Invisible Women Quotes

“The immune system is also thought to be behind sex-specific responses to vaccines: women develop higher antibody responses and have more frequent and severe adverse reactions to vaccines,19 and a 2014 paper proposed developing male and female versions of influenza vaccines.20”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“The female-specific concerns that men fail to factor in cover a wide variety of areas, but as you read you will notice that three themes crop up again and again: the female body, women’s unpaid care burden, and male violence against women.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“I found that there were more statues of men called John than there were of historical, named, non-royal women (the only reason adding royal women to the figure just beats the Johns is down to Queen Victoria, whose enthusiasm for putting up statues of herself I have a grudging respect for).”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“When students have an emotional problem, it is their female professors, not their male professors they turn to.39 Students are also more likely to request extensions, grade boosts, and rule-bending of female academics.31 In isolation, a request of this kind isn’t likely to take up much time or mental energy – but they add up, and they constitute a cost on female academics’ time that male academics mostly aren’t even aware of, and that universities don’t account for.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“the same way that men picture a man 80% of the time they think of a ‘person’, it’s possible that many men in the tech industry simply don’t notice how male-dominated it is.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“But when your big data is corrupted by big silences, the truths you get are half-truths, at best. And often, for women, they aren’t true at all.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Mistaking male bias for impartial, universal, common sense means that when people (men) come across someone trying to level the playing field, it’s often all they can see (perhaps because they read it as bias).”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“we must increase female representation in all spheres of life. Because as more women move into positions of power or influence, there’s another pattern that is becoming even more apparent: women simply don’t forget that women exist as easily as men often seem to.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“will argue that the gender data gap is both a cause and a consequence of the type of unthinking that conceives of humanity as almost exclusively male.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“We have to start accounting for the three themes that define women's relationship with that world. The first of these themes is the female body - or, to be precise - its invisibility. Routinely forgetting to accommodate the female body in design - whether medical, technological or architectural - has led to a world that is less hospitable and more dangerous for women to navigate. It leads to us injuring ourselves in jobs and cars that weren't designed for our bodies. It leads us to dying from drugs that don't work. It has led to the creation of a world where women just don't fit very well. There is an irony in how the female body is apparently invisible when it comes to collecting data, because when it comes to the second trend that defines women's lives, the visibility of the female body is key. That tend is male sexual violence against women - how we don't measure it, don't design our world to account for it, and in so doing, allow it to limit women's liberty.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“By failing to make the obvious connection between an openly misogynistic culture and the mysterious lack of women, Levy contributed to the myth of innately talented hackers being implicitly male. And, today, it’s hard to think of a profession more in thrall to brilliance bias than computer science. ‘Where are the girls that love to program?’ asked a high-school teacher who took part in a summer programme for advanced-placement computer-science teachers at Carnegie Mellon; ‘I have any number of boys who really really love computers,’ he mused. ‘Several parents have told me their sons would be on the computer programming all night if they could. I have yet to run into a girl like that.’

This may be true, but as one of his fellow teachers pointed out, failing to exhibit this behaviour doesn’t mean that his female students don’t love computer science. Recalling her own student experience, she explained how she ‘fell in love’ with programming when she took her first course in college. But she didn’t stay up all night, or even spend a majority of her time programming. ‘Staying up all night doing something is a sign of single-mindedness and possibly immaturity as well as love for the subject. The girls may show their love for computers and computer science very differently. If you are looking for this type of obsessive behavior, then you are looking for a typically young, male behavior. While some girls will exhibit it, most won’t.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“But the story of BPA is not just about gender: it’s also about class. Or at least it’s about gendered class. Fearing a major consumer boycott, most baby-bottle manufacturers voluntarily removed BPA from their products, and while the official US line on BPA is that it is not toxic, the EU and Canada are on their way to banning its use altogether. But the legislation that we have exclusively concerns consumers: no regulatory standard has ever been set for workplace exposure.5 ‘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.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“We have long known that women (in particular women under fifty-five) have worse outcomes than men following heart surgery. But it wasn’t until a Canadian study came out in 2016 that researchers were able to isolate women’s care burden as one of the factors behind this discrepancy. ‘We have noticed that women who have bypass surgery tend to go right back into their caregiver roles, while men were more likely to have someone to look after them,’ explained lead researcher Colleen Norris.25 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.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“The irony of ignoring the potential for male violence when it comes to designing systems for female refugees is that male violence is often the reason women are refugees in the first place.66 We tend to think of people being displaced because of war and disaster: this is usually why men flee. But this perception is another example of male-default thinking: while women do seek refuge on this basis, female homelessness is more usually driven by the violence women face from men.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“An analysis of 15 years of Supreme Court oral arguments found that men interrupt more than women. And they particularly interrupt women more than they interrupt other men... An individualist solution might be to tell women to interrupt right back... But there’s a problem... 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. He did not do the same to her (male) colleague Senator Ron Wyden who subjected Sessions to similarly dogged questioning. And it was only Harris who was then dubbed ‘hysterical’.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“(Bernie) Sanders came to think all (Hilary) Clinton said was ‘vote for me I’m a woman’. The data shows that she certainly didn’t. A word frequency analysis of her speeches by Vox revealed that Clinton mostly talked about workers jobs, education, and the economy... She mentioned jobs almost 600 times... and women’s right a few dozen times.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

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

“women earning more than half of all undergraduate degrees in the US, half of all undergraduate degrees in chemistry, and almost half in maths.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

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

“Long-hours culture is also a problem in academia – and it is exacerbated by career-progression systems designed around typically male life patterns. An EU report on universities in Europe pointed out that age bars on fellowships discriminate against women: women are more likely125 to have had career breaks meaning that their ‘chronological age is older than their “academic” age’.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“one in four American mothers return to work within two weeks of giving birth.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Women in Bolivia are credited with one year of pension contributions per child, up to a maximum of three children. As a side benefit (and a more long-term solution to the problem of feminised poverty), pension credits for the main carer have also been found to encourage men to take on more of the unpaid care load.60 Which raises the question: is women’s unpaid work under valued because we don’t see it – or is it invisible because we don’t value it?”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Despite what academics, NGOs and expatriate technicians seem to think, the problem is not the women. It is the stoves: developers have consistently prioritised technical parameters such as fuel efficiency over the needs of the stove user, frequently leading users to reject them, explains Crewe. 49 And although the low adoption rate is a problem going back decades, development agencies have yet to crack the problem, 50 for the very simple reason that they still haven’t got the hang of consulting women and then designing a product rather than enforcing a centralised design on them from above.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“So with that substantial sex difference in mind: how many drugs that would work for women are we ruling out at phase one trials just because they don’t work in men?”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Throughout this book I will refer to both sex and gender. By 'sex', I mean the biological characteristics that determine whether an individual is male or female , XX and XY. By 'gender', I mean the social meanings we impose upon those biological facts. The way women are treated because they are perceived to be female. One is man-made, but both are real and both have significant consequences for women as they navigate this world constructed on male data. But although I talk about both sex and gender throughout, I use 'Gender Data Gap' as an overarching term. Because sex is not the reason women are excluded from data - gender is”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“In 2016, 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 speech – and it’s currently the best on the market.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for 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. 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.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Employment procedures that are unwittingly biased towards men are an issue in promotion as well as hiring. A classic example comes from Google, where women weren’t nominating themselves for promotion at the same rate as men. This is unsurprising: women are conditioned to be modest, and are penalised when they step outside of this prescribed gender norm.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“This male-default bias goes back at least to the ancient Greeks, who kicked off the trend of seeing the female body as a ‘mutilated male’ body (thanks, Aristotle). The female was the male ‘turned outside in’. Ovaries were female testicles (they were not given their own name until the seventeenth century) and the uterus was the female scrotum. The reason they were inside the body rather than dropped out (as in typical humans) is because of a female deficiency in ‘vital heat’. The male body was an ideal women failed to live up to.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Accordingly, a recent study found that male academics – particularly those in STEM – rated fake research claiming that academia had no gender bias higher than real research which showed it did.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men