Invisible Women - Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (non-fiction) by Caroline Criado Pérez

Ouff! What a read! I love it!

Caroline made research findings so captivating and it was so interesting to read. Easy to follow, yet filled with so many facts and perspectives. I came out realising even more that in many ways, the world is structured based on men's preferences using males as benchmarks.

Let me share a few things from the book that I noted:

• Preface, p. XII - Simone de Beauvoir made it most famously in 1949 she wrote, 'humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself, but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. [...] He is the Subject, he is the Absolute - she is the Other.'

• Preface, p. XIII - If the people taking decisions that affect all of us are all white, able-bodied men (nine times out of ten from America), that too constitutes a data gap - in the same way that not collecting information on female bodies in medical research is a data gap.

• {Ibid) The female-specific concerns that men fail to factor in cover a wide variety of areas, but as you read you will notice that three themes crop up again and again: the female body, women's unpaid care burden, and male violence against women.

• P. 54 - Most passengers are 'transit captives', meaning that they have no reasonable means other than public transport to get from one place to another. This lack of choice particularly affects low-income women, and those living in the global south - in India, for example, women have limited access to private transport and therefore rely on public transport to a far greater extent than men. [...] All too often the blame is put on women themselves for feeling fearful, rather than on planners for designing urban spaces and transit environments that make them feel unsafe.

• P. 66 - 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 on a daily basis with the sexualised menace that is visited on that body.

• P. 70 - There is no such thing as a woman who doesn't work. There is only a woman who isn't paid for her work.

• P. 98 - Women are also asked to do more undervalued admin work than their male colleagues - and they say yes, because they are penalised for being 'unlikeable' if they say no. (This is a problem across a range of workplaces: women, and in particular ethnic minority women, do the 'housekeeping' - taking notes, getting the coffee, cleaning up after everyone - in the office as well as at home.)

• P. 100 - Brilliance bias is in no small part a result of a data gap: we have written so many female geniuses out of history, they just don't come to mind as easily. [...] We just don't see women as naturall brilliant. In fact, we seem to see femininity as inversely associated with brilliance.

• P. 112 + 113: What Google had suffered from until Sandberg became pregnant was a data gap: neither Google's male founders nor Sandberg had ever been pregnant before. As soon as one of them did get pregnant, that data gap was filled. And all the women who got pregnant at the company after that would benefit from it.

• P. 101: From development initiatives to smartphones, from medical tech to stoves, tools (whether physical or financial) are developed without reference to women's needs, and, as a result these tools are failing them on a grand scale. And this failure affects women's lives on a similarly grand scale: it makes them poorer, it makes them sicker, and, when it comes to cars, it is killing them. Designers may believe they are making products for everyone, but in reality they are mainly making them for men. It's time to start designing women in.

And many other fascinating facts that the book includes. If any of the above points interests you, I would highly recommend you checking this book out.