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

by Caroline Criado Perez

  Or maybe just someone to make the tea. Which is where we run into the third trend, which is perhaps the most significant in terms of its impact on women’s lives worldwide: unpaid care work. Women are doing far and away more than our fair share of this work – this necessary work without which our lives would all fall apart. And, as with male violence against women, female biology is not the reason women are the bum-wiping class. But recognising a child as female is the reason she will be brought up to expect and accept that as her role. Recognising a woman as female is the reason she will be seen as the appropriate person to clear up after everyone in the office. To write the Christmas and birthday cards to her husband’s family – and look after them when they get sick. To be paid less. To go part-time when they have kids.

  Failing to collect data on women and their lives means that we continue to naturalise sex and gender discrimination – while at the same time somehow not seeing any of this discrimination. Or really, we don’t see it because we naturalise it – it is too obvious, too commonplace, too much just the way things are to bother commenting on. It’s the irony of being a woman: at once hyper-visible when it comes to being treated as the subservient sex class, and invisible when it counts – when it comes to being counted.

  There is one more trend I kept coming across while writing this book: the excuses. Chief amongst these is that women are just too complicated to measure. Everyone was saying this, from transport planners, to medical researchers, to tech developers: they were all knocking their heads up against Freud’s riddle of femininity and coming away baffled and defeated. Female bodies are too unharmonious, too menstrual and too hormonal. Women’s travel patterns are too messy, their work schedules are too aberrant, their voices are too high. Even when, in the early twentieth century, influential Swiss architect Le Corbusier was devising a standard human model for use in architecture, the female body was ‘only belatedly considered and rejected as a source of proportional harmony’,9 with humanity instead represented by a six-foot man with his arm raised (to reach that top shelf I can never reach).

  The consensus is clear: women are abnormal, atypical, just plain wrong. Why can’t a woman be more like a man? Well, apologies on behalf of the female sex for being so mysterious, but no, we aren’t and no we can’t. And that is a reality that scientists, politicians and tech bros just need to face up to. Yes, simple is easier. Simple is cheaper. But simple doesn’t reflect reality.

  Back in 2008, Chris Anderson, then editor of tech magazine Wired, penned an article headlined ‘The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Model Obsolete’.10 We can ‘stop looking for models’, Anderson claimed. There is now a better way. Petabytes [that’s 1,000 million million bytes to you and me] allow us to say: ‘Correlation is enough.’ We didn’t need to hypothesise about anything, we just needed to crunch the numbers – or, more accurately, ‘let statistical algorithms’ crunch the numbers. In the era of Trump, Brexit and Cambridge Analytica, this seems Pollyanna-ish to say the least, but even before these data scandals it should have been obvious that his claims were hubristic, because back in 2008 we had even less data on women than we have now. And when you’re missing out half the global population in the numbers you feed your statistical algorithms, what you’re actually creating is just a big mess.

  Anderson holds up Google as an exemplar of what he dubbed ‘The Petabyte Age’, singing the praises of its ‘founding philosophy’ that ‘we don’t know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that’s good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required. That’s why Google can translate languages without actually knowing them (given equal corpus data, Google can translate Klingon into Farsi as easily as it can translate French into German).’ Except, as we’ve seen, Google actually can’t translate very well at all, even ten years later. That is, if you care about women being erased from language.

  So. Not so simple after all.

  Anderson is right about one thing though. There is a better way. And it’s a pretty simple one: we must increase female representation in all spheres of life. Because as more women move into positions of power or influence, there’s another pattern that is becoming even more apparent: women simply don’t forget that women exist as easily as men often seem to.

  Women in the film industry are more likely to employ women.11 Female journalists are significantly more likely to centre a female perspective and to quote women.12 Female authors do the same: 69% of US female biographers wrote about female subjects in 2015, compared to 6% of male biographers.13 The emphasis by women on female voices and perspectives extends to the academy. Between 1980 and 2007, female history faculty in the US rose from 15% to 35%14 – meanwhile across a similar time period (1975-2015), US history faculty specialising in women’s history rose from 1% to 10%15 – a tenfold increase. Female academics are also more likely to assign female authors to their students.16

  Then there’s how women might interpret history: in a 2004 Guardian article comedian Sandi Toksvig wrote about how when she was studying anthropology at university one of her female professors held up a photograph of an antler bone with twenty-eight markings on it. ‘This,’ she said, ‘is alleged to be man’s first attempt at a calendar.’ We all looked at the bone in admiration. ‘Tell me,’ she continued, ‘what man needs to know when 28 days have passed? I suspect that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.’17

  When Britain’s EU Withdrawal Bill was announced in 2017, the Human Rights Act was explicitly excluded from alteration – but it took a woman, Maria Miller, the Conservative MP for Basingstoke, to force the government to agree to make a statement requiring that Brexit is also compatible with the Equalities Act.18 Without this concession, a whole range of women’s rights could be scrapped after Brexit, with no avenue for legal redress. In the workplace it is often women, like developmental biologist Christiane Nusslein-Volhard with her foundation to help female PhD students with children, who are putting in place solutions to structural male bias – a bias which male leaders have overlooked and ignored for decades.

  Women are also leading the way when it comes to closing the gender data gap. A recent analysis of 1.5 million papers published between 2008-15 found that the likelihood of a study involving gender and sex analysis ‘increases with the proportion of women among its authors’19. The effect is particularly pronounced if a woman serves as a leader of the author group. This concern for women’s health also extends to the political sphere: it took a woman (Paula Sherriff, the Labour MP for Dewsbury) to set up the UK’s first All-Party Parliamentary group for women’s health in 2016. It was two rogue female Republicans who scotched Donald Trump’s attempts to repeal Obamacare (which would have disproportionately impacted on women), voting three times against his proposals.20

  And women are making a difference in politics more generally. It was two women, Melinda Gates and Hillary Clinton, who spearheaded the UN-backed organisation Data2x that is aimed specifically at closing the global gender data gap. It was a woman, Hillary Clinton, who insisted on going to Beijing in 1995 to make the now famous declaration that ‘Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights.’

  And when the worst happens, women are there too, filling in the gaps left by male-biased disaster relief. Researchers found that the ‘masculine and muscular image[s] of relief workers’ that dominated the media post-Katrina were belied by women who were ‘working tirelessly and courageously’ behind the scenes.21 The same thing has happened in Puerto Rico, all but abandoned by the US government after Hurricane Maria devastated the region in 2017. ‘The reality is that when you go to communities, mostly it is women as leaders and as community organizers,’ Adi Martinez-Roman, executive director for a non-profit that provides legal assistance to low-income families, told journalist Justine Calma.22 These women have collected data by ‘wad[ing] into flooded neighbourhoods’ and canvassing the abandoned communities.23 And they have developed and provided evidence-based sol
utions. They’ve set up soup kitchens. They’ve raised money and rebuilt roads. They’ve distributed ‘solar-powered lights, generators, gas, clothes, shoes, tampons, batteries, medication, mattresses, water’. They set up ‘free legal aid societies to help families navigate the confusing and ill-designed processes required to file FEMA claims’. They’ve even managed to source some communal, solar-powered washing machines.

  The solution to the sex and gender data gap is clear: we have to close the female representation gap. When women are involved in decision-making, in research, in knowledge production, women do not get forgotten. Female lives and perspectives are brought out of the shadows. This is to the benefit of women everywhere, and as the story of Taimina, the crocheting maths professor shows, it is often to the benefit of humanity as a whole. And so, to return to Freud’s ‘riddle of femininity’, it turns out that the answer was staring us in the face all along. All ‘people’ needed to do was to ask women.

  Acknowledgements

  Writing a book can feel like a lonely endeavour and often it is. But it’s also in many ways a group achievement. My first thanks have to go to Rachel Hewitt, who introduced me to her, now my, amazing agent Tracy Bohan at the Wylie Agency, because without that introduction this book would probably never have happened. And Tracy has been a dream to work with. I’m so grateful to her for taking me on and helping me to shape a book proposal that got me my very first book auction – not to mention always being on hand to very calmly, politely and Canadianly, deal with every problem (including those of my own making) that I’ve thrown at her. Thanks too to her wonderful assistant Jennifer Bernstein who has been so supportive throughout.

  Next thanks go to my two brilliant editors, Poppy Hampson and Jamison Stoltz, both of whom immediately got the idea in a way no-one else did. They have been painstaking and methodical, taking me carefully through the various drafts, asking questions that forced me to sharpen my argument and defend my thesis. This book is what it is because of them, and I’m so grateful to them for challenging me to make it better. Special thanks to Poppy for having at least two crisis coffees with me as I had minor breakdowns about Never Finishing. And huge thanks also to all at Chatto & Windus and at Abrams Books for taking this on and being so dedicated to making it work from the very beginning.

  I have so many people to thank who were generous with their time and expertise. Nishat Siddiqi for giving me a crash-course in how the heart works and answering all my no doubt ridiculous questions about the cardiovascular system. James Ball who did the same with all my stats questions alongside being a brilliant friend who listened to my more or less daily wails about getting to the end. Thanks too to my lovely friend Alex Kealy who was my other go-to for stats and also had to put up with semi-regular wailing. Alex Scott gets special mention for being amazingly kind and reading through my medical chapters to make sure I hadn’t made any howlers, as does Greg Callus who did a legal fact-check for me.

  Special acknowledgement has to go to Helen Lewis for her spot on coinage ‘vomit draft’ which I found incredibly useful to hold in mind as a way to just get the initial words down. Huge thanks also to her, Sarah Ditum, Alice Ford, Nicfy Woolf and Luke McGee for bravely reading some very early sections (and particularly to Helen for turning her expert eye to some particularly knoty sections). I hope none of you emerged too traumatised from the experience.

  To all my lovely friends for supporting me and putting up with my disappearing for months on end and repeatedly cancelling plans: thank you for your patience and support and thank you for listening. I couldn’t ask for a better bunch and I’m so grateful to have all of you in my life, especially my beloved HarpySquad and the gang of who really have had to suffer with me through this book on a daily basis. You know who you are.

  Biggest thanks of all, though, have to go to my amazing Official Friend and cheerleader Tracy King, who has not only worked with me on my madcap feminist campaigns, but who read the very earliest vomit drafts of this book and never stopped encouraging me and promising me I would eventually finish. I could never have done this and have remained (relatively) sane without her.

  OK, there is one more thanks: to my beloved dog Poppy. She really does make the work that I do possible – not just by sitting on my lap, but also by distracting me when I’ve been typing for too long. She literally just licked my arm as I typed that. She’s the gorgeous best and I couldn’t do anything without her.

  Endnotes

  Preface

  1 Beauvoir, Simone de (1949), The Second Sex, Parshley, H.M. trans. (1953), London

  Introduction

  1 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/164/3883/1045.1

  2 Slocum, Sally (1975), ‘Woman the gatherer: male bias in anthropology’, in Reiter, Rayna R. ed. (1975), Toward an Anthropology of Women. Monthly Review Press

  3 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/human-evolution-violence-instinct-to-kill-murder-each-other-a7335491.html

  4 https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v538/n7624/full/nature19758.html

  5 https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016–06/uog-mdb061716.php

  6 http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/news-and-views/social/no-women-arentas-likely-to-commit-violence-as-men-20141118-3km9x.html

  7 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/compendium/focusonviolentcrimeandsexualoffences/yearendingmarch2015/chapter2homicide#focus-on-domestic-homicides

  8 https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf

  9 http://www.unodc.org/documents/gsh/pdfs/2014_GLOBAL_HOMICIDE_BOOK_web.pdf

  10 https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131008-women-handprints-oldest-neolithic-cave-art/

  11 https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/sep/15/how-the-female-viking-warrior-was-written-out-of-history

  12 https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/09/viking-warrior-woman-archaeology-spd/

  13 https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/09/viking-warrior-woman-archaeology-spd/

  14 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/world/europe/sweden-viking-women-warriors-dna.html

  15 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/world/europe/sweden-viking-women-warriors-dna.html

  16 Walker, Phillip (1995), ‘Problems of Preservation and Sexism in Sexing: Some Lessons from Historical Collections for Palaeodemographers’, in Saunders, S. R. and Herring A. (eds.), Grave Reflections, Portraying the Past through Cemetery Studies (Canadian Scholars’ Press, Toronto); https://namuhyou.wordpress.com/2016/06/18/sexism-when-sexing-your-skull-cultural-bias-when-sexing-the-skull/

  17 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/world/europe/sweden-viking-women-warriors-dna.html

  18 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/18/battle-prejudice-warrior-women-ancient-amazons

  19 https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015–05-06/warrior-women

  20 Hegarty, Peter and Buechel, Carmen (2006), ‘Androcentric Reporting of Gender Differences’, APA Journals: 1965–2004 Review of General Psychology, 10:4, 377–89; Vainapel, Sigal, Shamir, Opher Y., Tenenbaum, Yulie and Gilam, Gadi (2015), ‘The Dark Side of Gendered Language: The Masculine-Generic Form as a Cause for Self-Report Bias’, Psychological Assessment Issue, 27:4, 1513–19; Sczesny, Sabine, Formanowicz, Magda, and Moser, Franziska (2016), ‘Can Gender-Fair Language Reduce Gender Stereotyping and Discrimination?’, Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1–11; Horvath, Lisa Kristina and Sczesny, Sabine (2016), ‘Reducing women’s lack of fit with leadership positions? Effects of the wording of job advertisements’, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 25:2, 316–28; Stout, Jane G. and Dasgupta, Nilanjana (2011), ‘When He Doesn’t Mean You: Gender-Exclusive Language as Ostracism’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36:6, 757–69; Vervecken, Dries, Hannover, Bettina and Wolter, Ilka (2013), ‘Changing (S) expectations: How gender fair job descriptions impact children’s perceptions and interest regarding traditionally male occupations’, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 82:3, 208–20; Prewitt-Freilino, J. L., Caswell, T. A. and Laakso, E. K. (2012)
, ‘The Gendering of Language: A Comparison of Gender Equality in Countries with Gendered, Natural Gender, and Genderless Languages’, Sex Roles, 66: 3–4, 268–81; Gygax, Pascal, Gabriel, Ute, Sarrasin, Oriane, Oakhill, Jane and Garnham, Alan (2008), ‘Generically intended, but specifically interpreted: When beau-ticians, musicians, and mechanics are all men’, Language and Cognitive Processes, 23:3, 464–85; Stahlberg, D., Sczesny, S. and Braun, F. (2001), ‘Name your favorite musician: effects of masculine generics and of their alternatives in German’, Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 20, 464–69

  21 Stahlberg, Sczesny and Braun (2001)

  22 Sczesny, Formanowicz and Moser (2016); Vervecken, Hannover and Wolter (2013)

  23 Stahlberg, D. and Sczesny, S. (2001), ‘Effekte des generischen Maskulinums und alternativer Sprachformen auf den gedanklichen Einbezug von Frauen’ [The impact of masculine generics on the cognitive inclusion of women], Psychol. Rundsch., 52, 131–40; Horvath and Sczesny (2016); Sczesny, Formanowicz and Moser (2016)

  24 Stout and Dasgupta (2011); Sczesny, Formanowicz and Moser (2016)

  25 Gygax, Gabriel, Sarrasin, Oakhill and Garnham (2008)

  26 Vainapel, Shamir, Tenenbaum and Gilam (2015)

  27 Ignacio Bosque, ‘Sexismo lingüístico y visibilidad de la mujer’, http://www.rae.es/sites/default/files/Sexismo_linguistico_y_visibilidad_de_la_mujer_0.pdf