Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Menby Caroline Criado Perez
isbn: 9781784706289
Publication Date: March 17, 2020
Pages: 410
Genre: Science
Publisher: Vintage Books
Imagine a world where...
· Your phone is too big for your hand
· Your doctor prescribes a drug that is wrong for your body
· In a car accident you are 47% more likely to be injured.If any of that sounds familiar, chances are you're a woman.
From government policy and medical research, to technology, workplaces, and the media. Invisible Women reveals how in a world built for and by men we are systematically ignoring half of the population, often with disastrous consequences. 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 profound impact this has on us all.
Discover the shocking gender bias that affects our everyday lives.
Here’s me, being all contrarian and swimming against the tide, but I could not finish this book. It engendered a level of page rage in me that I haven’t experienced since being forced to read Orwell, although, not so much that I’d like to flick a bic at it, so Orwell’s title remains safe.
Why the page rage? Because this book was sold to me as an academic look at the bias towards men in everyday living; if that’s what it was meant to be, it’s poorly written, with very little context, and next to no data to inform the author’s assertions. As a diatribe or manifesto, however, it’s an excellent piece of writing, full of snark and sarcasm and barely repressed vitriol, in spite of the forward where she claims to take an agnostic view, because so much of the bias is unintentional. Understand that I don’t make any claim that these bias don’t exist – I don’t disagree with her premise in the slightest. But I don’t like anyone of any gender that rages against the machine and does little else.
But the biggest reason for my page rage and my DNF is that I couldn’t help thinking as I read it that I’m not a female in Perez’s world. I’m too tall, my hands are too big, my seatbelt sits where it’s supposed to, but most damningly of all: I don’t have children. I’m not a care-taker or giver, and therefore I am irrelevant.
I have never encountered this attitude in my books before, and the irony is not lost on me that my first experience with it is in a feminist title.