...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.
...useful and sobering ... Seeing imbalance in percentage terms gives the process of understanding and combating it an important dimension. The book offers endless nuggets to chew on ... What I would have liked to see more of in this book is some investigation of why, given all the data we have, we do so little to fix things.
Criado Perez handles this material with subtle wit, calm authority, and a tendency to turn toward solutions. The book inaccurately treats womanhood as interchangeable with certain traits or experiences—like small stature, having given birth to one’s children, or facing gender discrimination in professional settings—which will turn off some readers. But this is still a provocative, vital book.
The author provides an incisive narrative paced more like a novel than a scientific study, offering digestible information with a sharp dose of wit ... the author offers a balance of statistics, provocative questions, and concise assessments of systemic bias and how to address it. She pinpoints how the personal and the political intersect in these data gaps ... In clear language, the author builds a strong case for greater inclusion with this thoughtful and surprisingly humorous view of institutional bias and gendered information gaps.
