Book Review: Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez
Gender inequality is a topic we see addressed more and more in the press these days, but there are still so many situations out there in which women are treated unfairly—and that news barely sees the light of day.
Caroline Criado-Perez does an outstanding job of bringing such issues out into the open in her book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, and her stories of bias and discrimination are backed with statistics and substantial evidence.
TRANSCRIPT
Today, I want to review a book that has had a huge impact on me and my thinking about the world, my understanding of the world, and the way it's designed. This also has got me thinking a lot about bias.
So, the book that I'm talking about is Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez. This book is astounding.
It is absolutely filled with stats, stories and evidence that really shows how our entire world is designed with this understanding that sort of the default human is a man.
So Perez goes into a bunch of different aspects of our lives, from the education system, from how we invest in companies, the way our medical system works, the way research trials work. Even things like cars—so you might not realize this, but they don't do crash test with dummies that are designed like female bodies.
The best that they do is they sometimes put a smaller man in the passenger seat to sort of mimic a woman, except women's bodies are designed very differently from men's. The way weight is distributed, all kinds of things, and we don't account for this.
She talks about how public restrooms are designed and how this negatively impacts women particularly in developing countries. And where public restrooms are often the only restrooms and women wind up being afraid to go use them because they're in very dangerous areas and you are significantly more likely to be sexually assaulted while going to the bathroom.
So women either run the risk of putting themselves in dangerous situations or they simply hold it and then they run the risk of UTIs and infections.
This book covers nearly every aspect of our lives and makes it very clear that women are considered an afterthought instead of a priority. Our perspectives are not prioritized in really anyway. And this is very damaging to our health, our safety, our ability to get ahead in life, our ability to get businesses funded or bills passed.
And you know, most people realize that I'm a pretty avid feminist. But reading this book, it opened my eyes to the way humanity and society treats women as an afterthought instead of as 50% of the population. The way that is negatively impacting literally every aspects of our lives it's an astounding read.
There were many points throughout it that made me angry, that made me frustrated, that made me devastated and I highly recommend that anybody reads this but especially if you're in a position of influence, especially if you play any sort of role in the startup world or in product design or development.
We have an ability to to change this narrative and to make the teams and the companies that are genuinely crafting our world, designing our world and making them more diverse and making sure that we are accounting for the very real impact that we have on a day-to-day basis.
What it really made me realize is that yes, we women are treated as an afterthought and that the book is primarily about what Criado-Perez refers to as the gender data gap but this data gap exists on a number of other levels, right?
So the racial data gap, the ability or disability data gap. There are so many segments of our society that are left out of the discussion and are not considered when we are shaping our world. Shaping our products, shaping how medicine works, shaping how our entire world and our lives are designed.
So if you're at all interested in how do you create products or policies or programs in such a way that it positively impacts the world and that you are making a bigger difference, I highly recommend you read this book.
I guarantee it will be a very eye-opening experience for you and you will learn a lot.
So click the link, either listen to the audio—by the way, she's got a fabulous British accent and she is very very engaging in the audio, so either listen to the audio or read the actual book.
There's a ton of information there and I think all of us could learn a lot about how we can make this world and our products a lot more inclusive.