Invisible Women Quotes

“This rather disheartening finding tallies with decades of ‘draw a scientist’ data, where participants overwhelmingly draw men (the bias has historically been so extreme that media around the world celebrated as great progress a recent paper which found that 28% of children now draw women).”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“52 Data from France, Germany, Sweden and Turkey shows that even after accounting for social transfers that some countries employ to recognise the contribution women make through their unpaid care work, women earn between 31% and 75% less than men over their lifetimes.53”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“since the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act, workplace fatalities in the UK have dropped by 85%. But there is a caveat to this good news story. While serious injuries at work have been decreasing for men, there is evidence that they have been increasing among women.7 The rise in serious injuries among female workers is linked to the gender data gap: with occupational research traditionally having been focused on male-dominated industries, our knowledge of how to prevent injuries in women is patchy to say the least.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Analysis of how gender affected support for Trump revealed that ‘the more hostile voters were toward women, the more likely they were to support Trump’.93 In fact, hostile sexism was nearly as good at predicting support for Trump as party identification.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“It’s in statues: when I counted all the statues in the UK’s Public Monuments and Sculptures Association database 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: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“the ‘generic masculine’ (using words like ‘he’ in a gender-neutral way) is not in fact read generically.20 It is read overwhelmingly as male.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“When you say man you don’t ‘include women too’, even if everyone does technically ‘know that’.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“If human evolution is driven by men, are women even human?”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“sex is not the reason women are excluded from data. Gender is.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“By the end of the day, 24 October 1975 came to be known by Icelandic men as ‘the long Friday’.1 Supermarkets sold out of sausages – ‘the favourite ready meal of the time’. Offices were suddenly flooded with children hopped up on the sweets they had been bribed with in an effort to make them behave. Schools, nurseries, fish factories all either shut down or ran at reduced capacity. And the women? Well, the women were having a Day Off.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

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

“Because when we say human, on the whole, we mean man.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“well-behaved women seldom make history’.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“When you have been so used, as a white man, to white and male going without saying, it’s understandable that you might forget that white and male is an identity too.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“male bias is so firmly embedded in our psyche that even genuinely gender-neutral words are read as male.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“It’s easy to slam phone manufacturers and social media platforms as sexist (and, as we shall see, they are, if often unknowingly), but the reality is that even if they had somehow managed to design an image of a ‘gender neutral’ runner, most of us would still have read that runner as male, because we read most things as male unless they are specifically marked as female.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“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

“being seen as uncaring is a norm violation for women in a way that it just isn’t for men.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Closing the gender data gap will not magically fix all the problems faced by women, whether or not they are displaced. That would require a wholesale restructuring of society and an end to male violence. But getting to grips with the reality that gender-neutral does not automatically mean gender-equal would be an important start.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“He – and it implicitly is a he – doesn’t need to concern himself with taking care of children and elderly relatives, of cooking, of cleaning, of doctor’s appointments, and grocery shopping, and grazed knees, and bullies, and homework, and bath-time and bedtime, and starting it all again tomorrow. His life is simply and easily divided into two parts: work and leisure. But a workplace predicated on the assumption that a worker can come into work every day, at times and locations that are wholly unrelated to the location or opening hours of schools, childcare centres, doctors and grocery stores, simply doesn’t work for women.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“These white men have in common the following opinions: that identity politics is only identity politics when it’s about race or sex; that race and sex have nothing to do with ‘wider’ issues like ‘the economy’; that it is ‘narrow’ to specifically address the concerns of female voters and voters of colour; and that working class means white working-class men.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“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: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Actually, a belief in meritocracy may be all you need – to introduce bias, that is. 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 Pérez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“In any case, fifty year’s worth of US census data46 has proven that when women join an industry in high numbers, that industry attracts lower pay and loses ‘prestige’,”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

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

“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 sexualized menace that is visited on that body.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Patronising women is another manoeuvre, an infamous example being then British prime minister David Cameron’s ‘Calm down, dear’ to Labour MP Angela Eagle in 2011.48 In the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s (IPU) 2016 global study on sexism, violence and harassment against female politicians, one MP from a European parliament said ‘if a woman speaks loudly in parliament she is “shushed” with a finger to the lips, as one does with children. That never happens when a man speaks loudly’.49 Another noted that she is ‘constantly asked – even by male colleagues in my own party – if what I want to say is very important, if I could refrain from taking the floor.’ Some tactics are more brazen. Afghan MP Fawzia Koofi told the Guardian that male colleagues use intimidation to frighten female MPs into silence – and when that fails, ‘The leadership cuts our microphones off’.50 Highlighting the hidden gender angle of having a single person (most often a man) in charge of speaking time in parliament, one MP from a country in sub-Saharan Africa (the report only specified regions so the women could remain anonymous) told the IPU that the Speaker had pressured one of her female colleagues for sex. Following her refusal, ‘he had never again given her the floor in parliament’. It doesn’t necessarily even take a sexual snub for a Speaker to refuse women the floor: ‘During my first term in parliament, parliamentary authorities always referred to statements by men and gave priority to men when giving the floor to speakers,’ explained one MP from a country in Asia. The IPU report concluded that sexism, harassment and violence against female politicians was a ‘phenomenon that knew no boundaries and exists to different degrees in every country’. The report found that 66% of female parliamentarians were regularly subjected to misogynistic remarks from their male colleagues, ranging from the degrading (‘you would be even better in a porn movie’) to the threatening (‘she needs to be raped so that she knows what foreigners do’).”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Premenstrual syndrome (PMS) is a collection of symptoms that can include among other things: mood swings, anxiety, breast tenderness, bloating, acne, headaches, stomach pain and sleep problems. 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.88 And yet while a range of medication exists to treat erectile dysfunction89 there is very little available for women, to the extent that over 40% of women who have PMS don’t respond to treatments currently available. Sufferers are still sometimes treated with hysterectomies; in extreme cases, women have tried to kill themselves.90 But researchers are still being turned down for research grants on the basis that ‘PMS does not actually exist’.91”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

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

“Less effective male professors routinely receive higher student evaluations than more effective female teachers. Students believe that male professors hand marking back more quickly – even when that is impossible because it’s an online course delivered by a single lecturer, but where half the students are led to believe that the professor is male and half female. 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 Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men