Blog Post 1 - Book review
Published:
‘Invisible women’ by Caroline Criado Perez.
Lovely discovery. My colleagues present after defending my thesis.
About the book
The book is sixteen readable chapters for exposing data bias. It reveals how modern societal infrastructures have been designed to help men daily, based on the misconception that data on men’s needs describe the problems both men and women face.
The book states that our problem-solving engineering is tuned to solve the problems men imagine, and we tested to perform its best for men’s needs. The reason is that we do not collect enough data on both men and women, and when we do, we don’t sex-disaggregate the data to measure the impact of innovative projects on both men and women. We test innovation disproportionately only on men samples. The book develops on many examples and exposes numerous scenarios that confirm this data bias.
As a result, the book illustrates how we have built modern workplaces, cities, tech products, research areas, medical and political systems, and even the policy-making rules under the fallacy that women’s essentials are the same as men’s. We have assumed that building solutions for men favor men and women equally. The author discloses multiple instances where this is not the case. Women’s needs are different; we ignore them for a long time, and we perpetuate this ignorance by thinking unraveling men’s problems solve all problems. Women play a unique social role; accounting for what women need to fulfill their role can profit both men and women.