Invisible Women Quotes

“Even human bones are not exempt from male-unless-otherwise-indicated thinking. We might think of human skeletons as being objectively either male or female and therefore exempt from male-default thinking. We would be wrong. For over a hundred years, a tenth-century Viking skeleton known as the ‘Birka warrior’ had – despite possessing an apparently female pelvis – been assumed to be male because it was buried alongside a full set of weapons and two sacrificed horses.11 These grave contents indicated that the occupant had been a warrior12 – and warrior meant male (archaeologists put the numerous references to female fighters in Viking lore down to ‘mythical embellishments’13). But although weapons apparently trump the pelvis when it comes to sex, they don’t trump DNA and in 2017 testing confirmed that these bones did indeed belong to a woman. The argument didn’t, however, end there. It just shifted.14 The bones might have been mixed up; there might be other reasons a female body was buried with these items. Naysaying scholars might have a point on both counts (although based on the layout of the grave contents the original authors dismiss these criticisms). But the resistance is nevertheless revealing, particularly since male skeletons in similar circumstances ‘are not questioned in the same way’.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

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

“One survey of senior level women working in Silicon Valley found that 90% of women had witnessed sexist behaviour; 87% had been on the receiving end of demeaning comments by male colleagues; and 60% had received unwanted sexual advances.41 Of that 60%, more than half had been propositioned more than once, and 65% had been propositioned by a superior. One in three women surveyed had felt afraid for her personal safety.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Given the steady stream of abuse reports from around the world, perhaps it’s time to recognise that the assumption that male staff can work in female facilities as they do in male facilities is another example of where gender neutrality turns into gender discrimination. Perhaps sex-segregation needs to extend beyond sanitation facilities, and perhaps no male staff should be in positions of power over vulnerable women. Perhaps. But if this is going to happen, authorities would first have to countenance the idea that male officials might be exploiting the women they are meant to be variously helping, guarding or processing. And, currently, authorities are not countenancing this.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“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. It hasn’t been designed to.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“The average length of paid maternity leave across the EU is twenty-two weeks.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“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 Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Enough women have experienced the sharp shift from ‘Smile, love, it might never happen,’ to ‘Fuck you bitch why are you ignoring me?’ to being followed home and assaulted, to know that an ‘innocent’ comment from a male stranger can be anything but.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“.. evidence from around the world shows that political gender quotas don’t lead to the monstrous regiment of incompetent women. In fact, in line with the LSE study on workplace quotas, studies on political quotas have found that if anything, they ‘increase the competence of the political class in general’. This being the case, gender quotas are nothing more than a corrective to a hidden male bias, and it is the current system that is anti-democratic.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“The lack of meritocracy in academia is a problem that should concern all of us if we care about the quality of the research that comes out of the academy, because studies show that female academics are more likely than men to challenge male-default analysis in their work.53 This means that the more women who are publishing, the faster the gender data gap in research will close. And we should care about the quality of academic research.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“A more ambitious route would be changing the structure of governance altogether: away from majority-based, and towards unanimous decision-making. This has been shown to boost women’s speech participation and to mitigate against their minority position. A 2012 US study found that women only participate at an equal rate in discussions when they are in ‘a large majority’ – interestingly while individual women speak less when they are in the minority, individual men speak the same amount no matter what the gender proportion of the group.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“It has become fashionable for modern workplaces to relax what are often seen as outmoded relics of a less egalitarian age: out with stuffy hierarchies, in with flat organisational structures. But the problem with the absence of a formal hierarchy is that it doesn’t actually result in an absence of a hierarchy altogether. It just means that the unspoken, implicit, profoundly non-egalitarian structure reasserts itself, with white men at the top and the rest of us fighting for a piece of the small space left for everyone else. Group-discussion approaches like brainstorming, explains female leadership trainer Gayna Williams, are ‘well known to be loaded with challenges for diverse representation’, because already-dominant voices dominate.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“But male politicians don’t have to escape to all-male safe spaces to sideline women. There are a variety of manoeuvres they can and do employ to undercut their female colleagues in mixed-gender settings. Interrupting is one: ‘females are the more interrupted gender,’ concluded a 2015 study that found that men were on average more than twice as likely to interrupt women as women were to interrupt men. During a televised ninety-minute debate in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, Donald Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton fifty-one times, while she interrupted him seventeen times. And it wasn’t just Trump: journalist Matt Lauer (since sacked after multiple allegations of sexual harassment) was also found to have interrupted Clinton more often than he interrupted Trump. He also ‘questioned her statements more often’, although Clinton was found to be the most honest candidate running in the 2018 election.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“But the next thing she says provides something of an explanation for how male-default thinking could be so prevalent in a world that is, after all, 50% female. ‘It’s just a feature of human psychology,’ she explains, to assume that our own experiences mirror those of human beings in general. This is a concept in social psychology that is sometimes called ‘naive realism’ and sometimes called ‘projection bias’. Essentially, people tend to assume that our own way of thinking about or doing things is typical. That it’s just normal. For white men this bias is surely magnified by a culture that reflects their experience back to them, thereby making it seem even more typical. Projection bias amplified by a form of confirmation bias, if you like. Which goes some way towards explaining why it is so common to find male bias masquerading as gender neutrality. If the majority of people in power are men – and they are – the majority of people in power just don’t see it. Male bias just looks like common sense to them. But ‘common sense’ is in fact a product of the gender data gap.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“If I had a pound for every time a man questioned my sanity in response to my saying anything vaguely feminist on Twitter I would be able to give up work for life.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“A 2008 analysis of a range of textbooks recommended by twenty of the ‘most prestigious universities in Europe, the United States and Canada’ revealed that across 16,329 images, male bodies were used three times as often as female bodies to illustrate ‘neutral body parts’.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“That was the conclusion of a study conducted by BI Norwegian Business School, which identified the five key traits (emotional stability, extraversion, openness to new experiences, agreeableness and conscientiousness) of a successful leader. Women scored higher than men in four out of the five. But it may also be because the women who do manage to make it through are filling a gender data gap: studies have repeatedly found that the more diverse a company’s leadership is, the more innovative they are. This could be because women are just innately more innovative – but more likely is that the presence of diverse perspectives makes businesses better informed about their customers. Certainly, innovation is strongly linked to financial performance.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“The average smartphone is now 5.5 inches and while we’re admittedly all extremely impressed by the size of your screen, it’s a slightly different matter when it comes to fitting into half the population’s hands (not to mention minuscule or non-existent pockets).”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“So far, menstrual-cycle impacts have been found for antipsychotics, antihistamines and antibiotic treatments as well as heart medication.58 Some antidepressants have been found to affect women differently at different times of their cycle, meaning that dosage may be too high at some points and too low at others.59 Women are also more likely to experience drug-induced heart-rhythm abnormalities60 and the risk is highest during the first half of a woman’s cycle.61 This can, of course, be fatal.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Private motivations are, to a certain extent, irrelevant. What matters is the pattern.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Clare Castillejo, the specialist in governance and rights in fragile states, points out that 'women frequently bring issues to the peace-building agenda that male elites tend to overlook,' such as the inclusivity and accessibility of processes and institutions and the importance of local and informal spheres.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Specifically, we’ve been counting male bodies: when women did work in those industries, or had similar exposures, ‘they were often discounted from studies as “confounding factors”.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Canon formation is passed off as the objective trickle-down of the musical marketplace, but in truth it is as subjective as any other value judgment made in an unequal society.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“If the people taking decisions that affect all of us are all white, able-bodied men (nine times out of ten from America), that too constitutes a data gap – in the same way that not collecting information on female bodies in medical research is a data gap.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“It’s tempting to think that the male bias that is embedded in language is simply a relic of more regressive times, but the evidence does not point that way. The world’s ‘fastest-growing language’,34 used by more than 90% of the world’s online population, is emoji.35 This language originated in Japan in the 1980s and women are its heaviest users:36 78% of women versus 60% of men frequently use emoji.37 And yet, until 2016, the world of emojis was curiously male.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Boler developed her first product – Elvie, a smart pelvic-floor trainer – after realising that poor pelvic-floor health in women was ‘a massively hidden epidemic’: 37% of women suffer from pelvic-floor issues; 10% of women will need to have an operation at some point because of prolapse (where your organs start dropping through your vagina). This rises to 50% of women over fifty.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“According to the FDA, the second most common adverse drug reaction in women is that the drug simply doesn’t work, even though it clearly works in 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 Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Women have always worked. They have worked unpaid, underpaid, underappreciated, and invisibly, but they have always worked. But the modern workplace does not work for women. From its location, to its hours, to its regulatory standards, it has been designed around the lives of men and it is no longer fit for purpose.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“But the gig economy is in fact often no more than a way for employers to get around basic employee rights.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“It is because what is male is universal (and what is female is niche) that a film about the fight of British women for their right to vote is slammed (in the Guardian, no less) as ‘peculiarly hermetic’ for not covering the First World War – sadly proving that Virginia Woolf’s 1929 observation (‘This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room’) is still relevant today.59 It is why V. S. Naipaul criticises Jane Austen’s writing as ‘narrow’, while at the same time no one is expecting The Wolf of Wall Street to address the Gulf War, or Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard to write about anyone but himself (or quote more than a single female writer) to receive praise from the New Yorker for voicing ‘universal anxieties’ in his six-volume autobiography.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men