing enough single-sex public toilets we save money in the long run by reducing the significant economic cost of violence against women. When we account for female socialisation in the design
of our open spaces and public activities, we again save money in the long run by ensuring women's long-term mental and physical health.
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In short, designing the female half of the world out of our public spaces is not a matter of resources. It's a matter of priorities, and, currently, whether unthinkingly or not, we just aren't prioritising
women. This is manifestly unjust, and economically illiterate. Women have an equal right to public resources: we must stop excluding them by design”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Men don’t just have more roles, they also spend twice as much time on screen – this rises to nearly three times as much when, as most films do, the film has a male lead.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself, but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. [. . .] He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Simone de Beauvoir made it most famously when in 1949 she wrote, ‘humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself, but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. [. . .] He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“But male universality is also a cause of the gender data gap: because women aren't seen and aren't remembered, because male data makes up the majority of what we know, what is male comes to be seen as universal. It leads to the positioning of women, half of the global population, as a minority. With a niche identity and a subjective point of view. In such a framing, women are set up to be forgettable Ignorable. Dispensable - from culture, from history, from data. And so, women become invisible.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Domestic violence against women increases when conflict breaks out.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“In short, decades of evidence demonstrate that the presence of women in politics makes a tangible difference to the laws that get passed. And in that case, maybe, just maybe, when Bernie Sanders said, ‘It is not good enough for someone to say, “I’m a woman! Vote for me!”’, he was wrong. The problem isn’t that anyone thinks that’s good enough. The problem is that no one does.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“It all feels rather catch-22ish. In a field where women are at a disadvantage specifically because they are women (and therefore can’t hope to fit a stereotypically male ‘pattern’), data will be particularly crucial for female entrepreneurs. And yet it’s the female entrepreneurs who are less likely to have it, because they are more likely to be trying to make products for women. For whom we lack data.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Although a 2015 Pew Research Center report53 found that equal numbers of American men and women play video games, only 3.3%54 of the games spotlighted at press conferences during 2016’s E3 (the world’s largest annual gaming expo) starred female protagonists. This is actually lower than the figure for 2015 which, according to Feminist Frequency, was 9%.55 If female playable characters do make it into a game they are still often framed as just another feature.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“In 2012, a World Economic Forum analysis found that countries with gender-inflected languages, which have strong ideas of masculine and feminine present in almost every utterance, are the most unequal in terms of gender. 33 But here’s an interesting quirk: countries with genderless languages (such as Hungarian and Finnish) are not the most equal. Instead, that honour belongs to a third group, countries with ‘natural gender languages’ such as English. These languages allow gender to be marked (female teacher, male nurse) but largely don’t encode it into the words themselves. The study authors suggested that if you can’t mark gender in any way you can’t ‘correct’ the hidden bias in a language by emphasising ‘women’s presence in the world’. In short: because men go without saying, it matters when women literally can’t get said at all.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men