What if you lived in a world where your phone was too big for your hand? Where doctors prescribed drugs that are wrong for your body–assuming they even believe you have the symptoms you claim? What if you hands are too small for a standard piano? What if you are 47% more likely to die in a car crash? What if hours upon hours of work you do is never recognized?
If the above sound familiar, chances are you are a woman living with the consequences of a gender data gap that fails to examine how women engage with the world.
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed For Men (2019) by Caroline Criado-Perez (find it on Bookshop) explores this gap and examines the numerous ways in which designed a world for the “average person” is usually shorthand to design for the average man–someone who rarely if ever faces the same challenges and situations an average woman might expect in comparable circumstances.
Criado-Perez breaks the book into parts Daily Life, The Workplace, Design, Going to the Doctor, Public Life, and When It Goes Wrong to unpack in various chapters examples of the gender data gap and the harm is causes to women both in everyday pay differences and discomforts (cold offices, too large phones) to more deadly consequences including cars not tested to evaluate women’s safety, personal protective equipment (PPE) fitted to male bodies, and more.
Criado-Perez reads the audio herself which I highly recommend if you are able to listen to books.
For a broad strokes overview of a lot of what is covered in this volume you can also check out this article at The Guardian which succinctly covers a lot of the points Criado-Perez makes in the book.
I especially like the time Invisible Women takes to examine and unpack what unpaid labor looks like for women. This book is the first time I have seen everything I do to manage my mom’s care contextualized as actual work. Which it absolutely is. This book is also the first time I feel like that kind of care has been framed as an unpaid job and not as an obligation or a burden.
Many of Criado-Perez’s points will be familiar rallying cries for feminists already familiar with some aspects of gender inequality and data bias. Regardless of your familiarity, the clear and straightforward presentation of information and data (or lack thereof) in Invisible Women will be eye opening for all readers. Highly Recommended.
Miss Print 