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Caroline Criado-Perez has devoted her activist career to amplifying the voices of marginalized females in the public space. She was an instrumental part of campaigns to rework Twitter’s online abuse policies, to get a female historical figure on the back of British banknotes, and to install a statue of a female suffragette in Parliament Square in London. Her recent book, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, she tackles the issue of data collection’s historic ignorance of female subjects. She exposes the large scale absence of gendered data in a variety of fields such as city planning, public transportation, medicine, and even vehicular safety.
Criado-Perez’s foundational assertion is a simple one: in our society, the male perspective and body are the norm, and the female existence merely represents a deviation from that norm. In the book, she explores the way that this belief has extended into virtually every area of human life, presenting a variety of still-existing inequalities. Criado-Perez includes everyday examples of how gender inequality is caused by a lack of female data—iPhones are designed for larger male hands, futuristic offices with glass staircases make skirt-wearing virtually impossible, public transportation is scheduled around traditional male travel times—before extending these concerns to their potentially life-threatening implications. For example, women are 50 percent more likely to have their heart attacks misdiagnosed because their symptoms look different, women are 2-3 times more likely to experience whiplash in car accidents because car seats are constructed with male body sizes in mind, and the lack of research into female health has made childbirth dangerous, especially for black mothers. These dangers to women are only exacerbated in underdeveloped countries where women without access to public toilets are assaulted when trying to relieve themselves, or when they’re waiting for the bus to arrive.
Criado-Perez also points out how society refuses to value the amount of unpaid care work that is almost entirely done by women, despite the massive contribution to GDP that it represents. Care of elders and children represents a large portion of many women’s schedules, and thus it represents a unique challenge to women entering the gainful workforce. Aside from the obvious gender pay gap, Criado-Perez tackles the ways in which unpaid care work has further unbalanced the gender dynamic in all types of professional fields. The effects are so far-reaching that it is near impossible to imagine a remedy.
But Criado-Perez wastes no time pointing fingers, she does not ascribe these inequalities to some mass misogynist conspiracy. Rather, she points out the ways in which leaving women out of rooms in which crucial decisions are being made can cause these massive data gaps in how public policies, medicines, and safety measures differently affect women. She makes the simple but powerful assertion that the only way to begin to remedy these dangerous inequalities is to listen to women. In a political age when unsubstantiated inflammatory claims and finger-pointing have become the norm, Criado-Perez’s meticulously researched and balanced account of the far-reaching effects of biased data feels incredibly refreshing and compelling.
Criado-Perez explained her initial inspiration for this book in an NPR interview, stating, “We’re used to the idea that women aren’t represented in our culture and media and politics and films. The idea that this extended to what was sold as objective – the idea of medicine and science, that they were also underrepresenting women – was just mind-blowing to me.” Invisible Women is an interesting meta-text in that it is a part of the solution is poses to the problem it is addressing; it is an effort to give voice to those silenced by the gendered data gap, a stab at filling that data gap with statistics. An informative text demands further exploration into its subject matter.