Invisible Women exposes the gender data gap and as a consequence how the world is pervasively, but invisibly, biased against women. Caroline makes a compelling point with several examples from technology to medicine to natural disasters. Reflecting on the book's contents will help uncover your unconscious bias and encourage you to actively seek out the voice of "invisible women".

1. Invisible Women
Exposing Data Bias In A World Designed For
Men
Caroline Criado Perez

2. 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

3. Seeing men as the human default is fundamental to the structure of human
society. We read most things as male unless they are specially marked as
female. This has led to gender data gaps.

4. Men and women travel differently.
Women are more likely than men to walk and take public transport.
Men, most likely have a fairly simple travel pattern; twice-daily commute in
and out of town. But women’s travel tends to be more complicated – termed
‘chain-tripping’- with several small interconnected trips. For example:
dropping children off at school before going to work and doing grocery
shopping on the way home.
The lack of consistent sex disaggregated data – gender data gap – impacts
everything from city planning to planning transport systems.

5. In many poorly planned dark, unlit public facilities like car parks, railway
platforms and streets women run the risk of being sexually assaulted.
Low income working women are ‘transit captives’ – they have no
reasonable means other than public transport to get from one place to
another.
This lack of gender sensitivity leads to urban planners excluding women
from many public spaces.
Due to physiological differences, a women’s needs are different from men
when it comes to accessing public toilets. Gender insensitive planning and
design is putting women’s health at risk across the world.

6. Companies mostly conflate longer working hours with job effectiveness and
routinely reward workers putting in long hours at work.
Irrespective of the proportion of household income they bring in, women do
a majority of the unpaid work from taking care of elders in the family to
cooking and cleaning. This work is largely invisible and women end up
working longer hours than men.
Traditional workplaces are designed for the unencumbered worker; the
men; while women need to manage their other responsibilities as well.
There is a need to recognize it, value it and design workplaces to account
for it.

7. Despite overwhelming evidence of the positive impact of maternity leave
on women’s participation in the organized labor market; it remains woefully
inadequate in many countries.

8. Meritocracy is an insidious myth, providing cover to institutional white male
bias.
Across work places women are asked to do more undervalued admin work
than their male colleagues.
Think of a genius. Chances are you pictured a man. Due to this ‘brilliance
bias’ male professors are routinely considered more talented than women.
This impacts women in academia, research, teaching and many other
areas.
Children learn this brilliance bias from school. Curriculums need to be
overhauled to weed this out.

9. Occupational research traditionally focused on male-dominated industries.
The reference human used to study effects of, say chemicals, is by default –
male.
The default man is routinely used; from design of protective equipment in the
military to shoulder bags for soldiers. Anatomical differences between men
and women are ignored in designing PPEs. (Personal Protective Equipment)
There is a significant gender data gap leading to discomfort and
consequently inefficiency amongst women.
Sometimes this may lead to chronic illness and in its extreme – death.

10. The gig economy is in fact often no more than a way for employers to get
around basic employee rights.
Women on irregular or precarious employment contracts are more at risk of
sexual harassment.
There is a global data gap when it comes to sexual harassment and
violence women face in the workplace due to a failure to research the
issue.

11. Women report farming as secondary activity simply because their unpaid
work including helping the men on the farm takes up so much time.
Studies in agriculture hence routinely under-estimate the contribution of
women leading to data gaps and women are excluded from several
development initiatives.

12. From traditional piano keyboards (female handspan is smaller than a mans)
to mobile phones, one-size-fits-all gender-neutral design disadvantages
women. It does not take into account the physiological differences.

13. Speech-recognition technology is more likely to accurately recognize male
speech than female speech.
That’s because speech-recognition technology is trained on large
databases of voice recordings, called corpura and these are dominated by
recordings of male voices.
Image databases and text corpura used to train AI technologies have a lot
of cultural and gender stereotypes. Some of the new systems are blatantly
sexist.

14. The world of venture capitalists and the tech industry is dominated by men
and suffers from the ‘sea of dudes’ problem – unable to see tech or solutions
targeted at women.

15. Car design has a long and ignominious history of ignoring women.
Procedures for testing with crash test dummies do not fully account for
differences in anatomy and posture between men and women. (and
especially pregnant women)

16. Historically doctors are trained with default male body and with the
assumption that there is no difference other than size and reproductive
function.
Contrary to assumptions, sex differences are substantial in every tissue and
organ system in the human body between men and women.
There is a significant data gap due to absence of women in drug tests.
Treatments, procedures and drugs affect men and women differently and
the lack of sex disaggregated data puts women at risk.

17. The Yentl syndrome – women are misdiagnosed and poorly treated unless
their symptoms or diseases conform to that of men.

18. Failure to account for unpaid household services in GDP is perhaps the
greatest gender data gap of all.
It is seen as a ‘costless resource’ and when countries try to rein in their
spending it is often women who end up paying the price.
The best job creation program could be introduction of universal childcare.

19. Democracy is not a level playing field, it is biased against electing women.
Decades of evidence suggests that presence of women in politics makes a
tangible difference to the laws that get passed.
The real reason we exclude women is because we see the rights of 50% of
the population as a minority interest.

20. Women are disproportionately affected by conflict, pandemic and natural
disasters. Women’s voices are consistently ignored leading to gender data
gaps.
Business interests (hence primarily male) are prioritized over basic
necessities and community services – these are more relevant to women’s
needs.

21. The real reason why women are intimidated and violated as they navigate
public spaces is the social meaning we have imposed on male and female
bodies.

22. Solution to sex and gender data gap is clear. We need to close the female
representation gap in all walks of life.
Women simply don’t forget that women exist as easily as men often seem to.