The Invisible

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Perez, Caroline Criado. 2019. Invisible Women: Data Bias in a world designed for Men. New York: Abrams Press. The thoroughness of Invisible Women doesn’t detract from its absolute readability. This is entertaining, scholarly and so very important. Adam Rutherford

And these silences are everywhere. Our entire culture is riddled with them. Films, news, literature, science, city planning, economics. The stories we tell ourselves about our past, present and future. They are all marked – disfigured – by a female-shaped ‘absent presence’. This is the gender data gap.

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And it gets only better as it proceeds! Basically, it's very difficult to make men to see life through a prism of female life. The reverse is a bit easier since women anyway do a lot of historically 'male' tasks these days. Now, we just need to get more women elected to positions that will allow them to enact public policy to close this data gap! In general, Invisible Women reeks of "whiteness = standard". Criado Pérez included some quotes in this book that made me really uncomfortable and furious at the same time, e.g. "We call the 18th century the century of 'Enlightenment', although it expanded the rights of men, it 'narrowed' those of women, because they were forbidden to control their property and income and were excluded from higher education and professional training." Oh, really? The 18th century expanded the rights of ALL men? ALL men were now able to control their property and income? Interesting. I must've slept through my history lesson then. This book ought to make you angry. Not least because the answer to many of the problems identified would simply involve listening to women. I knew many of the things discussed here. For instance, that many more women than men died in the tsunami in 2004. The reason? Women look after children and old people, women are often in locations where they can’t hear the warnings signals, women are less likely to learn to swim, women are less likely to learn to climb trees, women are constrained by ‘modesty’ in clothes that make escaping rising water almost impossible – and if they do escape they are likely to be raped and possibly bashed by men. If you are not made angry by this book you have no humanity left. But the solution is often also painfully simple. We need to listen to women. We need to place them in positions of power. We need to involve them in decision making processes that impact them. I know, radical ideas, but we might as well start big and work down from there.

The standard is also stunningly extensive, touching almost every aspect of life to disadvantage women at every turn. At best, it’s annoying: Women figure out inconvenient work-arounds for designs based on the male default, temporarily rendering the standard irrelevant. At worst, it’s dangerous and sometimes lethal to women. Measuring the world according to men’s bodies and men’s societal needs puts women at serious risk in countless ways. Perez analyzes lots of these, but to name three: Women are routinely under-represented or excluded in medical research and in drug trials. Cars are more dangerous for them thanks to the exclusive use of male-body crash-test dummies. Snow-plowing favors men’s travel routes, leading to increased injury and death for women. Two factors are at the heart of all the problems: Data are rarely sex-disaggregated, and survey questions too often have a male bias. Both flaws lead to a gender data gap, which in turn leads to imbalanced (or no) allocation of resources for women and little (if any) consideration of needs unique to them. Half of the world’s population is female, yet bizarrely, to those in charge women just don’t exist. They’re invisible.

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They don´t give a dollar for all the unpaid work, the caring for toddlers and especially care-dependent elders and without this, the health system would simply collapse. What does it mean to be ‘uncounted’? It means that the uncounted – an event, an individual, a group – is invisible, absent from a world built on data. The maxim ‘absence of evidence is not equal to evidence of absence’ is not applicable in official statistics. Rather, absence of evidence – or at least documented, recorded evidence – means that officially, and thus legally and politically, the uncounted something or someone does not exist. Melville’s father was raised by Davis Jr, so the author was thrilled when he was invited to a gala screening of Red Tails, George Lucas’s movie about the Tuskegee Airmen in 2012. But he was horrified when he discovered the movie had changed his grandfather’s name from Davis to Bullard. That anger fueled Melville’s determination to bring new attention to his ancestors. A self-described “entrepreneurial thinker and marketer”, he is not an elegant writer, but his story is powerful enough to propel the reader all the way through. Her first book, Do it Like a Woman, was published by Portobello in 2015. It was described as “a must-read” by the Sunday Independent and “rousing and immensely readable” by Good Housekeeping who selected it as their “best non-fiction”. Eleanor Marx hailed it in the New Statesman as “an extended and immersive piece of investigative journalism,” while Bridget Christie chose it as one of her books of the year in the Guardian, declaring that “young girls and women everywhere should have a copy.” Oh, females also are more likely to die or suffer longer because their medical issues present symptoms differently compared with men. Doctors, for the most part, have not been trained to account for these biological differences. Since 1989, cardiovascular disease is the number one health cause of death for women in the US. Perhaps you’ve heard the advice to take a low-dose of aspirin daily to help lower your chances of getting heart disease? The truth is that advice is effective for men, not for women who may actually be harmed by following that guidance, as the American Heart Association pointed out in 2016.

Caroline Criado Perez brilliantly exposes the appalling gender bias that underpins the collection of data and how it’s used. From medical treatments that fail to take female biology into account, to car safety features that are designed for the male body, women are the invisible 51%. This deeply researched and passionate book is the most important contribution to gender equality in years Amanda Foreman

You may then think that you’re not job-hunting and you’ve got a great professional network anyways. But there’s more. Drugs may not work for you if you’re female. There was a 2004 study by Sherry Marts and Sarah Keitt that demonstrated that differences between the two sexes go down to every tissue and organ system in the human body, as well as in the “prevalence, course, and severity” of the majority of common human diseases. Despite the National Institute of Health Revitalization Act of 1993 making it illegal not to include females in federally-funded clinical trials, a 2015 federal government audit of FDA revealed that 40 percent of documents still did not specify the sex of participants. So maybe that’s why you have to try many drugs and different dosages before finding medical relief. Bellow, Saul (June 1952). "Man Underground". Commentary. pp.608–610 . Retrieved January 9, 2022– via writing. upenn.edu. Unfortunately, some of what Criado-Perez says at various points could be used to bolster damaging gender-essentialist views. The author has also been criticized for transphobic views in general. Although she never says anything outrightly transphobic in this book, one part that gave me pause is where she discusses women's bathrooms in refugee camps. Trans-rights as they concern use of public bathrooms continues to be a heated point of contention. What she says here can be distorted by transphobics and trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERF) to serve as proof that trans-women, as people assigned male at birth, are a danger to cisgender women in bathrooms. In fact, research has shown time and again that transgender people are more often the victims of violence, not the perpetrators. As the refugee camps are concerned, women in these spaces may indeed be vulnerable and experience violence, but what happens there is not playing out in bathrooms in the larger world. There is no epidemic of cisgender women being assaulted in bathrooms by trans-women, as transphobics and TERF claim. This is a specious anti-trans argument rooted in fear and purposeful disregard for the facts. An example in the case is the post-disaster effort in Gujarat, in 2001 when an earthquake had just hit the state and thousands of lives were lost and 400,000 homes were destroyed. New homes were needed in the rebuilding effort but Gujarat’s rebuilding project had a major data gap: women were not included in the planning process; the result- they built houses without any kitchens.

Simply said, if someone is in power, he tries to make a policy that meets his wishes and reflects the image of the society, company, etc he wants to build. This can be done in a direct, evil way by treating minorities, women, atheists, etc. with repression until imprisonment, torture and death if they misbehave and in these cases, it is an obvious crime.So, it's either get everyone to practice extreme empathy or invite mixed companies to do tasks that require mixed perspectives. Now, people still are finding it challenging and it keeps leading to impressive flip-floppy results in a number of spheres. Malcolm Bradbury and Richard Ruland, From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature. Penguin, 380. ISBN 0-14-014435-8 rounded up because Everyone should read this book! you don’t have to realize you’re being discriminated against to in fact be discriminated against It was reported in October 2017 that streaming service Hulu was developing the novel into a television series. [19] See also [ edit ] I know someone who has this condition, and it’s very clear that the pain is not in her head—e.g., psychosomatic. (Although this doesn’t mix well with existing mental health conditions.)