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Invisible Women

Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

Caroline Criado Perez

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social-science

Introduction: The Default Male

  • So a group of one hundred female teachers in Spanish would be referred to as ‘las profesoras’ – but as soon as you add a single male teacher, the group suddenly becomes ‘los profesores’. Such is the power of the default male.Feb 28 2022 11:15PM
  • In short: because men go without saying, it matters when women literally can’t get said at all.Feb 28 2022 11:17PM
  • It’s in statues: when I counted all the statues in the UK’s Public Monuments and Sculptures Association database I found that there were more statues of men called John than there were of historical, named, non-royal women (the only reason adding royal women to the figure just beats the Johns is down to Queen Victoria, whose enthusiasm for putting up statues of herself I have a grudging respect for).Mar 1 2022 1:16PM
  • We class the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries as ‘the Renaissance’ even though, as social psychologist Carol Tavris points out in her 1991 book The Mismeasure of Woman, it wasn’t a renaissance for women, who were still largely excluded from intellectual and artistic life. We call the eighteenth century ‘the Enlightenment’, even though, while it may have expanded ‘the rights of man’, it ‘narrowed the rights of women, who were denied control of their property and earnings and barred from higher education and professional training’. We think of ancient Greece as the cradle of democracy although the female half of the population were explicitly excluded from voting.Mar 1 2022 1:29PM
  • At the turn of the twentieth century, award-winning British engineer, physicist and inventor Hertha Ayrton remarked that while errors overall are ‘notoriously hard to kill [. . .] an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat’Mar 1 2022 2:35PM
  • Pierre Bourdieu wrote in 1977 that ‘what is essential goes without saying because it comes without saying: the tradition is silent, not least about itself as a tradition’Mar 2 2022 4:16PM

Chapter 1: Can Snow-Clearing be Sexist?

  • The men (and it would have been men) who originally devised the schedule knew how they travelled and they designed around their needs. They didn’t deliberately set out to exclude women. They just didn’t think about them. They didn’t think to consider if women’s needs might be different. And so this data gap was a result of not involving women in planning.Mar 2 2022 9:17PM
  • Women wanted the road to be constructed in one direction to ‘facilitate their access to the nearest village with basic services’; men wanted it built in the opposite direction ‘to enable them to reach the larger town and market more easily on horsebackMar 2 2022 9:20PM
  • These charges seem particularly egregious in light of a 2016 study which revealed quite how much Chicago’s transport system is biased against typical female travel patterns. The study, which compared Uberpool (the car-sharing version of the popular taxi app) with public transport in Chicago, revealed that for trips downtown, the difference in time between Uberpool and public transport was negligible – around six minutes on average. But for trips between neighbourhoods, i.e. the type of travel women are likely to be making for informal work or care-giving responsibilities, Uberpool took twenty-eight minutes to make a trip that took forty-seven minutes on public transport.Mar 2 2022 9:46PM

Chapter 3: The Long Friday

  • 1975 had been declared by the UN as a Women’s Year, and in Iceland women were determined to make it count. A committee was set up with representatives from Iceland’s five biggest women’s organisations. After some discussion they came up with the idea of a strike. On October, no woman in Iceland would do a lick of work. No paid work, but also no cooking, no cleaning, no child care. Let the men of Iceland see how they coped without the invisible work women did every day to keep the country moving.Mar 3 2022 8:13AM
  • This observation may go some way to explaining why a Finnish study found that single women recovered better from heart attacks than married women – particularly when put alongside a University of Michigan study which found that husbands create an extra seven hours of housework a week for womenMar 3 2022 12:26PM
  • When Ryan Gosling thanked his partner Eva Mendes at the 2017 Golden Globes for her unpaid work, acknowledging that without it he would not be on stage accepting an award, he marked himself out as a rare manMar 3 2022 12:27PM
  • Bovasso sums it up: ‘You can get $30 for takeout if you work late (because your wife isn’t there to cook you dinner) or $30 for Scotch if you want to drink your face off, but you can’t get $30 for a sitter (because your wife is at home with the kids).’Mar 3 2022 8:41PM
  • Which is women all over: always the exception, never the defaultMar 3 2022 8:41PM

Chapter 4: The Myth of Meritocracy

  • So there was something remarkable going on when the proportion of women in this orchestra grew from a statistical 0% to 10% in a decade. That something was blind auditions. Instituted in the early 1970s following a lawsuit, blind auditions are what they sound like: the hiring committee can’t see who is playing in the audition, because there is a screen between them and the player. The screens had an immediate impact. By the early 1980s, women began to make up 50% of the share of new hiresMar 6 2022 11:15PM
  • An analysis of 248 performance reviews collected from a variety of US-based tech companies found that women receive negative personality criticism that men simply don’t. Women are told to watch their tone, to step back. They are called bossy, abrasive, strident, aggressive, emotional and irrational. Out of all these words, only aggressive appeared in men’s reviews at all – ‘twice with an exhortation to be more of it’.Mar 6 2022 11:16PM
  • Studies have shown that a belief in your own personal objectivity, or a belief that you are not sexist, makes you less objective and more likely to behave in a sexist wayMar 6 2022 11:17PM
  • But if in Silicon Valley meritocracy is a religion, its God is a white male Harvard dropoutMar 6 2022 11:18PM
  • Women are also asked to do more undervalued admin work than their male colleagues – and they say yes, because they are penalised for being ‘unlikeable’ if they say no.Mar 6 2022 11:25PM
  • On the other hand, appearing authoritative and knowledgeable as a woman can result in student disapproval, because this violates gendered expectationsMar 6 2022 11:28PM
  • Meanwhile men are rewarded if they are accessible at a level that is simply expected in women and therefore only noticed if it’s absent.Mar 6 2022 11:28PM
  • Think of a genius. Chances are, you pictured a man. It’s OK – we all have these unconscious biases. I pictured Einstein – that famous one of him sticking his tongue out, his hair all over the place. And the reality is that this bias (that I like to call ‘brilliance bias’) means that male professors are routinely considered more knowledgeable, more objective, more innately talented. And career progression that rests on teaching evaluations completely fails to account for it.Mar 6 2022 11:29PM
  • One US study found that female candidates are described with more communal (warm; kind; nurturing) and less active (ambitious; self-confident) language than men. And having communal characteristics included in your letter of recommendation makes it less likely that you will get the job,48 particularly if you’re a woman: while ‘team-player’ is taken as a leadership quality in men, for women the term ‘can make a woman seem like a follower’. Letters of recommendation for women have also been found to emphasise teaching (lower status) over research (higher status); to include more terms that raise doubt (hedges; faint praise); and to be less likely to include standout adjectives like ‘remarkable’ and ‘outstanding’. Women were more often described with ‘grindstone’ terms like ‘hard-working’.Mar 6 2022 11:33PM
  • In 1984 American tech journalist Steven Levy published his bestselling book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Levy’s heroes were all brilliant. They were all single-minded. They were all men. They also didn’t get laid much. ‘You would hack, and you would live by the Hacker Ethic, and you knew that horribly inefficient and wasteful things like women burned too many cycles, occupied too much memory space,’ Levy explained. ‘Women, even today, are considered grossly unpredictable,’ one of his heroes told him. ‘How can a [default male] hacker tolerate such an imperfect being?’Mar 6 2022 11:35PM
  • Staying up all night doing something is a sign of single-mindedness and possibly immaturity as well as love for the subject. The girls may show their love for computers and computer science very differently. If you are looking for this type of obsessive behavior, then you are looking for a typically young, male behavior. While some girls will exhibit it, most won’t.’Mar 6 2022 11:37PM
  • Gild undoubtedly did not intend to create an algorithm that discriminated against women. They were intending to remove human biases. But if you aren’t aware of how those biases operate, if you aren’t collecting data and taking a little time to produce evidence-based processes, you will continue to blindly perpetuate old injusticesMar 7 2022 3:04AM
  • Recent research has emerged showing that while women tend to assess their intelligence accurately, men of average intelligence think they are more intelligent than two-thirds of people.Mar 7 2022 3:07AM

Chapter 5: The Henry Higgins Effect

  • But a recent study found that ‘the metabolic rate of young adult females performing light office work is significantly lower’ than the standard values for men doing the same type of activity. In fact, the formula may overestimate female metabolic rate by as much as 35%, meaning that current offices are on average five degrees too cold for womenMar 7 2022 3:11AM
  • Meanwhile, we’ve only just noticed that nearly all pain studies have been done exclusively in male mice.Mar 7 2022 10:28PM
  • Women in the military are also affected by equipment designed around the male bodyMar 7 2022 10:58PM
  • Failing to account for female bodies in the military doesn’t just result in equipment that doesn’t work for women: it can injure them too. Women in the British Army have been found to be up to seven times more likely than men to suffer from musculoskeletal injuries, even if they have ‘the same aerobic fitness and strength’Mar 7 2022 10:59PM
  • Why can’t a woman be more like a man?’ he grumbles. It’s a common complaint – and one for which the common solution is to fix the women. This is unsurprising in a world where what is male is seen as universal and what is female is seen as ‘atypical’.Mar 7 2022 11:00PM
  • In 1997 a British female police officer was stabbed and killed while using a hydraulic ram to enter a flat. She had removed her body armour because it was too difficult to use the ram while wearing it. Two years later a female police officer revealed that she had to have breast-reduction surgery because of the health effects of wearing her body armour. After this case was reported another 700 officers in the same force came forward to complain about the standard-issue protective vest. But although the complaints have been coming regularly over the past twenty years, little seems to have been done. British female police officers report being bruised by their kit belts; a number have had to have physiotherapy as a result of the way stab vests sit on their female body; many complain there is no space for their breasts. This is not only uncomfortable, it also results in stab vests coming up too short, leaving women unprotected. Which rather negates the whole point of wearing one.Mar 7 2022 11:05PM

Chapter 6: Being Worth Less Than a Shoe

  • Zero-hour contracts, short-term contracts, employment through an agency, these have all been enticingly rebranded the ‘gig economy’ by Silicon Valley, as if they are of benefit to workersMar 9 2022 10:41AM
  • But the regional and sector-specific studies that do exist suggest ‘an overrepresentation of women’ in precarious jobs. In the UK, the trade union Unison found that by 2014 women made up almost two-thirds of low-paid workers,16 and many were ‘working multiple jobs on precarious contracts to make up lost hoursMar 9 2022 10:52AM
  • A 2016 study by the TUC found that 69% of women in manufacturing and 67% of women in hospitality and leisure ‘reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment’ compared to an average of 52%. A 2011 US study similarly found that the construction industry had the highest rates of sexual harassment, followed by transportation and utilities. One survey of senior level women working in Silicon Valley found that 90% of women had witnessed sexist behaviour; 87% had been on the receiving end of demeaning comments by male colleagues; and 60% had received unwanted sexual advances. Of that 60%, more than half had been propositioned more than once, and 65% had been propositioned by a superior. One in three women surveyed had felt afraid for her personal safety.Mar 15 2022 10:19PM
  • Research has found that nurses are subjected to ‘more acts of violence than police officers or prison guards’. In Ontario in 2014, the number of workplace injuries that required time off work from the healthcare sector ‘greatly outnumbered those in other sectors surveyed’. A recent US study similarly found that ‘healthcare workers required time off work due to violence four times more often than other types of injury’.Mar 15 2022 10:20PM
  • Leadership in all sectors is male-dominated and the reality is that men do not face this kind of aggression in the way women do. And so, rather like the Google leadership not thinking to put in pregnancy parking, many organisations don’t think to put in procedures to deal adequately with sexual harassment and violence.Mar 15 2022 10:21PM

Chapter 7: The Plough Hypothesis

  • According to a 2011 paper, Boserup’s hypothesis holds up to scrutiny. Researchers found that descendants of societies that traditionally practised plough agriculture held more sexist views even if they emigrated to other countries. The paper also found that sexist beliefs correlated with the kind of geo-climactic conditions that would favour plough agriculture over shifting agriculture. This suggested that it was the climate rather than pre-existing sexism that dictated the adoption of the plough – which in turn drove the adoption of sexist views.Mar 15 2022 11:59PM
  • A 2013 WASHplus-and USAID-funded report on user experiences of five stoves in Bangladesh repeatedly acknowledged that all five stoves increased cooking time and required more attending. This prevented women from multitasking as they would with a traditional stove, and forced them to change the way they cooked – again increasing their workload. Nevertheless, the main and repeated recommendation of the report was to fix the women, rather than the stoves. The women needed to be educated on how great the ‘improved’ stoves were, rather than stove designers needing to be educated on how not to increase women’s already fifteen-hour average working day.Mar 16 2022 3:38AM
  • It is the stoves: developers have consistently prioritised technical parameters such as fuel efficiency over the needs of the stove user, frequently leading users to reject them, explains Crewe. And although the low adoption rate is a problem going back decades, development agencies have yet to crack the problem,50 for the very simple reason that they still haven’t got the hang of consulting women and then designing a product rather than enforcing a centralised design on them from above.Mar 16 2022 3:39AM
  • That women’s failure to adopt clean stoves may simply result from a lack of purchasing authority is backed up by a 2016 report which found that ‘female-headed households are more likely to adopt cleaner cooking solutions than male-headed households’Mar 16 2022 3:40AM

Chapter 8: One-Size-Fits-Men

  • Octaves on a standard keyboard are 7.4 inches wide, and one study found that this keyboard disadvantages 87% of adult female pianists.Mar 16 2022 3:42AM

Chapter 8

  • Rachael Tatman agrees: ‘The fact that men enjoy better performance than women with these technologies means that it’s harder for women to do their jobs. Even if it only takes a second to correct an error, those seconds add up over the days and weeks to a major time sink, time your male colleagues aren’t wasting messing with technology.’Oct 11 2022 7:32AM

Chapter 9

  • This was not to be the only time Apple completely forgot about at least 50% of their users. When Apple launched their AI, Siri, she (ironically) could find prostitutes and Viagra suppliers, but not abortion providers. Siri could help you if you’d had a heart attack, but if you told her you’d been raped, she replied ‘I don’t know what you mean by ‘I was raped.’ These are basic errors that surely would have been caught by a team with enough women on it – that is, by a team without a gender data gap.Oct 13 2022 11:21PM
  • Defaulting to male seems particularly endemic in sports tech. Starting with the most basic, the calorie count on treadmills is perfect for practically no one, but it will be more accurate for your average man because its calculations are based on the average male weight (the default setting for calorie count on most exercise machines is for a person who weighs eleven stone). And although you can change the weight setting, that still leaves a calculation based on an average male calorie burn. Women generally have a higher fat and lower muscle distribution than men as well as different ratios of various muscle fibres. What this means at a basic level is that even after accounting for weight difference, men on average will burn 8% more calories than a woman of the same weight. The treadmill does not account for this.Oct 13 2022 11:22PM
  • On the topic of sexy robots, even if men do identify a problem that affects us all, that doesn’t mean that without female input they will come up with the right solution. When, in ‘retaliation’ for women denying him the sex to which he believed he was entitled, Alek Minassian mowed down and killed ten people in Toronto with a rented van, the New York Times published a column headlined ‘The Redistribution of Sex’, which argued that sex robots could be the answer to the plight of men who can’t convince women to sleep with them. Feminists might argue that the solution is, instead, to challenge male sexual entitlement.Oct 13 2022 11:40PM

Chapter 11

  • More broadly, researchers suggest that because women are socialised to ‘take turns in conversation, to downplay their own status, and to demonstrate behaviors that communicate more accessibility and friendliness’, the traditional medical interview model may be unsuccessful in getting the information from women that is needed to diagnose them effectively.Oct 30 2022 5:16AM

Chapter 12

  • Like so many of the decisions to exclude women in the interests of simplicity, from architecture to medical research, this conclusion could only be reached in a culture that conceives of men as the default human and women as a niche aberration. To distort a reality you are supposedly trying to measure makes sense only if you don’t see women as essential. It makes sense only if you see women as an added extra, a complicating factor. It doesn’t make sense if you’re talking about half of the human race. It doesn’t make sense if you care about accurate data.Oct 30 2022 5:32AM
  • A more dramatic government intervention than the introduction of paid parental leave would be to invest in social infrastructure. The term infrastructure is generally understood to mean the physical structures that underpin the functioning of a modern society: roads, railways, water pipes, power supplies. It doesn’t tend to include the public services that similarly underpin the functioning of a modern society like child and elder care.Oct 30 2022 4:51PM
  • 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 on female paid labour-participation rates, and GDPOct 30 2022 10:23PM

Chapter 13

  • A zombie stat is a spurious statistic that just won’t die – in part because it feels intuitively right. In the case of the UK’s 2017 general election we needed an explanation for why, contrary to nearly all polling predictions, the Labour Party did so well. An unprecedented increase in youth turnout fitted the bill: Labour had courted the youth vote, the story went, and it had almost won. But then, in January 2018, new data emerged from the British Electoral Survey. There was some debate over how definitive the data was,7 but the famous youthquake was downgraded to more of a youth-tremor at best. By March no one credible was talking about a ‘youth surge’ without substantial caveats, and the 72% statistic was firmly on life support.Oct 30 2022 10:24PM
  • Money continues not to be shared equally between couples, and money controlled by women continues to be more likely to be spent on children (a gender-neutral word which itself hides a wealth of inequalities) than money controlled by menOct 31 2022 5:22AM
  • In Rwanda and Malawi, children from female-headed households were healthier than children from male-headed households – even when the male-headed households had higher incomes.Oct 31 2022 5:24AM
  • The lower earner (usually the woman) becomes the ‘secondary earner’, and their income occupies the higher tax bracket. To return to our couple earning $60,000 and $20,000, the person earning $20,000 will be taxed on that income as if it is the final $20,000 of an $80,000 salary, rather than all she earns. That is, she will pay a much higher rate of tax on that income than if she filed independently of her higher-earning husbandOct 31 2022 5:29AM

Chapter 14

  • Projection bias amplified by a form of confirmation bias, if you like. Which goes some way towards explaining why it is so common to find male bias masquerading as gender neutrality. If the majority of people in power are men – and they are – the majority of people in power just don’t see it. Male bias just looks like common sense to them. But ‘common sense’ is in fact a product of the gender data gap.Oct 31 2022 5:39AM
  • The practice of excluding women from decision-making is widespread, and it is one of the most efficient ways (second only to not electing women at all) that this male-biased system has of siphoning off gendered data in the form of female life experience and perspectiveOct 31 2022 5:45AM
  • The aggression seems to increase along with the proportion of female politicians. Research from around the world (including saintly Scandinavia) has shown that as female representation increases, so does hostility against female politicians. Especially from their male colleagues. Studies in the US and New Zealand have shown that men ‘become more verbally aggressive and controlling of both committee hearings and parliamentary debates following an expansion in the proportion of women in the legislature’.Oct 31 2022 5:51AM
  • Another study found that as the proportion of women in US Congress increases (bear in mind Congress is only 19.4% female59), women are less likely to achieve leadership positions within their parties. Further research from the US and Argentina hasOct 31 2022 5:50AM

Chapter 16

  • A male-biased warning system is far from the only part of Bangladesh’s cyclone infrastructure that has been built without reference to women’s needs.Oct 31 2022 11:13AM

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