Invisible Women Quotes

“And so, because business leadership is still so dominated by men, modern workplaces are riddled with these kind of gaps, from doors that are too heavy for the average woman to open with ease, to glass stairs and lobby floors that mean anyone below can see up your skirt, to paving that’s exactly the right size to catch your heels. Small, niggling issues that aren’t the end of the world, granted, but that nevertheless irritate.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: 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. As computer scientists themselves say: ‘Garbage in, garbage out.”
― 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

“Dedication of Book: For the women who persist: keep on being bloody difficult”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“And so, because business leadership is still so dominated by men, modern workplaces are riddled with these kind of gaps, from doors that are too heavy for the average woman to open with ease, to glass stairs and lobby floors that mean anyone below can see up your skirt, to paving that’s exactly the right size to catch your heels.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“(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 problem is, women aren’t unencumbered. It’s just that the work they do is invisible.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Women are used to queueing when they go out. It’s frustrating and puts a dampener on their evening. No nice interval chit-chat about the show with friends over a drink, just dull, tedious lining up, occasionally leavened by the knowing eye rolls they share with their fellow waiting women.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Exposing 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.62”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“that when ‘brilliance’ is considered a requirement for a job, what is really meant is ‘a penis’.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Clearly, there is an injustice here. But all too often the blame is put on women themselves for feeling fearful, rather than on planners for designing urban spaces and transit environments that make them feel unsafe. And, as usual, the gender data gap is behind it all. The official statistics show that men are in fact more likely to be victims of crime in public spaces, including public transport.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“The solution to the sex and gender data gap is clear: we have to close the female representation gap.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“And so these differences go ignored, and we proceed as if the male body and its attendant life experience are gender neutral. This is a form of discrimination against women.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“The system is skewed towards electing men, which means that the system is skewed towards perpetuating the gender data gap in global leadership, with all the attendant negative repercussions for half the world’s population.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Eventually a consultant shook his head as Rachael told him how much she hurt and told her, ‘We have to send you home. There’s nothing wrong with you.’ But there was something wrong with her. Rachael was eventually diagnosed with endometriosis, a disease where womb tissue grows elsewhere in the body, causing extreme pain and sometimes infertility. It takes an average of eight years to diagnose in the UK,56 an average of ten years to diagnose in the US,57 and there is currently no cure. And although the disease is thought to affect one in ten women (176 million worldwide58) it took until 2017 for England’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence to release its first ever guidance to doctors for dealing with it. The main recommendation? ‘Listen to women.’59”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Perhaps of more urgent concern for women’s health is the 2016 discovery of a sex difference in how male and female cells respond to oestrogen. When researchers72 exposed male and female cells to this hormone and then infected them with a virus, only the female cells responded to the oestrogen and fought off the virus. It’s a tantalising finding that inevitably leads to the following question: how many treatments have women missed out on because they had no effect on the male cells on which they were exclusively tested?”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“And now that Britain is leaving the EU, the country is likely to fall even further below its European neighbours. Since 2008, the EU has been trying to extend its maternity-leave ruling to twenty weeks on full pay.71 This proposal was stuck in stalemate for years, and finally abandoned in 2015 thanks in no small part to the UK and its business lobby, which campaigned strenuously against it.72 Without the UK, the women of the EU will be free to benefit from this more progressive leave allowance.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Exposing 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.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“But although there is a lack of global data on ‘the exact nature, location and time’ of sexual crimes against women in public spaces, a growing body of research shows that women are in fact not being irrational.51 From Rio to Los Angeles men have raped women and girls on buses while drivers carry blithely along their routes.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“The history of humanity. The history of art, literature and music. The history of evolution itself. All have been presented to us as objective facts. But the reality is, these facts have been lying to us. They have all been distorted by a failure to account for half of humanity – not least by the very words we use to convey our half-truths. This failure has led to gaps in the data. A corruption in what we think we know about ourselves. It has fuelled the myth of male universality. And that is a fact.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“the female body is not the problem. The problem is the social meaning that 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

“when we are designing a world that is meant to work for everyone we need women in the room.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“One of the most important things to say about the gender data gap is that it is not generally malicious, or even deliberate. Quite the opposite. It is simply the product of a way of thinking that has been around for millennia and is therefore a kind of not thinking. A double not thinking, even: men go without saying, and women don’t get said at all. Because when we say human, on the whole, we mean man.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Cave paintings, for example, are often of game animals and so researchers have assumed they were done by men – the hunters. But new analysis of handprints that appear alongside such paintings in cave sites in France and Spain has suggested that the majority were actually done by women.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Факти беззаперечно свідчать: політичне середовище несприятливе для жінок. Це означає, що, хоча формально правила гри для всіх однакові, в реальності жінки-політкині опиняються в невигідному становищі порівняно з чоловіками. Так відбувається завжди, якщо будь-яка система створюється, не враховуючи гендерних факторів.”
― Керолайн Кріадо Перес, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

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

“We have to start recognising that the work women do is not an added extra, a bonus that we could do without: women’s work, paid and unpaid, is the backbone of our society and our economy. It’s about time we started valuing it.”
― 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.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“point-of-viewlessness’ of the white, male perspective. Because this perspective is not articulated as white and male (because it doesn’t need to be), because it is the norm, it is presumed not to be subjective. It is presumed to be objective. Universal, even.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Globally women do three times the amount of unpaid care work men do;42 according to the IMF, this can be further subdivided into twice as much childcare and four times as much housework.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men