Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

Such a disappointing read. For someone that claims to care as much about “data gaps” as she does, the massive gap in this book for people that are trans, gender fluid or non-binary is astonishing. Not to mention the very limited discussion of non-white races (only saw 2 mentions of black women in the entire book).

If you are a white cis woman that has no interest in intersectional feminism, then I guess this book might be for you. However, if you want an inclusive read that talks about trans and race issues as much as cis white women issues, then you can skip this, because you will finish the book with a very simplistic view of issues that are anything but simple.

If anything, she has managed to prove that just because a woman is included in the conversation, this does not guarantee that all women's views and issues will be represented in her speech.

The worst thing is that so many things were new to me, not because I didn't notice, but because I simply accepted them as the way things are.

Even the stupid crash test dummies? How hard can it be to make female crash test dummies?

Please, everyone regardless of gender, read this. It will make you mad at times but it's such an important book.

A must-read for everyone. This book illustrates very well that today's society's inequality is way more than “just” the pay gap. Being aware of inequalities and understanding it's effects is the first step for improving them. The second step is to learn from this book and take actions - trying to represent women more is one of the biggest challenges (that are possible to overcome!) in our society.

Factual and undeniable!

Made me realise sexism against women and the
underlying bias is much bigger and subtle than I thought it was.

Wonderful, informative book with all the stats and data required to persuade anyone to become a feminist. The book ranges from disruptive daily discrimination to life-threatening sexism, and is guaranteed to make you question your whole existence. I repeatedly had to put the book down and just sit and think for a minute because of how mind-boggling some of the facts were. I recommend this book to absolutely everyone and anyone - you won't regret it.

I very rarely write reviews, but I feel this book requires one. Reading this made me genuinely angry. As a young white male, beforereading this I was aware of some of the ways in which our world is not designed for women. The field in which I work is heavily male dominated, but there are some financial incentives in place to encourage more women, which I was somewhat resentful of. I agreed with more women in principle, but I didn't see why scholarships were the way to do that.

Now, however it is a different story. Reading this, Criado-Perez exposes the way in which our entire world is designed and structured to ignore wholesale the needs of 50% of our population. I was blown away by how insidious and ingrained this bias is - it pervades every aspect of what we do. This book made me ashamed of my own ignorance. It made me regret that I hadn't thought about this issue enough previously. After Criado-Perez shines a light on each issue, it makes it feel obvious, that it really was just staring me in the face and I couldn't see it. It made me angry that we allow this to happen.

I find Criado-Perez's work to be persuasive and meticulously researched. Every time I felt she would have been absolutely justified to make some snide comment about the blatant stupidity of the situation, she pulls up short and lets the data do the talking for her. This is one of the few books that I will be genuinely pushing my friends to read.

The rhythm is smooth, the chapters are grouped by subject matter and were very clear and consistent with the topics discussed.

I only made it 41% of the way thru because the news was so disheartening and, as of her writing, not much in the way of improvement; solutions identified or implementated.

It's a subject that I'll continue to follow.

We live in a world where ‘man' is the default - the default body, the default gender, the default occupation - while half of the population count as exception or minority. The resulting discrimination is either deeply ingrained in culture or happens without awareness because of the gender data gap. We simply don't know how policy decisions in general favor men over women, because we don't gender-segregate the data.

- Women die more often in hospitals because procedures and medication are primarily tested on men.
- Equally sized bathrooms forget about the fact that women are generally the ones taking care of children and elders.
- Women receives more injuries in car accidents, because their bodies are NOT scaled-down versions of male crash test dummies.
- Clearing the roads before pavements on snow-days, helps ‘men' drive to work, while interrupting unpaid female work and leading to higher numbers of female injuries.

Some of these might be obvious, other might only lead to a 10% advantage of men over women. But these percentages are steady and never tip the other way.

Criado-Perez does a phenomenal job at showing us a variety of examples from all fields of life, supported with substantial data and references, while also keeping the book an engaging read.

I have been very interested to read this book since the first time I read the author's article in the Guardian about the kind of gender data gap that exists in our world and how it affects daily life of women. But I kept putting it off because I knew it would only make me mad and sad. But I finally got my copy from the library and it made me feel everything I expected it to.

To start off with the kind of book this is, it's possible a casual reader will find it dry. It's very scientific and research oriented, chock full of information about studies and loads of statistics that are important to understand the gravity of the issues that the author is trying to discuss. This can also come across as a little repetitive because ultimately, whatever the topic the author is talking about in a chapter, the conclusion is kinda inevitable.

But it's the overall impact of these statistics and how it feels to read it as a woman that's impactful even though I'm not a very numbers oriented person. From something as small as the average setting of the air conditioning in a workplace to highly dangerous like misdiagnosis of life threatening heart attacks, the idea that everything is designed and researched keeping an average man in mind is appalling but also not surprising. Right from how we grew up referring to our species as “mankind”, a man has always been the default and we the women, the aberration. And with men at the helm of every power structure since centuries, it's no wonder that the whole world is designed in a way to make them safe and comfortable, and any noise made by women or institutions asking for more gender specific research and policy are dismissed because women, their bodies, their unpaid labor - everything about them is too different, too atypical. And it just boils my blood that the differences of half of the population are considered atypical and too complicated to be factored into making life impacting decisions, as if only one half of the world deserves to be represented.

The author covers a wide range of topics like how the massive amount of unpaid labor by women goes unnoticed and isn't considered when making any policy decisions regarding social service budgets or infrastructure planning that would benefit their myriad tasks; how much of the industrial or agricultural equipment is made in a way that exacerbates the chance of injury and long term issues for women; how most of the drugs and treatments that we use have never even been tested properly to see how differently they would affect a woman or are they even effective on a female body; how every field of employment including tech and academia is structured in a way that benefits men who can work along hours but never takes into account the massive amounts of additional responsibilities women have to fulfill; how cars are never crash tested with female dummies, particularly drivers which leads to a much higher risk of injury and death. And the list just goes on.

But what scares me the most is the rise of using big data and algorithms for making any important decisions in the current day and age. And as men are still the ones in power and the majority in development of these projects, and data actually pertaining to women doesn't exist - any algorithms developed only exacerbate their existing biases and will harm women in even more substantial ways as the usage of technology keeps increasing. It's hardly surprising that even algorithms and AI seem to associate the terms doctor, genius and scientist with men while women are confined to nurse, nanny and secretary.

To conclude, this is a very informative book and I think everyone who is interested to know how our world works and on what basis decisions are made everyday, should give this a try. It's not a binge reading kinda book, so it maybe easy to handle in smaller doses. And if you are a woman reading it, I promise it'll make you very very angry and exasperated and maybe even scared. And while the author keeps mentioning that many of the issues discussed can be mitigated by gathering more gender specific data, none of what is actually happening gave me hope that it's possible in the near future. So many of the problems could really be solved if the decision makers just listen to women, but are they really ready to?