Invisible Women Quotes

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

“Women tend to be smaller than men and have thinner skin, both of which can lower the level of toxins they can be safely exposed to.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“[...] [A] world increasingly reliant on and in thrall to data. Big Data. Which in turn is panned for Big Truths by Big Algorithms, using Big Computers. 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

“The US pay gap between mothers and married fathers is three times higher than the pay gap between men and women without children.51”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Women are always there to fill in the gap.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“When women are involved - it's better for humanity involved.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“A 2007 international study of 25,439 children’s TV characters found that only 13% of non-human characters are female (the figure for female human characters was slightly better, although still low at 32%).43 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.44”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“In 2013, British tennis player Andy Murray was lauded across the media for ending Britain’s ‘77-year wait’ to win Wimbledon, when in fact Virginia Wade had won it in 1977. Three years later, Murray was informed by a sports reporter that he was ‘the first person ever to win two Olympic tennis gold medals’ (Murray correctly replied that ‘Venus and Serena have won about four each’).61 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: Exposing 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.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“So a group of one hundred female teachers in Spanish would be referred to as ‘las profesoras’ – but as soon as you add a single male teacher, the group suddenly becomes ‘los profesores’. Such is the power of the default male.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“We have learned from so many mistakes in the past that women are at a greater risk for sexual assault and violence if they don’t have separate bathrooms,’ says Gauri van Gulik, Amnesty International’s deputy director for Europe and Central Asia.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“The threats come from a place of fear.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“I was one of those girls being taught, via a curriculum, a news media and a popular culture that were almost entirely devoid of women, that brilliance didn’t belong to me.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“The US is not alone in having a tax system that, by failing to account for gender, ends up discriminating against women.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“As we’ve seen, introducing properly paid maternity and paternity leave is an important step to achieving this, by increasing female paid employment and potentially even helping to close the gender pay gap60 – which is in itself a boon to GDP.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“In fact, the best job-creation programme could simply be the introduction of universal childcare in every country in the world.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“If this doesn’t sound like just another day in the office for you, be grateful that you’re not a health worker. Research has found that 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

“Women who had often done little more than manifest behaviours that were out of feminine bounds (such as having a libido) were incarcerated for years in asylums. They were given hysterectomies and clitoridectomies. Women were locked up for having even mild post-natal depression: the grandmother of a friend of mine spent her life in an asylum after throwing a scourer at her mother-in-law. At least one US psychiatric textbook, still widely in use during the 1970s, recommended lobotomies for women in abusive relationships.62”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“In a married couple’s joint tax return, the couple must ‘stack’ their wages. The higher earner (given the gender pay gap this is usually the man) is designated the ‘primary earner’, and their income occupies the lower tax bracket. The lower earner (usually the woman) becomes the ‘secondary earner’, and their income occupies the higher tax bracket. To return to our couple earning $60,000 and $20,000, the person earning $20,000 will be taxed on that income as if it is the final $20,000 of an $80,000 salary, rather than all she earns. That is, she will pay a much higher rate of tax on that income than if she filed independently of her higher-earning husband.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“But here I run into yet another data gap: the available research on whether car headrests have been designed to account for the female body is seemingly non-existent. This gap is hardly unexpected though: car design has a long and ignominious history of ignoring women. Men are more likely than women to be involved in a car crash, which means they dominate the numbers of those seriously injured in car accidents. But when a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured than a man, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured, 46 even when researchers control for factors such as height, weight, seat-belt usage, and crash intensity.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“But while Boler’s and Tin’s products may give women better information about their bodies, the same can’t be said for all new tech, wearable or otherwise. In the tech world, the implicit assumption that men are the default human remains king. When Apple launched its health-monitoring system with much fanfare in 2014, it boasted a ‘comprehensive’ health tracker. 15 It could track blood pressure; steps taken; blood alcohol level; even molybdenum (nope, me neither) and copper intake. But as many women pointed out at the time, they forgot one crucial detail: a period tracker. 16”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“The use of a ‘standard’ US male face shape for dust, hazard and eye masks means they don’t fit most women (as well as a lot of black and minority ethnic men). Safety boots can also be a problem. One female police officer told the TUC about trying to get boots designed for female crime scene investigators. ‘The PPE boots supplied are the same as those for males,’ she explains, ‘and the females find them uncomfortable, too heavy, and causing pressure on the Achilles tendons. Our uniform stores refused to address the matter.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Continuiamo ad affidarci agli studi sui lavoratori maschi e facciamo finta che vadano bene anche alle donne. E per "maschi" intendiamo, nello specifico, individui di razza bianca tra i venticinque e i trent'anni che pesano settanta chili. Ci siamo scelti un " Uomo di riferimento" dotato di superpoteri che gli permettono di rappresentare l'umanità intera. Solo che non è vero.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“US universities provide another example of how gender-blind leave policies can end up discriminating against women. US academics in the tenure-track system have seven years to receive tenure after getting their first academic job or they’re fired. This system is biased against women – especially women who want to have children, in part because the years between completing a PhD and receiving tenure (thirty to forty) coincide with the years these women are most likely to try for a baby.87 The result? Married mothers with young children are 35% less likely than married fathers of young children to get tenure-track jobs,88 and among tenured faculty 70% of men are married with children compared to 44% of women.89 Universities have done little to address this – and even those that have tried, have often done so in gender-blind ways that may end up exacerbating the problem they were trying to solve.90 In the 1990s and early 2000s, a number of US universities adopted what was intended as a family-friendly policy: parents would receive an extra year per child to earn tenure.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“The long-hours bias is particularly acute in Japan where it is not unusual for employees to stay in the office past midnight. This is in part because promotion tends to be based on hours worked, as well as the length of time an employee has spent at a company.119 It also doesn’t hurt to take part in ‘nomunication’, a play on the Japanese word for drinking (nomu), and the English word communication.120 Technically of course women can do all these things, but it’s much more difficult for them. Japanese women spend an average of five hours a day on unpaid labour compared to men who spend about an hour: it’s clear who will be free to impress the boss by staying in the office till late, followed by back-slapping drinks at a local strip club.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Companies also still seem to conflate long hours in the office with job effectiveness, routinely and disproportionately rewarding employees who work long hours.114 This constitutes a bonus for men. Statistician Nate Silver found that in the US, the hourly wage for those working fifty hours or more – 70% of whom are men – has risen twice as fast since 1984 as hourly pay for those working a more typical thirty-five to forty-nine hours per week.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“This system is biased against women – especially women who want to have children, in part because the years between completing a PhD and receiving tenure (thirty to forty) coincide with the years these women are most likely to try for a baby.87 The result? Married mothers with young children are 35% less likely than married fathers of young children to get tenure-track jobs,88 and among tenured faculty 70% of men are married with children compared to 44% of women.89”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“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

“It is why the England national football team page on Wikipedia is about the men’s national football team, while the women’s page is called the England women’s national football team,”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Multiple-choice aptitude tests which required ‘little nuance or context-specific problem solving’ focused instead on the kind of mathematical trivia that even then industry leaders were seeing as increasingly irrelevant to programming.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men