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Last Word | Catalyst
Exposing data bias in a world
designed for men
W
hen a heavily pregnant Sheryl Sandberg
struggled to walk across the huge Google
car park in 2014, she was, at least, in
a position to do something about it. In Sandberg’s
Lean In, she recalls being embarrassed that she hadn’t
realised “that pregnant women needed reserved
parking until I experienced my own aching feet”.
And that, for Caroline Criado-Perez, is the point.
The fact that neither Sandberg nor Google’s male
founders had been pregnant before exposed a gender
data gap that could be quite easily filled. But the
reality is that it took a senior woman to understand
the problem and fix it.
It would be easy to see this as
a small issue, up there with other
niggles women have: paving that
fails to take heels into account
or office temperatures designed
around the metabolic resting rate
of the average 40-year old 70kg man.
But what Invisible Women does
so effectively is to weave together
an astonishing range of examples
which shine a light on a world which
– whether by accident or design,
often both – excludes the needs and
potential of half the population.
The book ranges widely: from
government policy and medical
research, to technology, workplaces,
urban planning and the media,
Criado-Perez exposes data gaps,
stereotyping and bias that clearly
discriminate against women.
This results in everything from
irritation and frustration to missed
opportunities and even an increased
risk of injury and death.
Central to the book is the issue of
what constitutes ‘work’. When governments started
to calculate GDP in the wake of the Great Depression,
they made a deliberate decision that collecting data
around unpaid work in the home would be too
challenging. As estimates suggest that unpaid care
work could account for up to 50% of GDP in high-
income countries and 80% in low-income countries,
a disproportionate amount of it carried out by women,
this must be the single biggest gender data gap of all.
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As women have increasingly joined the paid
workforce, this shift has not been matched by men
doing more unpaid work; women have simply
increased their total work time, well in excess of
recommended paid hours per week limits. This may
account for the fact that, in the UK, for example,
women report feeling stress at work more often than
men. Long-hours cultures only make things worse.
Often, the pressure is too much, with women
accommodating their caring responsibilities by
working part-time, often below their skill and pay
level, with knock-on effects for pension provision.
Even when women take things
into their own hands, they face
a systematic discrimination as
entrepreneurs: 2018 research by
the Boston Consulting Group found
that, on average, female business
owners receive less than half the
level of investment as their male
counterparts, despite producing
more than twice the revenue per
dollar of funding.
But hope is at hand. Criado-Perez
remains optimistic: “when women
are able to step out of the shadows…
things start to shift”. And not just
women. Consider, for example,
the evidence that men who take
paternity leave tend to play a more
active role in future childcare too:
in 2010, a Swedish study showed
that a mother’s earning potential
increased by an average of 7% for
every month of leave taken by the
father. Or the fact that the New York
Philharmonic Orchestra started to
recruit women for the first time
after instituting blind auditions.
Or that changing the language and stock images used
in job ads for leadership positions will increase the
number of women who apply. Perhaps we can all effect
change by collecting and analysing the right data and
by challenging assumptions.
This is a book that sometimes labours an already
familiar point. But if recognising problems is the first
step towards creating solutions, Invisible Women does
us all a favour.