Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez

Subtitled “Exposing data bias in a world designed for men”, this book does what it says on the tin – and how.

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez was published in 2019, and there’s no reason to believe that anything has changed since then.

Criado Perez has researched, compiled, aggregated, and analysed an astonishing amount of data from many years and from around the world.

Heavily footnoted, she outlines her sources in 69 pages of endnotes. There’s also a 19 page index that is well structured, letting the reader look up “unpaid work” in general or in contexts like “Australia, unpaid work”.

This is no dry, academic work, however. On the contrary, it’s passionate, compelling, and hard to put down, while being simultaneously dismaying, logical, and irrefutable. The author provides many anecdotal accounts that back up her arguments: often obvious, always illustrative, and sometimes jaw dropping.

A forensic dissection of snow clearing in Sweden illustrates the pervasively thoughtless construction of services and products designed for the “default male”, as do so many of the examples Criado Perez provides.

Her central argument is based on three themes that define women’s relationship with the world, across the globe and throughout history.

1. How the female body has been and continues to be ignored in just about all aspects of the designed world: medical, architectural, social, economic, and technological.
2. Male violence against women: how it’s variously tolerated, encouraged, misunderstood, and perpetuated.
3. The unrecognised burden of unpaid care work shouldered almost exclusively by women in a world designed to ignore its value.

Is there a way out of this? Of course there is and it’s both disarmingly simple to understand and complex to implement. The key lies in collecting, analysing and acting on the data that is plentifully available.

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.

Those of us who work in accessibility for people with disabilities recognise, acknowledge, and empathise with this requirement. It’s summed up in the principle of “Nothing about us without us”, a principle that applies to many “minority” groups. That it needs to be applied to 50% of our population is shocking, saddening, and enraging.

Criado Perez has done an amazing job of gathering specific data, anecdotal evidence, and consistent analysis to point a way forward that will genuinely benefit all of us, including those who sustain the “default male” attitude. And she does it without rage, but with calm, sensible purpose.

I can’t say I enjoyed reading Invisible Women but it did make me determined to do whatever I can personally to call for the inclusion of women in the redesign of the world, including holding myself to account for how I might be unconsciously perpetuating a world designed for men.

Highly recommended.