Invisible Women
Multitasking with some unpaid caring work :)
My students know about my love for books. In fact, I regularly read excerpts to them during class. I have accumulated a collection of texts over the years that give interesting and meaningful perspective to the topics that we discuss in class. A historical context, a human experience, a poetic phrasing. Some of my students share my love for reading, and we often swap recommendations. This book was recommended to me by a student and it may be one that I add to my collection of supplemental course texts.
Summary (No spoilers)
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez is a thoroughly well researched report on the underrepresentation of women in all areas of research and decision making globally, and how that impacts women, certainly, but also all people everywhere. The book looks at this problem through the contexts of daily life, the workplace, public space and product design, medicine, economics, politics, and disaster response. Did I mention it is exceptionally well cited? The bibliography occupies fully 1/3 of the text. Caroline has done her homework on this.
Touchstones
The first point this book makes is that across the long arc of history, and in all realms, men are the default human and women are a variation from that norm. As a society, we assume most things to be male unless they are either excessively feminine or specifically marked as female. A few examples of gender neutral things that conjure a male perspective unless specified otherwise: basketball, president, judge, lion, pilot, minister, firefighter, engineer, truck, I could go on.
The result of this deeply male-dominated culture is that the male experience, the male perspective, has come to be seen as universal, while the female experience - that of half the global population, after all - is seen as niche.
The book in fact begins with a quote from Simone de Beauvoir: “Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.” This bit about truth clarified for me something that I pondered in my book report on The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny. It had to do with the idea that facts and truth are two different things. I can see more clearly now the accuracy of that observation. Facts and truth are two different things. Facts can be half truths. Facts can bury the truth, reshape the truth, distort the truth if told selectively. As a researcher myself, I understand that data can be used to weave a story, and that the storyteller’s bias will impact it to some degree, no matter the steps taken to neutralize it. Caroline Criado Perez is certainly trying to make a point through this book that, on occasion, feels slightly heavy handed. But she had good reason to do it that way. It takes so much data to convince us away from what we have been socialized to see as the norm (men). On top of that, as a women she probably understood that she would have to make a very strong argument in order to be taken seriously. No doubt she is boxed into a catch 22: not a strong enough argument and people won’t buy in, too strong of an argument and she’s just biased by feminism. The “default male” ethos is strong, subconscious, ingrained. It has taken real work for me, as someone who believes in upending this male default, to do something as simple as use more gender neutral language. It still is a conscious effort to disrupt the default thinking I have been socialized into.
Page after page in this book is packed with the evidence (much of which also rings true anecdotally) that women have been and continue to be severely underrepresented in all kinds of places where our perception of normal is developed, and where important decisions are made. Women are underrepresented in children’s TV characters, speaking roles and time on screen in TV and film, statues, news reports, figures on money, video game characters. Women are underrepresented in history textbooks, literature curriculums, medical textbooks. We are underrepresented in car crash test dummies, clinical trials, political positions, venture capital recipients, calculations of GDP. Our specific presentations are not discussed as it relates to risk factors for and symptoms of disease. Women’s needs and perspectives have not been considered in the design of public spaces, in work schedules and routines, in technologies such as phone size, voice recognition software, and virtual reality. Being left out of these spaces has real impacts on women’s ability to participate fully, safely, to our highest potential. In some cases it threatens our very lives. As we move increasingly into an age of algorithms and big data, our being left out sets us up for further problems. If women have not been represented in the data, and that data is being used to make further decisions, then the current problems will only be amplified.
When your big data is corrupted by big silences, the truths you get are half-truths, at best. And often, for women, they aren’t true at all. As computer scientists themselves say: ‘Garbage in, garbage out.’
In the places in which women are overrepresented, it is often to our detriment. Women are significantly overrepresented among those who are displaced due to violence (both national and personal), and they are more likely to be victims of abuse and violence, frequently by the men in uniform whom they encounter while seeking help and safety. Women are also overrepresented among those doing unpaid work, energy intensive caring work, and gig or contract work which often comes without benefits, security, or bargaining rights.
Globally, 75% of unpaid work is done by women, who spend between three and six hours per day on it compared to men’s average of thirty minutes to two hours… Spending cuts on public services are not just inequitable, they are counterproductive. Increasing the amount of unpaid work women have to do lowers their participation rate in the paid labour force. And women’s paid labour force participation rate has a significant impact on GDP… Social infrastructure [public services that underpin the functioning of a modern society like child and elder care] ‘yields returns to the economy and society well into the future in the form of a better educated, healthier, and better cared for population’.
Investment in early childhood education has been found to increase employment, median annual earnings, home ownership, and savings accounts, while decreasing crime rates and attendant law enforcement costs. It also allows more women with young children to join the workforce, thereby increasing tax revenue to such a degree that up to 95% of the investment cost could be recouped.
We like to think that the unpaid work women do is just about individual women caring for their individual family members to their own individual benefit. It isn’t. Women’s unpaid work is work that society depends on, and it is work from which society as a whole benefits. When the government cuts public services that we all pay for with our taxes, demand for those services doesn’t suddenly cease. The work is simply transferred onto women, with all the attendant negative impacts. And so the unpaid work that women do isn’t simply a matter of ‘choice’. It is built into the system we have created - and it could just as easily be built out of it.
Considering and prioritizing the perspectives and needs of women does more than just make women’s lives easier or more convenient. It makes workplaces more productive, it makes children more likely to be successful adults, it improves health, it benefits the economy, it reduces crime, and it fosters global peace.
My Review
I learned so much from this text. Parts of it were deflating, overwhelming in the evidence of inequity and injustice. And yet, it all felt familiar. Things I know in my bones, both from my lived experience as a woman, and from my extensive reading and research on the problems that arise when a diverse array of voices are not at the tables where decisions are made. Importantly, as the author notes, this gender data gap “is not malicious, or even deliberate. Quite the opposite. It is simply the product of a way of thinking that has been around for millennia.” We could change it if we want to. I believe this work is important, and in some ways the data gaps are enormous. But I also know that the first step to solutions is recognizing, facing, and understanding the problems. This only happens when we are willing to look with a critical eye at our environs and care about them enough to work towards their greater good. I give Invisible Women 5 stars.