User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
Do not read this if you are suffering from high blood pressure, because it is absolutely rage inducing. However EVERYONE should read this at some point, it looks at things that I had never even considered, genuinely brilliant.
Second Read- so.... my Feminist bookclub have this on the list, so gave it a reread- just as goddamn rage inducing on the second read.
Rating: really liked it
Incredibly enlightening... and frustrating.
Rating: really liked it
I don't know who would possibly want a man's opinion on a book about the problems with male default bias, but... here's my review.
This is essentially a collection of statistics which entail how systems made by men and for men are minimizing and marginalizing the other 50% of the population. It does this by breaking the statistics down into chapter-spanning categories and creating a cohesive narrative to explain how all of these events are related and come back to the same basic problem.
I would recommend this book to any man who identifies as "not sexist." Because this makes it clear that even treatment that men believe is fair, un-sexist, and in the best interest of women, is still entirely subjective to their inherently male worldview. This book really shook up my views on what equal consideration for both men and women should look like. To anyone who thinks, "Why can't women be more like men," or that women should follow the exact same rules and be given the exact same treatment, read this book. You will develop a very thorough understanding of how, both now and historically, one-size-fits-all rules generally conflate what favors society as a whole with what favors the men who write them. Consequently, equal consideration to both men and women often requires unequal treatment, because, surprising as this may be to many men, women don't necessarily have the same needs.
I listened to the audiobook, which happens to be narrated by the author. This, I think, was a huge benefit, as the tones and inflections of the author convey the feeling and intended meaning of every word. This does, of course, mean that the author's (understandably) frustrated bias often comes through in the subtext, but I think that's important in order to glean not only the data and statistics, but an actual woman's perspective on them. It doesn't blur the actual data being presented, so I think the book is better for it.
My one complaint is that the information in this book was borderline overwhelming. A majority of the content entails half-hour cascades of one statistic after another, and I found that my proverbial eyes would glaze over occasionally and I would have to back up and try again. This is unfortunately inevitable, as there are only so many ways to convey this information to the reader. It also draws to light the sheer volume of the unconscious and invisible discriminations that happen every day, and I commend the author's ability to gather and present them so entirely.
Another side effect of the volume of information is that I don't feel particularly empowered to personally incite a change. I often found myself nodding along with most of the book, but I'm left feeling very unclear as to what to do next. I do, however, believe that I am armed with facts that I didn't have before, and I can use this knowledge to call out the injustices that occur within my sphere of influence.
As a whole, most of this book felt like a persuasive essay along the lines of, "You want proof that male privilege exists, that most systems of governance are biased toward men, and that women are literally dying because of it? Well here's your proof."
And the proof is appalling. Point taken.
Rating: really liked it
This is a really good comprehensive investigation of how a failure to account for gender based needs and requirements results in a bias towards cis men.
This is exactly why the casual cissexism embedded in it is so unfortunate and harmful.
Perez critics the continuous overlooking of women and women's needs, but is herself continuously overlooking trans and nonbinary people. She also keeps switching between sex and gender as interchangeable.
The most problematic claim is that a lack of sex-segregated bathrooms in some places increases rape and sexual assault. This is clearly focusing on the wrong aspect of a problem, while creating new problems for people who don't fit the norm. It is extremely disappointing in the context of shedding light on how women are seen as a deviation of the cis male norm, who is seen as default.
A critical book published in 2019 which deals with gender cannot ignore trans folks. It is simply not good enough to address cis people exclusively in such a comprehensive book.
Hope there will be a better, more inclusive edition soon, as it is highly important this kind of information be accessible for all.
Rating: really liked it
Simply said, if someone is in power, he tries to make a policy that meets his wishes and reflects the image of the society, company, etc he wants to build. This can be done in a direct, evil way by treating minorities, women, atheists, etc. with repression until imprisonment, torture and death if they misbehave and in these cases, it is an obvious crime.
It gets more subtle when bigotry and indoctrination kick in and lead to both politicians and managers that are not all direct, misogynic sexists. That would either fit the requirements their spin doctors taught them for winning the next election nor the code of conduct, corporate responsibility or whatever ethic mumbo jumbo the PR department has in planning.
Those white, rich man's minds have been poisoned by influences of faith, elitist thinking and inhumanity and many of them simply had no chance to get out of this vicious cycle, because it makes no difference if it is a cult, an extremist group or a billionaires club, they are all pretty misguided and pitiful.
The worst case, both for women and for the possibility to real change, are those who believe that they are doing the right thing and would call themselves emancipated but keep on pushing laws and employment contracts that discriminate against women indirectly and perfidiously. They don´t give any kind of appreciation, allowance or financial help to mothers without whose immense pain and effort each nation would die out because no kids would be born anymore.
They don´t give a dollar for all the unpaid work, the caring for toddlers and especially care-dependent elders and without this, the health system would simply collapse.
There are medicinal research areas that are taught, shaped and mainly tested on man. It is a simple economic reason why men are preferred in all kinds of long going and very expensive admission procedures for drugs because they don´t get pregnant and have no staggering hormone levels. The result is that many side effects may cause much more harm in women because they haven´t been tested in such large numbers or anyway.
The same questions plops up with the harmfulness of, well, anything, like any kind of food additive, environmental toxins and the regulatory limits. Tested and found harmless for men with an official quality seal. Tested with younger and older women with different hormone levels, muscle mass and probably pregnancy? "Nope, would have been too difficult and expensive, sorry, nobody does that, probably in Amazon wonderland, but not here." There are no numbers available regarding the side effects of all drugs, environmental destruction and food risks, but let's say that there may be an unknown number of women that would have profited from clean 50 male/ 50 female test series instead of dying.
I find it really difficult to decide if the simple, logical, economic greed is more disgusting than the reminiscences and aftermaths of all those very old, sexist writings by weird old men. Those two axes of evil certainly exponentiate each other, learn from each other and produce the right social and consumer products for him who unofficially still deems women inferior.
In design, the number of toilets is a prime example of male domination. This is not deadly, in contrast to using crash test dummies that are normed as male or giving free condoms and restricting female contraception, but an instance of simply forgetting that there is another gender out there. Or designing public transport in a way that makes it impossible to do more than just manly things like driving from home to work and back and not caring about things like groceries, kids and stuff. It would also be more expensive to tailor clothes that fit better at hips and breasts, so it simply isn´t done.
As much talk as there is about gendering, sexual harassment, eating disorders, etc. so less is heard about those topics in mainstream media. Those would probably bash the religious groups as long as the broadcast corporation doesn´t belong to the Kraken. But they wouldn´t even touch the economic problems with pincers and gloves, cause they all are very dependent on the companies advertising their products.
There are no men in general to blame, but a society and upbringing that makes them so blind to the different necessities of half of the population that their work, publications and statistics get highly subconscious biased, onesided, dangerous and often even deadly, as seen in medicine, especially pharmacy, one of the sickest examples of misleading science I have ever seen, especially because it is so obvious and could be easily prevented.
"This is a men biased world", one could sing and yes, the so-called strong gender built the whole world with a focus on efficiency, profit or prestige and didn´t listen, care or even think of the needs of all their wives, mothers, sisters and daughters. And they inherited this behavior to their sons instead who live in a world of big data with algorithms, AI and immense potential to use all those tools to improve life for all people, but instead, as daddy taught them, they simply ignore, forget or, the easiest way, don´t even evaluate the data about women to jump in their money storage instead and let gold coins softly recoil from their bald head (from daddy too) producing a hollow sound from a skull just filled with ....
By empowering women, making a strict law to make half of each government and management leadership ranks half female, make all research transparent with tools like blockchain and dumping direct and indirect sexism in the trash can of history right next to all the other sick ideas out of white men's heads.
This is another great book about the topic:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...
I like to talk about WEIRD and the topic is a prime example of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychol...
A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real-life outside books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%2...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancip...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violenc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminiz...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employm...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereot...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intra-h...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unpaid_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valuati...
Categories
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...
Rating: really liked it
This is a book about unconscious bias. It's not about men deliberately excluding women when considering things like uniforms, city travel, or treatments for medical conditions ... although it's true that once the bias is pointed out, it's not always top of the list to make safety adjustments. And that's really one of the most important points of the book: it endangers women if you design and build the world without considering women's needs and habits. Women are built in a particular way, and they are socially conditioned in a particular way, and they're treated in a particular way - comparing all this to men's situation is useful only to a certain extent because it is so easy for everyone to slip into the mindset that men are the default human, and women are, as the author notes, "niche". We design things for people, but really only think of men and their needs because - and companies and designers are open about this - women are harder, with our non-linear bodies and hormones meaning that more sophisticated (and more expensive) research needs to be done.
We also design things for men because men are the designers for the most part. They have no experience being women of course, and don't really look into it because, for the most part, it doesn't occur to them. If you're a woman, just think about all the books you've read through the years about male experience, with a male protagonist, and presented - or even taught - to you as "human experience". We do it all the time, and I read books regularly with male protagonists sorting out their stuff (if you follow me here, you'll see plenty of ex-Navy-SEALS running around). But women's experience in novels and poems? That's women's experience only. My point here is that while women are trained to identify with both men and women, and indeed possibly favor the male experience, men aren't trained to look at - or think about - women's experience.
Criado Perez has really done her research, but what could have been a very statistic-heavy book is in fact very readable, engaging, and so enlightening. The Introduction should really be published on its own - it's magnificent. This is a book to buy and keep, and get some of those sticky notes because you'll want to mark pages for future reference!
Rating: really liked it
There is so much relevant, important, fascinating, and deeply troubling information here about the ways in which the world, in big and small ways, is built for white men. BUT. I have to give this book two stars for its appalling erasure of trans and nonbinary people. The words themsleves (transgender, nonbinary, gender non-conforming) do not even appear in this book. Not once. Nor does the word cisgender. In a book about the ways that a lack of data renders women invisible, and the ways that invisibility literally costs women their lives, it is, frankly, inexcusable that Criado-Perez does the exact same thing to trans people. In her world, apparently, trans and nonbinary people do not exist.
This does not have to be a book about trans issues. It is not a book about race, and yet, Criado-Perez includes some analysis of race in the various scenarios she examines. It is not a book about class, and yet she also includes analysis of the way class affects the various data biases she examines. There is very little analysis of queer sexualities, AND YET she manages to precede almost all the data she gives about married couples with the word "heterosexual", which at least renders queer people visible. But she does not give this same basic consideration to trans and nonbinary people.
There's a whole chapter about the accessibility of public restrooms, in which she does not consider the ways that access to restrooms specifically affects trans and nonbinary folks. There's a whole bit about gendered language, and the ways it shapes how he think and act (which was totally relevant and important) that does not even CONSIDER how gendered language might and does affect (and harm) people who fall outside the gender binary. There's a chapter on how public transit and its infrastructure (bus stations, subway stops, etc.) are not designed with women in mind. She goes into the ways in which various infrastructures are unsafe for women, and the ways in which women experience violence in public places. But she does not once mention specific violence toward trans women, or how likely trans women are to be the targets of violence.
I'd read a few reviews before I started this, so I was prepared to be upset by it, but I decided to read it anyway because I found the subject matter as a whole so compelling. But Criado-Perez's failure to even mention the existence of trans people, and people outside the gender binary, just made it nearly impossible for me to take anything she said seriously. This happens a lot in nonfiction and I'm always exhausted and angered by it. Sometimes the oversights are small enough that I still feel the book has some merit. But in a book ALL ABOUT GENDER, and specifically the ways in which ignoring gender leads to serious harm--it's just too big an erasure to get past. The irony is heartbreaking.
Do better.
Rating: really liked it
This is a long-delayed, hugely important book, which people of ALL genders should be reading. Sadly, more people seem to be discussing it than have actually read it. It's not just about crash test dummies, or voice recognition software, or airline seats, or toilet queues, or medical research. It's about the systematic way in which data on women has been ignored, neglected and downright erased, whereas data on men is not only abundant, but recognized as the universal norm. The needs of the "average person" boil down to the needs of the *average man*, and though not all men *are* average, there's still an enduring attitude that male is a default position and female, an aberration. I found myself recognizing so many situations depicted in this book - things I thought that only I had experienced, but which turn out to be common to pretty much all women, whether they're aware of it or not. Read this, and you'll start noticing inequalities you never even considered before. And you'll notice them everywhere.
Rating: really liked it
Invisible Women is the story of what happens when we forget to account for half of humanity. It is an exposé of how the gender data gap harms women when life proceeds, more or less as normal. In urban planning, politics, the workplace. It is also about what happens to women living in a world built on male data when things go wrong. When they get sick. When they lose their home in a flood. When they have to flee that home because of war.
My husband is not a knuckle-dragging caveman, but he
is a middle-aged, white, Canadian male, totally oblivious to the privileges afforded to him by our society (admittedly, many of those privileges are granted to me as well). We were in the car, listening to the radio over the summer, and “It's a Man's World” began to play. Dave chuckled and said, “Boy, things have changed, eh?” And I replied: “And boy, have they stayed the same.” And this stunned him. “You can't believe that,” he said. “Here's a story for you then. A young girl at work...” I cut him off. “Young girl? What, is she eight or nine?” And then he was flustered. “You
know what I mean. I'm just trying to tell you a nice story.” He paused like he was going to punish me by not telling me the story after all but soon continued: “Rebecca, who is probably twenty-five and on my team, was asked by HR to assemble some slides for a presentation on the industry and she asked me if she could present it to me first. She reads off the first slide, which is about the gender pay gap, and before she went to the next slide she frowned, looked at her notes, and said, 'This is probably American data.' Because she
knows that there's no gender pay gap in our office, and if anything, there are more women than men in senior positions, and more women on a management track.” He looked proud of himself – and he should, I know that this non-caveman, the father of my daughters, is not a sexist or a chauvinist – but still I pushed my point: “If this had been a twenty-five year old male in your story, would you have started off with, 'This young boy at work...?' Because that's what hasn't changed, and no matter what you consciously do to promote the careers and the welfare of the women you know, it's the subconscious biases that are harder for us to navigate because you don't even know what you're doing that's holding us back.” Dave, “shocked” to discover I felt this way, wanted more details about these “subconscious biases” of which I accused him. And while women
know that the systems are rigged against us, it's hard to be specific – until now. Caroline Criado Perez has assembled a collection of shocking and eye-opening stories in Invisible Women, very clearly making the point that men, for the most part, aren't consciously trying to hold women back; for the most part, men don't think about women, and the fact that our needs might differ from their own, at all. From medicine to safety devices to public transit, everything is designed and tested to suit the typical male's body and needs, with women's very different bodies and needs considered niche or secondary or “the same but smaller”. It is mostly about the gender data gap: the fact that nearly all studies and research, even medical testing, isn't disaggregated by sex, so there is next to no data about how
anything in our societies, which tend to be designed by men for men, affects women differently than men. And where this is no data, a thing – in this case, women – is in effect invisible to those who do the planning – in most cases, men. Informative, shocking, and usefully prescriptive,
Invisible Women is a must read for men and women everywhere.
The specifics are fascinating – dysmenorrhea (extremely painful periods) was found to be completely alleviated without side effects in the early stages of Viagra testing, but its manufacturer stopped that direction of testing when it found the drug's more profitable application; women in police forces and armies around the world are forced to wear male body armour that doesn't account for breasts and hips and therefore leaves them vulnerable to attack and more prone to workplace injury (a female police officer in Spain was disciplined for acquiring her own made-for-women bulletproof vest); NGOs tend to ask the male heads of household what is required in the aftermath of a disaster, which has, more than once, led to the construction of homes without kitchens in them – but it would take a book-length review to list everything fascinating in this book. I'll just add some of Criado Perez's conclusions regarding the invisibility of women in public planning:
When planners fail to account for gender, public spaces become male spaces by default. The reality is that half the global population has a female body. Half the global population has to deal with the sexualised menace that is visited on that body. The entire global population needs the care that, currently, is mainly carried out, unpaid, by women. These are not niche concerns, and if public spaces are truly to be for everyone, we have to start accounting for the lives of the other half of the world. And, as we've seen, this isn't just a matter of justice; it's also a matter of simple economics.
The invisibility of women in the workplace:
Women have always worked. They have worked unpaid, underpaid, underappreciated, and invisibly, but they have always worked. But the modern workplace does not work for women. From its location, to its hours, to its regulatory standards, it has been designed around the lives of men and is no longer fit for purpose. The world of work needs a wholesale redesign – of its regulations, of its equipment, of its culture – and this redesign must be led by data on female bodies and female lives.
And the invisibility of women in the political sphere:
The data we already have makes it abundantly clear that female politicians are not operating on a level playing field. The system is skewed towards electing men, which means that the system is skewed towards perpetuating the gender gap in global leadership, with all the attendant negative repercussions for half the world's population. We have to stop willfully closing our eyes to the positive discrimination that currently works in favour of men. We have to stop acting as if theoretical, legal equality of opportunity is the same as true equality of opportunity. And we have to implement an evidence-based electoral system that is designed to ensure that a diverse group of people is in the room when it comes to deciding on the laws that govern us all.
The first step to true equality of opportunity and outcome would be to close this gender data gap – wherever there is evidence of inequality, decent people do tend to advocate for change – but this will take more women in decision-making roles (it's disheartening to read of the many researchers who can't get grants to study issues that affect only women as they are too “niche”) and that takes time. I remember back in the 80s my mother complaining that the medical world tended to treat women like small men instead of maybe, just maybe, something not the same as men. So, yeah, that was a long time ago and it's still a man's world.
Rating: really liked it
Q:
Most of recorded human history is one big data gap. Starting with the theory of Man the Hunter, the chroniclers of the past have left little space for women’s role in the evolution of humanity, whether cultural or biological. Instead, the lives of men have been taken to represent those of humans overall. When it comes to the lives of the other half of humanity, there is often nothing but silence.
And these silences are everywhere. Our entire culture is riddled with them. Films, news, literature, science, city planning, economics. The stories we tell ourselves about our past, present and future. They are all marked – disfigured – by a female-shaped ‘absent presence’. This is the gender data gap.
The gender data gap isn’t just about silence. These silences, these gaps, have consequences. They impact on women’s lives every day. The impact can be relatively minor. Shivering in offices set to a male temperature norm, for example, or struggling to reach a top shelf set at a male height norm. Irritating, certainly. Unjust, undoubtedly.
But not life-threatening. Not like crashing in a car whose safety measures don’t account for women’s measurements. Not like having your heart attack go undiagnosed because your symptoms are deemed ‘atypical’. For these women, the consequences of living in a world built around male data can be deadly.
One of the most important things to say about the gender data gap is that it is not generally malicious, or even deliberate. Quite the opposite. It is simply the product of a way of thinking that has been around for millennia and is therefore a kind of not thinking. A double not thinking, even: men go without saying, and women don’t get said at all. (c) Oh, wow. This is a quite good power start to this book.
And it gets only better as it proceeds! Basically, it's very difficult to make men to see life through a prism of female life. The reverse is a bit easier since women anyway do a lot of historically 'male' tasks these days.
So, it's either get everyone to practice extreme empathy or invite mixed companies to do tasks that require mixed perspectives. Now, people still are finding it challenging and it keeps leading to impressive flip-floppy results in a number of spheres.
Great in-depth research do on how economics benefits from taking into account the needs of women.
Q:
… sex is not the reason women are excluded from data. Gender is. (c)
Q:
Private motivations are, to a certain extent, irrelevant. What matters is the pattern. What matters is whether, given the weight of the data I will present, it is reasonable to conclude that the gender data gap is all just one big coincidence. (c)
Q:
It is why a 2015 study of multiple language Wikipedias found that articles about women include words like ‘woman’, ‘female’ or ‘lady’, but articles about men don’t contain words like ‘man’, ‘masculine’ or ‘gentleman’ (because the male sex goes without saying). (c)
Q:
‘You’ve played games as a blue hedgehog. As a cybernetically augmented space marine. As a sodding dragon-tamer. [. . .B]ut the idea that women can be protagonists with an inner life and an active nature is somehow beyond your imaginative capacities?’ …
It should be easier to imagine yourself as a woman than as a blue hedgehog. But on the other hand she’s also wrong, because that blue hedgehog has one particularly important similarity with male players, even more so than species alignment, and that is that Sonic the hedgehog is male. We know this because he isn’t pink, he doesn’t have a bow in his hair, and he doesn’t simper. (c)
Some stuff is, naturally, idiotic, like it always manages to be in these books:
Q:
More recently, a 2017 analysis of ten introductory political-science textbooks found that an average of only 10.8% of pages per text referenced women (some texts were as low as 5.3%). The same level of male bias has been found in recent analyses of Armenian, Malawian, Pakistani, Taiwanese, South African and Russian textbooks. (c) Political science? Well, if women have been barred from politics for a larger part of history, what should the authors refer to? While the question at hand is serious, the discussion should not become irrational. We should stick to the facts not demand that women are invented into textbooks.
The author lists a bunch of instances when a woman's work was attributed to a man. Which, she argues, made women's breakthroughs so much harder to see and to attribute correctly. Love this part.
Q:
For most of history, if women were allowed to compose at all, it was for a private audience and domestic setting. Large orchestral works, so crucial for the development of a composer’s reputation, were usually off limits, considered ‘improper’. Music was an ‘ornament’ for women, not a career. (c)
Street design and transportation gender planning - now, that's another extremely important consideration!
Q:
There is a tendency (as ever) to blame the women rather than male-biased design. But male-biased design is in fact exactly what the problem is here. (c)
Q:
when we don’t collect and, crucially, use sex-disaggregated data in urban design, we find unintended male bias cropping up in the most surprising of places. (c)
Q:
A 2016 study found that Indian women who use fields to relieve themselves are twice as likely to face non-partner sexual violence as women with a household toilet. (c)
Rating: really liked it
Had a hard time reading this, skipped, scanned, got bored with the ranting and the constant portaying women as victims and mothers. They are many times, but especially in western countries they have and can do more than is suggested in this book. Underwhelming. And yes: I am a feminist. ♀️
Rating: really liked it
When I got a free copy of
Invisible Women (shout out to the LPB Berlin) I was really excited. Many of my friends raved about this book which exposes the gender gap in scientific data and how the resulting gap in knowledge causes the continuous and systematic discrimination against women, creating an invisible bias that has a profound impact on women's lives.
Unfortunately, I can't join their choir of praise. Whilst this book had an interesting subject matter, I had some major problems with it:
1 - Not even a mention of trans womenFor a book claiming to zoom in on "half of the Earth's invisible population" and having gender as its main focus, it's almost comical that Criado Pérez completely ignores trans women. They're simply not part of her book. No stats on the violence trans women in particular face, or on their income and living situations.
I don't know if Criado Pérez ever responded to the criticism she received for not including trans women in her book on fucking women of all people but it reeks of transphobia.
2 - No focus on marginalised womenEven more appalling was the lack of inclusion of BIWOC, disabled women and women living in the Global South. Similarly to trans women, they were not part of this narrative. The reason I found this more appalling was the fact that Criado Pérez actually acknowledged their lack of presence in her book but gave the lacklustre excuse that "I would often try and find stats for black women or for disabled women and I just couldn't." UUUMMM, EXCUSE ME, MISS? Your book was published in fucking 2019, how come Black women, for example, have published books like Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present or Women, Race & Class for decades now.
I totally get that stats on cis white able-bodied women are easier to find and more readily available in quantity, but it's not like there isn't a single stat on BIWOC or disabled women that you could've included. DO BETTER!
In general,
Invisible Women reeks of "whiteness = standard". Criado Pérez included some quotes in this book that made me really uncomfortable and furious at the same time, e.g. "We call the 18th century the century of 'Enlightenment', although it
expanded the rights of men, it 'narrowed' those of women, because they were forbidden to control their property and income and were excluded from higher education and professional training." Oh, really? The 18th century expanded the rights of ALL men? ALL men were now able to control their property and income? Interesting. I must've slept through my history lesson then.
Whenever Criado Pérez says "men" in this book, she means "white men". And that sucks. Because she often juxtaposes the condition of "men" with those of "women", and thus presents a distorted picture, e.g. when she says that women in the US earn less than men, she doesn't state that white women earn more than Black men. Her generalising statements do her cause no good. She comes across as ignorant and her book as lazily researched.
3 - The worst fucking structureWhat can I say? I just hated the structure of this book. Seriously, who edited this? Why have these very specific chapter titles like "At the workplace" or "Visit to the doctor" when you're not going to primarily talk about these topics in these chapters? It made no damn sense.
Overall, I wasn't the biggest fan of giving stat after stat after stat but it became downright impossible to retain the important information of each chapter because everything was so disorganised and disjointed.
4 - Facts? What are facts? When reading nonfiction, especially on a topic you don't know that much about, you always have to trust that the author will provide you with facts and sources you can trust. Unfortunately, regarding the topics I had prior knowledge of, mainly the ones focusing on gender and language, I was shocked to see that Criado Pérez included some research that is highly contested, if not fully refuted. For example, she cites that there is a correlation between gender neutral language and gender equality, stating that countries with English as their official language have a higher gender equality than countries with gender-specific languages like Germany.
You don’t need a degree to see that this is absolute bullocks. Countries like Sweden, Switzerland and Norway are among the most gender equal, whereas countries like South Africa or “even” the US aren't shining examples of gender equality. Not sure what Criado Pérez was thinking but it left me wondering if she included other stats as “facts” that can simply be refuted if one was knowledgeable on the subject.
So all in all,
Invisible Women is not a book I'd recommend!
Rating: really liked it
4.5 ☆ rounded up because Everyone should read this book!you don’t have to realize you’re being discriminated against to in fact be discriminated against
Caroline Criado-Perez tackles an immense topic and she succeeds in demonstrating that women have been rendered invisible by virtue of cultural norms that men sometimes have unthinkingly and at other times deliberately have adopted. By excluding women from consideration, not only does all of humanity lose out on potentially transformative insights but women are exposed to greater harm ranging from injury and up to death. If you are female, your first response may be to look at your life and believe “not me!” because you’re surrounded by respectful people of both sexes. If you are male, then I’m going to appeal to your innate sense of fairness and decency to consider reading
Invisible Women.
Let’s start with the indispensable cell phone. Chances are good that you have a smartphone since you’re on Goodreads / social media. Have you noticed that the design of these phones have increased to the point that you need both hands to phone and to operate the camera feature (which are both features you’d likely require during an emergency) and that the phone is too big for most of your pockets (if you’re even wearing clothing with pockets)? The males would be more likely than females to say “no difference, no big deal.” Or have you noticed that you prefer either compact cars or SUVs which seat you up very high because both provide better sightlines and visibility from the driver’s seat than the large family sedan that your parents probably drove? I know that I do.
What both questions have in common is that the smartphone and the car were designed with the primary user assumed to be male, who has larger hands and who is taller on average than females. So even if you said, “yeah, sure,” you likely have shrugged them off as minor inconveniences.
But these examples are just the tip of the iceberg. The internet and the technological capabilities of modern life have created many benefits and efficiencies. Companies have had decades to collect user data (location, internet traffic patterns, demographics, etc) and industries have compiled massive corpora (databases of voices, text, and images). We’re now in the age of Big Data, with programmers designing algorithms to sift through the oceans of data. But what if those algorithms are based on corpora predominantly featuring male voices, male images, and adjectives that are culturally favorable to males over females? As programmers are wont to say, “garbage in, garbage out.” This means that whatever bias exists in the corpora will be amplified by the time that algorithm completes its search. This could explain why 30 percent of resumes a company receives are the lucky minority to be seen by human eyes. I sincerely doubt that of the 30 percent of resumes which are seen by humans that they equally represent the two sexes.
You may then think that you’re not job-hunting and you’ve got a great professional network anyways. But there’s more. Drugs may not work for you if you’re female. There was a 2004 study by Sherry Marts and Sarah Keitt that demonstrated that differences between the two sexes go down to every tissue and organ system in the human body, as well as in the “prevalence, course, and severity” of the majority of common human diseases. Despite the National Institute of Health Revitalization Act of 1993 making it illegal not to include females in federally-funded clinical trials, a 2015 federal government audit of FDA revealed that 40 percent of documents still did not specify the sex of participants. So maybe that’s why you have to try many drugs and different dosages before finding medical relief.
Oh, females also are more likely to die or suffer longer because their medical issues present symptoms differently compared with men. Doctors, for the most part, have not been trained to account for these biological differences. Since 1989, cardiovascular disease is the number one health cause of death for women in the US. Perhaps you’ve heard the advice to take a low-dose of aspirin daily to help lower your chances of getting heart disease? The truth is that advice is effective for men, not for women who may actually be harmed by following that guidance, as the American Heart Association pointed out in 2016.
Finally, there is the statistic released by a 2015 McKinsey study: “globally, 75 percent of unpaid work is done by women." But you already knew that, didn’t you?
Getting concerned yet? Find out more, by reading
Invisible Women. It is easy to read and there are no tables of statistics or graphs. Much as I would have really liked graphical representation of statistics, the lack of comprehensive and historical data supports her basic premise of the book - women are invisible. I personally also would have wanted more depth than breadth for not all of her points were made equally strong.
For those of you who already know this,
Invisible Women is still worth reading as Criado-Perez provides some coverage of women in other parts of the world as well as suggestions for how to change this systemic problem.
Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.
~ Simone de Beauvoir
Rating: really liked it
Eye opening!!! So interesting to see how deep inequality really goes systemically. I mean you know it does, but I've never looked at it through the eyes of all of this data before, or lack there of. It discusses a lot of topics that are not generally talked about when people are talking about gender inequality. Areas that you have never even thought about; for example things like snow removal, public transportation, how public bathrooms are designed. Some of the things discussed are life threatening, like the symptoms for a heart attack or the use of crash test dummies, but some are less so. However, when all of this data to all of these situations are added up, it can become very life threatening as it leads to a very large gap between genders. Very interesting.
Also, keep in mind that although this book has many stories added in to make it quite readable, it is still a book based around data. I do think it is a very important read though as it discusses data and solutions that otherwise would likely not be discussed as they are so ingrained into our society we usually don't even notice. There is no one person making these rules that we can just blame and fight against; there are so many subconscious biases in all areas of our lives, and this book really points out so many. Definitely recommend as it is a great starting place to identifying the areas that need improvement.
Rating: really liked it
Incredibly interesting!
