Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

by Caroline Criado Perez

  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.57 Especially from their male colleagues. Studies58 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’. 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.60 Further research61 from the US and Argentina has shown that having large numbers of female legislators is ‘tied to both women’s diminished success in passing legislation and reduced chances of being appointed to “masculine” and “powerful” Committees’.62 In a similar vein, US analysis has found that framing human rights issues as women’s rights issues makes male politicians less likely to support legislation, and if a rights bill is mainly sponsored by women, it ends up being watered down and states are less likely to invest resources.63 It seems that democracy – in so far as it pertains to women – is broken.

  Working in the context of such extreme psychological warfare inevitably affects women’s ability to do their jobs. Many women told the IPU that they had restricted their travel, made sure they went home before nightfall, or only travelled when accompanied.64 Others self-censor, particularly when it comes to speaking up about women’s issues65 (which tend to generate the most aggression66), some going as far as dispensing with social media altogether, and in this way deprive themselves ‘of a forum in which to disseminate and debate their ideas’.

  Others simply stand down. Violence against female politicians in Asia and Latin America has been shown to make them less likely to stand for re-election and more likely to leave after fewer terms compared to male politicians.67 ‘I don’t know if I will be a candidate in the next elections,’ one Asian MP told the IPU, ‘because I need to think about not causing too much harm to my family.’68 Meanwhile one in three female politicians in Swedish local politics ‘reportedly considered giving up their positions as a result of threatening incidents’.69

  The abuse faced by female politicians also makes women more reluctant to stand in the first place. More than 75% of British women on a programme for aspiring female leaders said that sexist abuse of female politicians online ‘was a point of concern when considering whether to pursue a role in public life’.70 In Australia, 60% of women aged eighteen to twenty-one and 80% of women over thirty-one said the way female politicians were treated by the media made them less likely to run for office.71 Nigeria experienced a ‘marked decline’ in the number of female politicians elected to the country’s congress between 2011 and 2015; a study by the US NGO the National Democratic Institute found that this could be ‘attributed to the violence and harassment that women in office face’.72 And, as we have seen, this decline in female representation will give rise to a gender data gap that in turn will result in the passing of less legislation that addresses women’s needs.

  The evidence is clear: politics as it is practised today is not a female-friendly environment. This means that while technically the playing field is level, in reality women operate at a disadvantage compared to men. This is what comes of devising systems without accounting for gender.

  Sheryl Sandberg’s approach for navigating hostile work environments, outlined in her book Lean In, is for women to buckle up and push through. And of course that is part of the solution. I am not a female politician, but as a woman with a public profile I get my own share of threats and abuse. And, unpopular as this opinion may be, I believe that the onus is on those of us who feel able to weather the storm, to do so. The threats come from a place of fear. In fact, a gender-data-gap-driven fear: certain men, who have grown up in a culture saturated by male voices and male faces, fear what they see as women taking away power and public space that is rightfully theirs. This fear will not dissipate until we fill in that cultural gender data gap, and, as a consequence, men no longer grow up seeing the public sphere as their rightful domain. So, to a certain extent, it is an ordeal that our generation of women needs to go through in order that the women who come after us don’t.

  This is not to say that there are no structural solutions. Take the issue of women being interrupted. An analysis of fifteen years of Supreme Court oral arguments found that ‘men interrupt more than women, and they particularly interrupt women more than they interrupt other men’.73 This goes for male lawyers (female lawyers weren’t found to interrupt at all) as well as judges, even though lawyers are meant to stop speaking when a justice starts speaking. And, as in the political sphere, the problem seems to have got worse as female representation on the bench has increased.

  An individualist solution might be to tell women to interrupt right back74 – perhaps working on their ‘polite interrupting’75 skills. But there’s a problem with this apparently gender-neutral approach, which is that it isn’t gender-neutral in effect: interrupting simply isn’t viewed the same way when women do it. In June 2017 US Senator Kamala Harris was asking an evasive Attorney General Jeff Sessions some tough questions. When he prevaricated once too often, she interrupted him and pressed him to answer. She was then in turn (on two separate occasions) interrupted and admonished by Senator John McCain for her questioning style.76 He did not do the same to her colleague Senator Rob Wyden, who subjected Sessions to similarly dogged questioning, and it was only Harris who was later dubbed ‘hysterical’.77

  The problem isn’t that women are irrationally polite. It’s that they know – whether consciously or not – that ‘polite’ interrupting simply doesn’t exist for them. So telling women to behave more like men – as if male behaviour is a gender-neutral human default – is unhelpful, and in fact potentially damaging. What is instead called for is a political and work environment that accounts both for the fact that men interrupt more than women do, and that women are penalised if they behave in a similar way.

  It has become fashionable for modern workplaces to relax what are often seen as outmoded relics of a less egalitarian age: out with stuffy hierarchies, in with flat organisational structures. But the problem with the absence of a formal hierarchy is that it doesn’t actually result in an absence of a hierarchy altogether. It just means that the unspoken, implicit, profoundly non-egalitarian structure reasserts itself, with white men at the top and the rest of us fighting for a piece of the small space left for everyone else. Group-discussion approaches like brainstorming, explains female leadership trainer Gayna Williams, are ‘well known to be loaded with challenges for diverse representation’, because already-dominant voices dominate.78

  But simple adjustments like monitoring interruptions79 and more formally allocating a set amount of time for each person to speak have both been shown to attenuate male dominance of debates. This is in fact what Glen Mazarra, a showrunner at FX TV drama The Shield, did when he noticed that female writers weren’t speaking up in the writer’s room – or that when they did, they were interrupted and their ideas overtaken. He instituted a no-interruption policy while writers (male or female) were pitching. It worked – and, he says, ‘it made the entire team more effective’.80

  A more ambitious route would be changing the structure of governance altogether: away from majority-based, and towards unanimous decision-making. This has been shown to boost women’s speech participation and to mitigate against their minority position81 (a 2012 US study found that women only participate at an equal rate in discussions when they are in ‘a large majority’82 – interestingly while individual women speak less when they are in the minority, individual men speak the same amount no matter what the gender proportion of the group).

  Some countries have attempted to legislate against the more extreme ways in which women’s voices are shut out from power. Since 2012, Bolivia has made political violence a
gainst a woman elected to or holding public office a criminal offence; in 2016 they also passed a law preventing anyone with a background of violence against women from running for political office.

  But on the whole, most countries proceed as if female politicians do not operate at a systemic disadvantage. While most parliaments have codes of conduct, these are generally focused on maintaining a gender-neutral ‘decorum’. Most countries have no official procedure for settling sexual-harassment complaints, and it’s often up to whoever happens to be in charge (usually a man) to decide whether sexism is in fact indecorous and therefore against rules. Often they don’t. One female MP told the IPU that when she demanded a point of order following a sexist insult from a colleague, the Speaker had rejected her motion. ‘I cannot control what another member thinks of you,’ she was told.

  The UK used to have a gender-specific code of conduct for local government, overseen by an independent body which had the power to suspend councillors. But this was discarded under the 2010 coalition government’s ‘Red Tape Challenge’. It is now up to each local authority to decide which standards to set and how to enforce them. The government’s recommendations for how this should be done included only one vague reference to promoting ‘high standards of conduct’ and did not mention non-discrimination at all.83 There is no longer any clear mechanism by which councillors can be suspended for non-criminal misconduct.84

  It is unsurprising then that by 2017, when the Fawcett Society produced a report on local government, the women’s charity found ‘a harmful culture of sexism in parts of local government politics which would not be out of place in the 1970s’, where ‘sexism is tolerated, and viewed as part of political life’, and where almost four in ten women councillors have had sexist remarks directed at them by other councillors.85 One female councillor described ‘a culture of demeaning younger women and dismissing the contribution that women make’. A women’s group was described as ‘the wives club’; a dinner with a senior national political speaker ‘was promoted as an opportunity for ‘the wives’ to dress up’. When she and a fellow female colleague challenged the behaviour they were described as ‘aggressive’, and ‘referred to by demeaning, sexist nicknames’. Her emailed questions have gone ignored; she has been excluded from meeting notifications; and she described her contributions to discussions as ‘tolerated rather than welcomed’. On social media her own party colleagues told her to ‘run away little girl and let the grown-ups do their job’.

  There are two central points to take away from this section. The first is that when you exclude half the population from a role in governing itself, you create a gender data gap at the very top. We have to understand that when it comes to government the ‘best’ doesn’t have to mean ‘those who have the money, the time and the unearned confidence from going to the right school and university’. The best when it comes to government means the best as a whole, as a working group. And in that context, the best means diversity. Everything we’ve seen so far in this book shows us without a doubt that perspective does matter. The data accrued from a lifetime of being a woman matters. And this data belongs at the very heart of government.

  Which leads to the second point: the data we already have makes it abundantly clear that female politicians are not operating on a level playing field. The system is skewed towards electing men, which means that the system is skewed towards perpetuating the gender data gap in global leadership, with all the attendant negative repercussions for half the world’s population. We have to stop wilfully closing our eyes to the positive discrimination that currently works in favour of men. We have to stop acting as if theoretical, legal equality of opportunity is the same as true equality of opportunity. And we have to implement an evidence-based electoral system that is designed to ensure that a diverse group of people is in the room when it comes to deciding on the laws that govern us all.

  PART VI

  When it Goes Wrong

  CHAPTER 15

  Who Will Rebuild?

  When Hillary Clinton wanted to speak about women’s rights at the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, even her own side was dubious.1 ‘People were saying: “This is a not an important issue for the US government, it’s a nice thing and I’m glad you care about it, but if the First Lady of the United States goes and actually speaks about women’s rights, that elevates an issue that in the midst of everything else going on – the collapse of the USSR and the transition of the former Soviet states and Warsaw Pact nations and Rwanda and Bosnia, there was so much else going on in the world – maybe you should speak about it from afar.”’ As we will see (and as the US administration already knew at the time) what was ‘going on’ in Rwanda and Bosnia was the mass and systematic rape of women.

  When things go wrong – war, natural disaster, pandemic – all the usual data gaps we have seen everywhere from urban planning to medical care are magnified and multiplied. But it’s more insidious than the usual problem of simply forgetting to include women. Because if we are reticent to include women’s perspectives and address women’s needs when things are going well, there’s something about the context of disaster, of chaos, of social breakdown, that makes old prejudices seem more justified. And we’re always ready with an excuse. We need to focus on rebuilding the economy (as we’ve seen, this is based on a false premise). We need to focus on saving lives (as we will see this is also based on false premise). But the truth is, these excuses won’t wash. The real reason we exclude women is because we see the rights of 50% of the population as a minority interest.

  The failure to include women in post-disaster efforts can end in farce. ‘They built houses without any kitchens,’ Maureen Fordham, a professor of disaster resilience, tells me. It was 2001, and an earthquake had just hit Gujarat, a state in western India. Thousands of people died and nearly 400,000 homes were destroyed. So new homes were needed, but Gujarat’s rebuilding project had a major data gap: women weren’t included or even consulted in the planning process. Hence the kitchenless homes. In some confusion I ask Fordham how people were expected to cook. ‘Well, quite,’ she replies, adding that the homes were also often missing ‘a separate area that’s usually attached to a house where the animals are kept’, because animal care isn’t on the whole a male responsibility. ‘That’s women’s work.’

  If this sounds like an extreme one-off, it isn’t. The same thing happened in Sri Lanka four years later.2 It was after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami which swept across the coasts of fourteen countries bordering the Indian Ocean, killing a quarter of a million people in its wake. And just like in Gujarat, Sri Lanka’s rebuilding programme didn’t include women, and, as a result, they built homes without kitchens. A related issue arises in refugee camps when humanitarian agencies distribute food that must be cooked – but forget to provide cooking fuel.3

  The US has a similar history of forgetting about women in post-disaster relief efforts. Fordham tells me about the redevelopment scheme set up in Miami following 1992’s Hurricane Andrew. ‘They called it “We Will Rebuild”.’ The problem was, the ‘we’ who were planning the rebuilding were nearly all men: of the fifty-six people on the decision-making board (reportedly an ‘invitation-only group of Miami insiders’4) only eleven were women.

  This male-dominated ‘we’ were criticised at the time as ‘an uptown group trying to deal with a downtown problem’. One woman simply saw ‘the good ole boy network once more taking charge, running things when they had no real idea of what the problems were, especially the problems of women. It was business as usual.’ And what this good ole boy network wanted to rebuild was business centres, the skyscrapers, the Chamber of Commerce facility, at a time when ‘thousands were still suffering from [a] lack of basic necessities [and] community services’. They completely missed, says Fordham, ‘things like nursery schools or health centres’, as well as the smaller-scale informal workplaces, which, as we’ve seen, are particularly relevant to women’s needs. In Miami, disgruntled women�
��s rights activists set up ‘Women Will Rebuild’ to address the gaps in the official scheme.

  We Will Rebuild was a while ago now, but when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans thirteen years later, it became clear that lessons had not been learned. Over 30,000 people were displaced by the August 2005 hurricane (at the time, the US was in the top ten of countries with ‘major internally displaced populations of concern’5) and the single largest category of these internally displaced populations were African American women. But despite their dominance amongst those affected, African American women’s voices were barely heard at all in planning efforts, either before or after the storm hit.6 This omission constituted a major gender data gap and resulted in a failure to direct resources towards those who were most vulnerable, which, said a 2015 Institute of Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) report, could easily have been predicted with proper research. Instead, by failing to consult women about their needs, planners were responsible for what the IWPR called a ‘third disaster’ following the twin disasters of the hurricane and subsequent flooding. And this third disaster was, ‘like the failure of the levees, of human origin’.

  Most former tenants of New Orleans public housing wanted to – and assumed they would – return to their former homes after the clean-up. After all, ‘the Bricks’, as the four large housing projects within the city of New Orleans are known, were still standing. More than this, according to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, they were structurally sound and would be habitable after cleaning. But it was not to be. Even as ‘affordable and structurally sound homes in New Orleans remained in high demand’, funding was announced for the buildings to be demolished. They would be replaced with mixed-income housing which included only 706 public housing units compared to the 4,534 that had existed before.