Invisible Women

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Synopsis

Imagine a world where your phone is too big for your hand, where your doctor prescribes a drug that is wrong for your body, where in a car accident you are 47% more likely to be seriously injured, where every week the countless hours of work you do are not recognised or valued.

If any of this sounds familiar, chances are that you’re a woman.

Invisible Women shows us how, in a world largely built for and by men, we are systematically ignoring half the population. It exposes the gender data gap – a gap in our knowledge that is at the root of perpetual, systemic discrimination against women, and that has created a pervasive but invisible bias with a profound effect on women’s lives.

From government policy and medical research, to technology, workplaces, urban planning and the media, Invisible Women reveals the biased data that excludes women.

Award-winning campaigner and writer Caroline Criado Perez brings together for the first time an impressive range of case studies, stories and new research from across the world that illustrate the hidden ways in which women are forgotten, and the impact this has on their health and well-being. In making the case for change, this powerful and provocative book will make you see the world anew.

Synopses source: Goodreads

Review

Genre(s): Nonfiction, Science, Sociology
HB&W Rating: 5 stars
View on Goodreads, StoryGraph
Buy on Barnes & Noble, Amazon

This book floored me from the Forward. Talk about a hook! I’ve never consumed a nonfiction book as readily as I consumed this one. And the Forward was just the beginning. This book not only hooked me but held me all the way to the last word. In fact, in my group chat with my girlfriends, I was regularly blasting them with “oh my gosh, this book!”

I am not a person to take anything at face value, especially this day in age. If you want to convince me of something, you need hard facts and evidence. Criado Perez delivers on every front. Those things don’t typically make for a riveting read (or listen as in this case), but Criado Perez presents this data in a way that is both approachable and eloquent, turning facts and figures into something you actually want to keep reading and making the case for implicit bias against women undeniable.

The audiobook version is read by the author, who in my humble opinion sounds like a fast-talking Emma Watson. I definitely had to slow down my normal 1.5x speed so I could properly digest what I was hearing and make sense of the data. It’s clear in both the speed in which she speaks and the tone she takes that she is passionate about this topic, which went a long way to keeping me rapt. That said, I would consider this a fast-paced audiobook but if I were eyeball reading it, I would say it would likely be a slow-paced book due to all the facts and figures.

The book starts by describing the concept of the default male, the idea that men, specifically straight, white men, are the standard or norm in society and the world is designed around their bodies, experiences, and behaviors. She goes on to cite countless studies and examples where the data collected for products, systems, and policies are focused primarily, if not entirely, on men, resulting in a failure to accommodate women’s needs. This can lead to poorer living circumstances, poorer health, and dangerous goods and services for women. She acknowledges that the failure to include women in data collection is not necessarily done out of malice, but is often because it is too complicated or because of a complete oversight of the need to include women, circling back to the default male concept.

From medicines that don’t work correctly in women’s bodies, car seats and seatbelts that are built for male bodies, down to voice recognition technology that yields far more errors for women’s voices than it does for men’s or phone sizes designed for men’s larger hands making it harder for women to hold, Criado Perez shines a light on all the ways, big and small, that the gender data gap hurts women and by virtue humankind. There was even a crochet reference! In the Afterward, Criado Perez talks about the mathematician Daina Taimina, who solved a problem that had stumped male mathematicians for years to the point they were ready to give up. Her male counterparts had been endeavoring to create a model of the hyperbolic plane, unsuccessfully, until Taimina attended a workshop about the topic and noted how she could model it easily with crochet. All it took was a single woman’s perspective to solve this years-long problem. Why? Because crochet is a typically female hobby. Also, if you’re a crocheter, you should check out Taimina’s models! She took one look at the men’s paper model and said, I can do that better with crochet! Read about her experience here.

This book is smart, insightful, and surprisingly hard to put down. I loved everything about it and can’t recommend it enough!

Until next time,

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