Excellent, engaging book on the way implicit gender bias affects every day life and society. Criado’s writing is engaging and eye-opening. I recommend this book for data nerds as well as fans of Freakonmics and other similar treatises.

I featured this thought-provoking book in my regular culture column in The Globe and Mail's weekend section, in a column about gender bias in design and its history. In addition to that I've been personally recommending it all over the place!

A critical book for our time. The meticulous research and discovery performed by Caroline Criado Perez is outstanding! She unravels how much white middle-aged men have been centered on so many things from the air conditioning in a place of business to snow removal on the streets. I think the high point discovery is that Viagra originally had a purpose to help with menstrual cramp pain, but the research was steered elsewhere since there was more money to be made. Women have been constantly side-stepped and ignored throughout history. Over time, without a narrative, that story leads to further erasure. Even studies that do not account or include women means women are consistently put in harm's way whether they are going to see a doctor or even driving in their car. Perez is brilliant in presenting this content in a very accessible way. This is a breakthrough book that should force rethinking about how much our everyday actions lead to sexist environments and hardships.

This is a thought provoking book that draws attention to how we rely on data that may not be representative of the whole population and that research findings may not be valid for specific segments. In a world that relies heavily on science to guide decisions in fields from healthcare to marketing, this is an enormous problem. There are business implications to ignoring a substantial portion of the population, especially if that market segment makes most of the purchasing decisions with a household. It's time that women are included in research studies along with men in proportions that match the population. Anything less should be considered as substandard scientific methodology if the goal is to generalize to the population.

This book was very insightful. I was happy to see it written and that someone was drawing attention to this persistent issue.

INVISIBLE WOMEN by Caroline Criado Perez offers an intriguing, if sometimes dense, look at "Data Bias in a World Designed for Men." Perez, a feminist advocate, explores workplace and medical issues in addition to numerous other examples from daily life where the use of data perpetuates bias and discriminates against women. Her examples fit nicely with recent press coverage like "A Fix for Gender Bias in Health Care? Check" from The New York Times. Perez provides nearly seventy pages of references and relevant links which have already been of great benefit to our student researchers. Her work raises so many subtle decisions favoring men (e.g., calorie count on treadmills based on average male weight). However, (perhaps because of living in London?) she does not include much discussion of the impact of data and discrimination in sports; that is a bit surprising given the disparities in media coverage and recent lawsuit by the US National Women's Soccer Team. Perez does include fairly lengthy sections on parental leave and unpaid work, which again could tie to recent media coverage ("Women Did Everything Right. Then Work Got 'Greedy'"). Overall, INVISIBLE WOMEN offers an important look at systemic bias that merits further discussion and research.

Links in post:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/opinion/a-fix-for-gender-bias-in-health-care-check.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/03/why-the-us-national-womens-soccer-team-is-suing/585202/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/upshot/women-long-hours-greedy-professions.html

Wow, did this book hurt. And made me angry. In a good way, that is—not feeling angry at some, at least, of what it deals with, would have probably been abnormal. For two main reasons: 1) it points at things one doesn’t necessarily thinks about when reflecting at first upon all the ways women still get the short straw, and 2) once you consider these things, you realise you’re not even surprised, and -that- is proof that all of this stuff is… just sad. It’s the 21st century, and half of humanity is still forced to deal with rubbish.

Here’s a very simple illustration of one of the problems the author points. It’s very simple, and minor, and I bet a lot of people (possibly mostly men, but surely also some women) would tell me to ignore it and “suck it up” and “it’s not important, so stop dwelling on it.’ But it is a good example. I work in a fairly good company when it comes to treating people equally. It’s not perfect, of course, but let’s just say that for a Silicon Valley company, they actually openly try to recruit more diverse people than just 25-ish white male nerds, which in itself deserves to be pointed. And it gives its new hires little welcome gifts. So when I joined, among the gifts, was a pair of socks. They’re pretty, I like their colour, and I’d love to wear them. There’s just a problem that no one obviously though about: they’re not “one size fits all”, they’re “one size fits all MEN”. Which means they’ve been gathering dust at the bottom of my wardrobe, since wearing socks whose heels ride above your ankles is really incomfortable. And there you have it: the way the default “human being” is actually “male”, with female bodies being sort of a side show that those poor men have to accommodate (/le sigh).

(In defence of my employer, they do give us female version of T-shirts, too, so it’s not completely hopeless either. And no, my point is not to rant about socks. If someone hasn’t gotten my point by now, they should probably read this book because they’d make a good target for it.)

It is both enlightening and infuriating to read about this for 300+ pages, about all the circumstances in which women are still, more or less unconsciously, treated as the less important part of humanity, the part that can “suck it up” and “deal with it: look, we men deal with it”, except that it’s much easier for men to deal with it since the “it” was made for them at first. An example from the book: tsunami shelters in countries where there’s a solid separation between the female sphere and the male sphere, where women can’t go out unless they’re with men from their family, because if they do, they’re pretty much free buffet for all. So, when a tsunami hits, and the shelters are designed as huge places where hundreds of people have to cram, without any separation between the sexes, guess what happens? Well, women die, because they don’t dare to go in there (if they do, they almost surely end up shamed and beaten and raped); and that’s IF they get to the shelters in the first place, since a man from their family needs to warn them and take them there first. (It is also telling that in such dire circumstances, like these ones, or refugeed camps, the worst for women is often not even the wars or natural catastrophes that led them there, but male violence.)

And the worst of it, the saddest part, is that most of the time, it’s not even done on purpose: it happens because most people who plan these places, most people who decide about infrastructures, are still men, and the mere idea that not all people (read: 50% of the people) don’t have exactly the same needs as theirs <i>doesn’t even cross their minds</i>. How pathetic is that?

Conclusion: Read this book. Read about all these pathetic things, that you can’t dismiss as “oh well it’s not true, surely this (female, of course) author is exaggerating”, except that she’s not, nope, you can indeed see all this around you, every day, if you pay attention. I don’t even need to check sources to realise this. If it’s around me in 2019 Britain, I can’t dismiss it as “but it only happens in ‘certain countries’, luv”.

Invisible Women is an incredibly well-researched dive into the ways the world has been built to accommodate men, both culturally and physically, and how this often leaves women at a decided disadvantage. This goes beyond the pay gap and sexist double standards, touching on everything from how we design technology to how we remove snow. Perez digs deep into the data that supports her argument—that the world defaults to a generalized male—and presents an array of examples, case studies, and potential solutions. This study also proves how vital data has become to uncovering (and possibly resolving) a lot of the systemic sexism that pervades every facet of society. An excellent, if occasionally rage-inducing, read.

This is a fascinating and important read. It was heavy, but I really enjoyed it and strongly recommend

This is a fascinating and frustrating look at data bias and the way the world seems to think of male as the default and female as an outlier when it comes to collecting data and doing studies. The author examines many areas and illustrates how this bias hurts not only women but people in general. It is worth reading!

I am impressed by this book, having not yet completed it. I would love to read the rest. I am surprised by its scope, which, while covering a vast territory, holds to its cohesive and concise thesis: the absence of gender-specific data results in a vast array of outcomes that disadvantage and harm women. If it is possible to extend my access to the rest of the book, please do. Thank you.

I really loved the way Caroline Criado Perez first built the case for this book, which focuses on the way gender bias in data impacts everyday life, by highlighting a number of situations in which male is the default and a cascade of outcomes from that singular "default male". I didn't need convincing, but setting the book up this way and returning to the "default male" throughout, created a nice baseline understanding and allowed for her to weave in several different case studies without feeling like she was straying too far from the central idea of the book.
While I understand that this is a book specifically about the gender data gap, I couldn't help but wish there was a bit more intersectionality or at least a greater nod to the fact that there is a separate, equally important book to be written about the virtually non-existent data on women of color, women with disabilities, etc. Still, I think the book is a fantastic starting point and great read.