Invisible Women

By Caroline Criado Perez

When it snows, I'm reminded of the opening chapter of Invisible Women. Perez asks us: can snow-clearing be sexist? It's a brilliant opener because even the mostly staunchly feminist among us might falter. Take a look at this scene I snapped this week:

You might notice that the road is entirely clear of snow and ice, but the pavement is covered in frozen snow. It was incredibly slippy. It's like this through most of town - in the supermarket carpark, the spaces are clear but the footpaths are frozen, pedestrians having to clamber over big heaps of snow dumped over the footpath when the parking spaces were cleared. The car-related infrastructure is clear, but the pedestrian infrastructure is not. Is this sexist?

Perez talks about Karlskoga, in Sweden, where they looked into this as part of a gender equity policy review. At first, they laughed at the prospect that a snow-clearing schedule could be sexist. They weren't laughing after they looked into it. It is sexist, and it's an unlikely example of an approach to a problem designed with only men's experience of that problem in mind.

Women are more likely than men to walk and take public transport. They're less likely to have a car. If a household owns a car, women are less likely to have access to it. Women's travel patterns tend to be more complicated than men's, because women do 75% of the world's unpaid care work. Women are three times as likely as men to take a child to school in London. Women are more likely to be caring for older people, too. Women are more likely to be travelling on foot and physically burdened - by young children, pushchairs, wheelchairs, or older people with restricted mobility. Imagine trying to push a pushchair down the pavement in the photo.

When Karlskoga used this data to change the snow-clearing schedule, not only did it promote equity in ability to travel, it saved them money. Pedestrians, who are most likely to be women, are three times more likely to be injured than motorists in slippy or icy conditions, so clearing the pavements meant fewer accidents.

From hereon, Perez takes us through many examples of the ways the gender data gap affects women's everyday lives, from the mildly irritating (like wearing a blanket in an office set to a male temperature preference) to the life-threatening (like driving a car where safety features are designed to protect men, so women are 47% more likely to be seriously injured, or being more likely to die from a heart attack because the information we're given about heart attacks is about male symptoms). She argues that the gender data cap is a cause and a consequence of a type of unthinking that sees men as the default humans, and largely forgets about women.

A brilliant, accessible read that reveals the pervasive data gaps in a world designed for men.