My office decided to start a diversity-themed book club and the first book they chose made me so angry, I had to put it down the first night and limit myself to a few pages a day. That book was Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez. In it, Criado Perez unveils the shocking ways that a world designed for men by men systematically discriminates against and endangers women. She proves beyond a doubt how the lack of women in leadership positions within corporations, male-dominated fields, and governing bodies not only leads to products that just don’t work for women, it kills them. Let me say that again. The uneven distribution of both genders in leadership positions around the world is not only unjust, it leads to the untimely deaths of many.
Lack of Data on Women
In Invisible Women, Criado Perez first proves to us that the world treats men as the “default human”. We substitute the word “man” for “human”, build products for men, and test products only on men because until recently corporate leaders (mostly men) thought of women as simply “small men”. Without including women in studies, test cases, and decision-making, we lack data around how women react to just about everything. Criado Perez meticulously examines how this lack of data on women’s lives, bodies, and experiences leads to products, policies, and entrenched mindsets that continue to prioritize the male as the default. From ill-fitting personal protective equipment to medical trials that underrepresent female participants to urban planning that ignores women’s safety concerns, the “gender data gap” has widespread and often dangerous ramifications.
What makes Invisible Women so powerful is the sheer breadth of examples Criado Perez provides across diverse facets of life – the workplace, public spaces, household chores, driving, entrepreneurship, and more. Her rigorous research illuminates the myriad ways gender biases are quite literally built into the fabric of our societies. This book reminded me so much of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, which hits you over the head so hard with evidence that we live within a caste system in the US, that you can’t continue to see the world around you any other way. Criado Perez’s Invisible Women will never allow me to unsee the patriarchy as an institution that needs to be obliterated…yesterday.
What Goes Wrong When We Don’t Design For Women?
So many things go wrong when we ignore or purposefully don’t include women in decision-making and testing. Many of us have heard about the fact that crash test dummies for cars are built around the average 150-pound male body. That’s a size that doesn’t really fit most men, let alone women. As a result, women are much more likely to die in car crashes than men.
One shocking fact that I never considered is how dangerous it is when communities aren’t designed with enough restrooms for women. The rate of sexual assaults goes down significantly when women have nearby, lockable bathrooms. Imagine that!
Here’s another shocking fact. There is a drug available today that, in a small study was found to eliminate nearly every symptom of Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS) in women. PMS is an issue that every single woman has to cope with for a significant portion of her life. Yet we don’t have great drugs to help us. When a larger study needed to be commissioned, scientists couldn’t get additional funding. What was this magic drug that could help millions of women worldwide but is being ignored at the moment? Viagra, actually. We’ve been using viagra to correct the “clearly horrible, life-threatening” condition of male erectile dysfunction for years, but when the drug shows promise for women, we can’t get a study funded. What the hell, people? And drug companies, why on earth are you passing up a potential multi-billion dollar funding stream?
How did we not know viagra could help women as well as men from the very beginning? Well, because the first studies of the drug were done mostly on men.
What Can We Do About This?
I wish Criado Perez had focused more on what we can do about all of this. I think it would have been a lot less depressing if she had. Nevertheless, she did touch on some bright spots.
Women’s Strike
Iceland’s women went on a “women’s strike” for one day. Women not only stopped working at their paid jobs, they stopped doing their unpaid care work too. The men called this day “the longest day”. Children ran amuck, men worked extra hours caring for family members, and society basically came to a standstill. A year later, Iceland passed a comprehensive equality law. Now, Iceland has one of the smallest gender pay gaps in the world.
Think Outside of the Box
In Sweden, a simple change to snow removal saved the country a lot of money, but not in the way you would think. When it snows, most communities plow major roads first, doing walking paths and side streets last. Women are the ones who use those paths the most, so Sweden reversed the order in which they removed snow. Now they remove snow first from walking/bike paths and last on major roads. It’s easier for a car to drive through two inches of snow than for someone to push a stroller through it. An unexpected thing happened next. Snow-related injuries went down by half and the country starting saving money overall. The cost of healthcare savings more than made up for the additional cost of shoveling snow.
Effective Ways to Add Women To The Workforce
We’ve also found that quotas ensuring more women make it to leadership positions work. The fear with quotas is that subpar leaders will take the places of better leaders. However, in countries that have quotas for women to fill spaces in parliament, the quality of leadership actually goes up. Quotas simply correct the male bias, and make it easier for higher quality leaders to emerge in a biased world.
There’s also an easy fix for women self-selecting not to come back to work after maternity leave. Give women 5-7 months of maternity leave. More women opt to come back to work when they’ve had enough time to recover from childbirth.
Additionally, we see in every industry when we do blind applications and auditions (i.e. remove names from resumes) more women get hired in the first place. We’re qualified, we just need to get through hiring managers’ unconscious biases.
Let’s Break Down the Patriarchy
Invisible Women is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand how deeply rooted gender biases pervade modern society, often in insidious and overlooked ways. Caroline Criado Perez issues an urgent call for reform that cannot be ignored.
Right after I finished this book, my daughter showed me an “entrepreneur traits” quiz she was given in her 8th grade career class. It was filled with traits that normally accompany the typical male entrepreneur today: aggressive, interested in money, focused solely on success, etc. She was upset that she didn’t score in the highest percentile on the trait quiz. She didn’t see through the fact that the quiz was rigged from the beginning. I suspect several girls in her class took this quiz, found out they weren’t cut out to be entrepreneurs and quietly took that career path off the table. So, I emailed her teacher and principal. Her male principal got it and is now considering taking that quiz out of the curriculum. Hallelujah! One horribly male biased practice down, lots more to go.
What Invisible Women helps us do is notice these biases around us. We must notice and remove one bias at a time. We all have a part to play in making the playing field much more even.
