Invisible Women is a damning critique of a world that – because it is designed by men, for men – is biased against women to varying degrees, from the trivial (phones too big for women’s fingers) to the deadly (higher likelihood of death in car crashes). Criado Perez writes in a lucid, bantering style, and while her tone is more investigative reporter than staid academic, her book is chocked full of footnotes. It is not only highly readable but should also be required reading for policymakers, for its most tragic conclusion is that, even with the best of intentions, policy is only as good as its dataset, and therefore the startling lack of female-inclusive data dooms women to poor design in just about every facet of life.
Thoroughly grounded in feminist theory (she cites de Beauvoir’s Second Sex in the preface as an intellectual lodestar), Criado Perez’s gameplan is repetitive but highly effective: look closely at any sector, from pharmaceuticals to Nordic snowplow policy, to orchestra auditions and everything in between. Her data is both interesting and infuriating.
These problems can, broadly speaking, be put into two heuristics: some are acted misogyny (e.g., blind auditions in orchestras, where the performer is behind a curtain and their gender is therefore unknown, have significantly more women successful candidates), whereas others revolve around sins of data omission (90% of pharmacological articles described male-only studies).
Due to this sin of omission, nearly every sector imaginable has terrible user design for women. One example of 'the path to hell being paved with good intentions’ is, surprisingly enough, in the NGO sector.
When NGOs realized that their clean stoves (used to replace traditional stoves, which are deleterious to health due to the smoke they give off) were not being used, these NGOs’ first instinct was to blame the societies and their ‘traditional cultures’. The real problem, however, was that the ‘developers have consistently prioritised technical parameters such as fuel efficiency over the needs of the stove user, frequently leading users to reject them’. The reasons are varied and worth repeating here:
in Bangladesh, the new stoves didn’t allow multitasking (as traditional stoves do), thereby effectively increasing the working hours of women
in India, the lab-approved stove broke down frequently in actual use and required extensive maintenance – but this failed to realise since men were the primary repairers. They usually refused to fix the new stove since the old one ‘worked just fine’
also in India, high-efficiency stoves (rigorously tested!) only accepted smaller pieces of wood, and as wood-splitting is difficult for many women, they reverted to traditional chulhas, which have no such size limitations.
Now, occasionally Criado Perez runs the risk of being monocausal in her argument because when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Bad user design is not solely targeted at women, although her logic does add up for the most part. But arguably she’s also stretching, if only a bit.
However, this is perhaps uncharitable, as 99% of the book reads like a litany of examples of the data gap and how sexist policy adversely affects women. There is no denying sexism exists in this world, and as we move farther from the overt, Mad Men-esque sexism (not to say that this doesn’t still exist in many corners), the next step will be expurgating the often-unseen (perhaps even unintentional) built-in sexism. And Criado Perez’s book does an excellent job of shedding light on the insidiousness of certain sexist policies. Sometimes it’s the unintentional – or even well-intentioned – which ends up causing the most harm.
Overall, Invisible Women does a rare feat: incredibly enlightening (at least for this male author, although maybe not so much to women) and highly readable. If half the population is being subjected to bad policy, it goes without saying this is a big issue. It’s neither exclusively a Western nor ‘developing world’ problem; it’s not about rich or poor (exclusively). It’s an insidiously pervasive issue, but the first step is understanding the problem exists, then we can take steps to remedy it.
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