Caroline Criado Perez investigates the shocking root cause of gender inequality and research in Invisible Women, diving into women’s lives at home, the workplace, the public square, the doctor’s office, and more.
...a damning indictment of the institutional ignorance about women that is built into all aspects of life, and the unintentional discrimination it causes. Invisible Women is a game-changer; an uncompromising blitz of facts, sad, mad, bad and funny, making an unanswerable case and doing so brilliantly ... The most powerful part of her book focuses on the male bias of Silicon Valley, where our futures are designed ... I’m happy to report Criado Perez dodges those traditional feminist staples of worthiness and humourlessness. Despite grappling with a barrage of evidence — there are 100 pages of endnotes — she largely manages to avoid bludgeoning the reader ... the ambition and scope — and sheer originality — of Invisible Women is huge ... It should be on every policymaker, politician and manager’s shelves.
While some of these 'gender data gaps' are well-known, others are strikingly unexpected ... The book covers a huge range of examples of how data are biased against women — from industrial design to healthcare systems to disaster responses ... Many [examples] resonated with me personally ... Data determine how resources are allocated. Bad data lead to bad resource allocation. Criado Perez hammers home this message with example after example, and a lack of evidence is certainly not a criticism that could be levelled at the book ... one worry is whether the author can have done adequate due diligence on the quality of all the research she cites ... Criado Perez comprehensively makes the case that seemingly objective data can actually be highly male-biased ... Policymakers everywhere should take heed.
...furiously brilliant ... the originality of Criado Perez’s research is that she hunts down and uses hard data as her evidence, and when, as is often the case, there is no gender-disaggregated data, she shows how this too is discriminatory ... The book is admirably internationalist in its perspective ... This is an excellent book packed with practical information of the kind required by those attempting to dismantle the patriarchy.
