When feminist advocate Caroline Criado Perez campaigned for a notable woman’s profile to be included on British banknotes, she received an avalanche of abuse and threats, including one telling complaint from a man: “but women are everywhere now!”. He’s not wrong, in the sense that women make up more than half of the world’s population – women are everywhere, now and always have been – but as Perez outlines in her 2019 book Invisible Women, they are often “missing” from the critical design, policy, and funding decisions that shape our lives.
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(By the way, Perez was successful in her campaign – Jane Austen has been printed on the British £10 note since 2017.)
Invisible Women explores the origins and impacts of what Perez calls the “gender data gap”. Data sets, big and small, are used to decide everything, from how big a phone screen should be to what medicines are approved for distribution. The thing is that data about women are often excluded from these sets, or not collected at all (rarely due to explicit malice or bias, more often for reasons of convenience or nescience). This leads to the all-too-predictable conclusion: we are living in a man’s world.
This exclusion has consequences, ranging from minor inconvenience to fatality. Invisible Women uses a broad range of case studies, across health, transport, technology, politics, and world events, to demonstrate the tangible impact of the arguably esoteric field of statistics and data analysis. Women might be “everywhere now”, but they are still more likely to die in car crashes because test dummies are modelled off the average male body. They are more likely to die in natural disasters because warning systems and evacuation procedures are designed by and for men, without consideration of women’s specific needs. They are more likely to feel cold at work, because temperature regulation guidelines for offices are based on male metabolic data from the mid-20th century. They are more likely to get inaccurate readings from their FitBits because the technology wasn’t developed to account for steps taken during housework or while pushing a pram.
A lot of the information Perez covers in Invisible Women won’t be new-news to fellow female readers. We already know that we do the lion’s share of domestic labour, and that we are disproportionately victimised by male violence. Still, it’s validating to have these experiences printed in black and white, backed up by rigorous research (where it exists). Sure, that makes Invisible Women a fairly stats-heavy book, but I don’t know what else you could expect from a book about data bias.
I guess it’s somewhat ironic that a book about exclusion and underrepresentation itself excludes and underrepresents a significant population. Perez has very little to say about the experiences of trans, non-binary, and intersex people in Invisible Women, aside from a brief allusion to them in the opening chapter. While this alone is enough to get her cancelled in a lot of leftie echo chambers, I go back and forth on my feelings about it.
On the one hand, trans women are women, and any work of feminist theory is incomplete without them. The experiences of trans, non-binary, and intersex people are informative, in the same way that the experiences of cis-women are. On the other hand, Perez explicitly sets out to deal with the issue of data bias on a macro level, and the population of cis-women is simply much larger than the population of trans, non-binary, and intersex people (50+% compared to 1-2%, respectively). Plus, the issue of exclusion of trans, non-binary, and intersex people from data analysis (and the myriad ways this negatively impacts the lives of people in these communities) is deserving of a whole book of its own. Subsuming it into an already-chockers book about the experiences of cis-women would do it a great disservice – and probably get Perez roasted for writing about a community of which she is not a part, anyway.
So, I guess I feel a bit “yes, and” about it: yes, the gender data gap is real and has a real impact on cis-women, and it also affects other people who aren’t cis-males and they deserve consideration (even though they weren’t specifically included in Invisible Women).
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