A Book Post

I'm not sure I read enough to make Monday book posts a semi-regular thing, but I've written about books that have been important to me in the past couple of weeks and I've got another one today. I don't remember how I stumbled across this book, but the title caught my eye, and I think the author writes about an important idea that we should all be aware of. But beware, this book might make you angry!

It's Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez. 

The author's basic premise is that data is important in our world today, for everything from economic development to healthcare, education, safety, and public policy. We rely on numbers to make important decisions and distribute resources. But there is a big problem with this. Much of the data we have collected and pay attention to does not take gender into account. It treats men as the default and women as atypical, so bias and discrimination are built into our systems. Women can pay tremendous costs for this bias, in time, money, and often with their lives. It sounds slightly dramatic, and I can picture some of the males that I know rolling their eyes at this, but while I was reading the examples that the author presented, I found myself in complete agreement. 

Some things are simple, but I've often thought that my phone was too large to feel really comfortable in my hand, and I can't recall that I've ridden in any car where the seat belts fit correctly or comfortably. They were most likely built around male dimensions, just like crash-test dummies. The fact that the safety equipment in cars does not take into account that women are shorter and lighter contributes to the horrendous statistic that when a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47 percent more likely to be seriously injured than a man and 17 percent more likely to die. I'm willing to bet that almost every woman has felt discounted by a male physician at some point in their lives, and possibly even had their symptoms diminished as just part of "being a woman." An important example is the real life-or-death consequences of a lack of medical research when it comes to the different symptoms of a heart attack in men and women. There are so many examples in the book that at times it can become overwhelming. 

Because there are so many instances in our daily lives of this gender bias, it can start to feel like some sort of conspiracy against women. I don't think that the author was intent on blaming males, but rather that many of the people that design products and do research have assumed that being human is the same as being male. She points out that most of us can not even imagine a problem until we or someone we care about experiences it. When she was pregnant, Sheryl Sandberg felt frustrated with how long she had to walk to and from the car park of the Google building. She brought her concerns to the Google co-founders and they were surprised that they had not seen this problem themselves, but neither had Sheryl before she was pregnant herself. 

It can also feel a bit depressing because there are no easy fixes for these problems. The author states that “The solution to the sex and gender data gap is clear: we have to close the female representation gap. When women are involved in decision-making, in research, in knowledge production, women do not get forgotten”.

So besides making me angry, overwhelmed, and slightly depressed, I'm still glad I read this book. It made me much more aware of the male-default world we are living in and how we all need a new perspective and more women involved in how we design the world.

Because I couldn't choose just one quote from the book, I'll leave you with three of them:

“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. Because when we say human, on the whole, we mean man.”

“Whiteness and maleness are silent precisely because they do not need to be vocalized. Whiteness and maleness are implicit. They are unquestioned. They are the default. And this reality is inescapable for anyone whose identity does not go without saying, for anyone whose needs and perspective are routinely forgotten. For anyone who is used to jarring up against a world that has not been designed around them.”

“We need a revolution in the research and the practice of medicine, and we need it yesterday. We need to train doctors to listen to women, and to recognise that their inability to diagnose a woman may not be because she is lying or being hysterical: the problem may be the gender data gaps in their knowledge. It’s time to stop dismissing women, and start saving them.”