Review of Invisible Women

[chris_gerrib]

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a fascinating, dense and at times infuriating book. The author Caroline Criado Perez, bombards the reader with statistic after statistic showing that, not only is the modern world built for men, much of the data we collect about that world either ignores or discounts the differences between men and women. Every paragraph, it seems, has a concrete example, such as, there are no female crash test dummies. Sometimes, scaled-down male dummies are used, but given women's different bone density and muscle distribution, even that's not helpful. Nor are there any pregnant crash test dummies, yet car accidents are the leading cause of fetal death.

In many of the instances Perez cites, sex-specific data isn't gathered. One of the outcomes is that problems, such as heart attacks in females, are described as having "atypical symptoms." Except since females are 50% of the population, there's nothing "atypical" about that. Mind-blowing and infuriating stuff like that flows like water out of a firehose through the pages of this book.

I said the book is dense - it's more textbook than beach read. However, it's an important and eye-opening read for both sexes.



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