 Cover of the first edition | |
| Author | Caroline Criado Perez |
|---|---|
| Country | Great Britain |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Chatto & Windus |
Publication date | 2019 |
Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men is a 2019 book by British feminist author Caroline Criado Perez. The book describes the adverse effects on women caused by gender bias in big data collection.
The book received both the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize and the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award in 2019. [1] [2] It has on the whole been welcomed and positively reviewed in major publications.
This book is described by Cordelia Fine and Victor Sojo in The Lancet as providing "several fascinating case studies—from domains as varied as medicine, occupational health and safety, transport, technology, politics, and disaster relief". [3]
Carol Tavris reviewed it for Skeptical Inquirer Magazine , stating that the "theoretical underpinning of this book is not new; every generation of feminist scholars rediscovers Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 observations that women are the second sex", referring to the French philosopher's book. [4]
Angela Saini reviewed it in The Guardian , calling it "a dossier on gender inequality that demands urgent action." The book makes clear, she writes that "women aren't a minority. They are the majority. They are absolutely everywhere and always have been. Yet as Criado Perez shows, women must live in a society built around men. From a lack of streetlights to allow us to feel safe, to an absence of workplace childcare facilities, almost everything seems to have been designed for the average white working man and the average stay-at-home white woman. Her answer is to think again, to collect more data, study that data, and ask women what they want." Still, writes Saini, for all the data that Criado Perez presents, it is unclear that governments (and, perhaps, men, though she does not say this) "What should worry us more than the data gap, then, is that huge and seemingly intractable don't-give-a-damn gap." [5]
In an article for Literary Review magazine titled 'Female Unfriendly', feminist author Joan Smith, lauds the book as essential reading, at least for those to whom Criado Perez's findings will be news. "This book, which demonstrates the bias men enjoy in both familiar (to me at least) and less obvious scenarios, sets the record straight. I knew, for instance, that women fare worse after heart attacks because they present with different symptoms from men; Criado Perez cites research showing that women are 50 per cent more likely to be misdiagnosed because they tend not to have the classic 'Hollywood heart attack', which begins with chest and left-arm pains. But I didn't realise that women are also more likely to suffer serious injuries in a car crash because crash test dummies have traditionally been designed to reflect the 'average' male body." Smith concludes that "The cumulative effect of all this evidence is devastating, even if it confirms what most women already know." [6]
Invisible Women also found a wide international audience, and has been translated into many languages, including French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Finnish, Portuguese, Persian, Swedish, Icelandic, Danish, Greek, Lithuanian, Estonian, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Turkish, Russian and Chinese. [7]
Misogyny is hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against women or girls. It is a form of sexism that is used to keep women at a lower social status than men, thus maintaining the social roles of patriarchy. Misogyny has been widely practised for thousands of years. It is reflected in art, literature, human societal structure, historical events, mythology, philosophy, and religion worldwide.
Asexuality is the lack of sexual attraction to others, or low or absent interest in or desire for sexual activity. It may be considered a sexual orientation or the lack thereof. It may also be categorized more widely, to include a broad spectrum of asexual sub-identities.
Feminist economics is the critical study of economics and economies, with a focus on gender-aware and inclusive economic inquiry and policy analysis. Feminist economic researchers include academics, activists, policy theorists, and practitioners. Much feminist economic research focuses on topics that have been neglected in the field, such as care work, intimate partner violence, or on economic theories which could be improved through better incorporation of gendered effects and interactions, such as between paid and unpaid sectors of economies. Other feminist scholars have engaged in new forms of data collection and measurement such as the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), and more gender-aware theories such as the capabilities approach. Feminist economics is oriented towards the goal of "enhancing the well-being of children, women, and men in local, national, and transnational communities."
Gender archaeology is a method of studying past societies through their material culture by closely examining the social construction of gender identities and relations.
Daina Taimiņa is a Latvian mathematician, retired adjunct associate professor of mathematics at Cornell University, known for developing a way of modeling hyperbolic geometry with crocheted objects.
Carol Anne Tavris is an American social psychologist and feminist. She has devoted her career to writing and lecturing about the contributions of psychological science to the beliefs and practices that guide people's lives, and to criticizing "psychobabble," "biobunk," and pseudoscience. Her many writings have dealt with critical thinking, cognitive dissonance, anger, gender, and other topics in psychology.
Angela Saini is a British science journalist, broadcaster and the author of books, of which the fourth, The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality, was published in 2023. Saini has worked as a reporter and presenter for the BBC and has written for a number of publications including The Guardian, New Scientist, and Wired UK. She has also produced and presented several radio and television documentaries, including a BBC Radio 4 documentary on biofuels and a BBC World Service documentary on the impact of climate change on Indian agriculture. Saini's writing and reporting focus on how science interacts with society, especially on how it affects marginalized groups, and she has been acclaimed for her work by a diverse range of organizations and institutions.
Cordelia Fine is a Canadian-born British philosopher of science, psychologist, and writer. She is a full professor in the History and Philosophy of Science programme at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Fine has written three popular science books on the topics of social cognition, neuroscience, and the popular myths of sex differences. Her latest book, Testosterone Rex, won the Royal Society Science Book Prize, 2017. She has authored several academic book chapters and numerous academic publications. Fine is also noted for coining the term 'neurosexism'.
Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award is an annual award given to the best business book of the year as determined by the Financial Times. It aims to find the book that has "the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues". The award was established in 2005 and is worth £30,000. Beginning in 2010, five short-listed authors each receive £10,000, previously it was £5,000.
Gender-biased diagnosing is the idea that medical and psychological diagnosis are influenced by the gender of the patient. Several studies have found evidence of differential diagnosis for patients with similar ailments but of different sexes. Female patients face discrimination through the denial of treatment or miss-classification of diagnosis as a result of not being taken seriously due to stereotypes and gender bias. According to traditional medical studies, most of these medical studies were done on men thus overlooking many issues that were related to women's health. This topic alone sparked controversy and brought about question to the medical standard of our time. Popular media has illuminated the issue of gender bias in recent years. Research that was done on diseases that affected women more were less funded than those diseases that affected men and women equally.
Invisible Woman is a fictional character that appears in comic books published by Marvel Comics.
Caroline Emma Criado Perez is a British feminist author, journalist and activist. Her first national campaign, the Women's Room project, aimed to increase the presence of female experts in the media. She opposed the removal of the only woman from British banknotes, leading to the Bank of England's swift announcement that the image of Jane Austen would appear on the £10 note by 2017. That campaign led to sustained harassment on the social networking website Twitter of Criado Perez and other women; as a result, Twitter announced plans to improve its complaint procedures. Her most recent campaign was for a sculpture of a woman in Parliament Square; the statue of Millicent Fawcett was unveiled in April 2018, as part of the centenary celebrations of the winning of women's suffrage in the United Kingdom. Her 2019 book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men was a Sunday Times bestseller.
Gender bias on Wikipedia is a term used to describe various sex-related facts about Wikipedia: its contributors are mostly male, relatively few biographies on Wikipedia are about women, and topics primarily of interest to women are less well-covered.
Feminist language reform or feminist language planning refers to the effort, often of political and grassroots movements, to change how language is used to gender people, activities and ideas on an individual and societal level. This initiative has been adopted in countries such as Sweden, Switzerland and Australia, and has not been linked to higher gender equality.
The NeuroGenderings Network is an international group of researchers in neuroscience and gender studies. Members of the network study how the complexities of social norms, varied life experiences, details of laboratory conditions and biology interact to affect the results of neuroscientific research. Working under the label of "neurofeminism", they aim to critically analyze how the field of neuroscience operates, and to build an understanding of brain and gender that goes beyond gender essentialism while still treating the brain as fundamentally material. Its founding was part of a period of increased interest and activity in interdisciplinary research connecting neuroscience and the social sciences.
Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story is a 2017 book by science journalist Angela Saini. The book discusses the effect of sexism on scientific research, and how that sexism influences social beliefs.
The statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, London, honours the British suffragist leader and social campaigner Dame Millicent Fawcett. It was made in 2018 by Gillian Wearing. Following a campaign and petition by the activist Caroline Criado Perez, the statue's creation was endorsed by both the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Theresa May, and the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. The statue, Parliament Square's first monument to a woman and also its first sculpture by a woman, was funded through the government's Centenary Fund, which marks 100 years since some women won the right to vote. The memorial was unveiled on 24 April 2018.
Neurosexism is an alleged bias in the neuroscience of sex differences towards reinforcing harmful gender stereotypes. The term was coined by feminist scholar Cordelia Fine in a 2008 article and popularised by her 2010 book Delusions of Gender. The concept is now widely used by critics of the neuroscience of sex differences in neuroscience, neuroethics and philosophy.
Eva Kail is a Vienna-based urban planner who has popularized gender mainstreaming in city design and contributed to more than 60 projects related to gender equality in housing, transportation, planning, and design of public spaces.
Linda M. Scott is an American management academic and gender consultant. An expert on women's economic development, she is Emeritus DP World Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Oxford.