Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

Worth A Read Yes
Length 432
Quick Review The world is full of inequity. Some is intentional. Some is unintentional. Data bias affects women significantly from getting around to being diagnosed to just being inconvenienced. Data is blind, especially when the data doesn’t include women. a

My best friend told me about this book because he read it and was impressed. I was impressed he picked up a book about women’s issues. He’s no mysoginist; he’s just a man with interests lying elsewhere. 

At its core Invisible Women is about discrimination. The data gap may not be malicious or even something done on purpose, but it exists and perpetuates gender inequality around the world in small and big ways most people have not or will ever contemplate. I have lots of feelings and thoughts on Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women. I’m impressed. She pulls from a variety of sources on a variety of topics from snow removal to the lack of inclusion in medical research. I can only imagine the amount of information and studies she left out of the book, but she chose things of seeming inconsequence to things of extreme consequence. The bottom line:

• Women are other.
• Humanity suffers. 

There were so many insanely great quotable moments in the book: Most of my notes are just quotes. I’ll include all of the ones I jotted down at the bottom because they’re just too good. Invisible Women can be completely summed up in this quote on how the data gap  “is simply the product of a way of thinking that has been around for millenia and is therefore a kind of not thinking.”

I loved every part of this book. She writes on topics I honestly had no idea about: how snow removal is inadvertantly keeping women from succeeding. She also discusses topics I knew about but hadn’t though of in terms of gender equality: gendered language uses the male form as the default, but nongenderized languages don’t have better equality. To gendered discrimination I have personally experienced: medicine is not geared towards women, making them a priority, or taking their pain and symptoms seriously. (Had a listened to one asshat doctor who didn’t believe me or take me seriously, I would have died.)

Honestly, I would love to discuss all of the points Criado Perez makes in Invisible Women. If you have an interest, hit me up. I’m always up for a gender discussion. 

Criado Perez does a great job presenting the data and mostly the lack of data. She makes her points. She rarely includes anecdotes unless those anecdotes were included in studies. She bases all of her arguments in fact, leaving feelings and emotions behind. I, personally, love an emotional ploy. I, also, understand it’s not what fuels change on a systemic level. Criado Perez keeps herself out of the book. She’s acting as an information conduit. Her personality and opinions seep through in small ways. Her phrasing and occasional parenthetical statement packs a punch making it both interesting and a tiny pull at the emotional strings. She has a sense of humor to her writing, and I caught myself giggling more than once. 

Caroline Criado Perez has a way with words in Invisible Women. She is persuasive and interesting. One of the more important quotes is the very last sentence of the book: “All people needed to do was to ask women.” 

Memorable Quotes
“the chroniclers of the past have left little space for women’s role in the evolution of humanity, whether cultural or biological. Instead, the lives of men have been taken to represent those of humans overall.”
“Men go without saying, and women don’t get said at all.” hit me in the feels
“it matters when women literally can’t get said at all”
“Women have always worked. They have worked unpaid, underpaid, underappreciated, and invisibly, but they have always worked.”
“When it comes to the tech that ends up in our pockets (I’m ever hopeful)”
“We lack consistent, sex-disaggregated data from every country…”
“we continue to rely on data from studies done on men as if they apply to women.”
“And as an added bonus, not forcing women to march in time with men has not, as yet, led to the apocolypse.”
“Different sex: totally opposite result.”

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Title: Invisible Women; Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
Author: Caroline Criado Perez
Publisher: Abrams Press (Abrams)
Copyright: 2019
ISBN: 9781419729072