Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez
“Routinely forgetting to accommodate the female body in design - whether medical, technological or architectural - has led to a world that is less hospitable and more dangerous for women to navigate. ”
3 Main Messages:
When only men are making the decisions, they do not bring a woman’s perspective to the table
In many situations it is not that the data is being ignored - it simply doesn’t exist
What is frustrating in some countries is a death sentence for women in others.
This book will make you angry. And so it should!
I have heard it said many times that we live in a world designed by and for men, but had no idea of the extent of danger that this creates for women. Caroline Criado Perez’s book explores where data on women is being ignored and where it simply doesn’t exist. She asks why the default setting for design and policy is always to suit the needs of men and realises that “They didn’t deliberately set out to exclude women. They just didn’t think about them. They didn’t think to consider if women’s needs might be different.”
There is an element of unlearning that needs to take place here. For millennia, the average sized man as been our world’s default setting and so our environment, medicines and technologies have been designed with only men in mind. This is because only males have been making those decisions until very recently. And these environments, medicines and technologies work very well - for men. But as Caroline Criado Perez shares in multiple examples throughout the book, this kind of thinking puts women’s lives at great risk. There is much that we take for granted and that is what makes this book such a necessary eye-opener.
As Criado Perez shares in the introduction, there are running themes throughout this book which keep cropping up: “the female body, women’s unpaid care burden, and male violence against women.” She goes on to explore how change is possible and the positive impact which can be created for all when policy and planning accounts for women’s needs. She highlights the work of Swedish Governments with snow-clearance schedules, of the importance of accounting for female safety in urban planning and of understanding the needs of a female and family when designing houses. The first step is to think of what women want - even better: include women in the planning and decision making process from the outset.
“When we are designing a world that is meant to work for everyone we need women in the room”.
The book highlights the both way that we work and how the way in which different types of work are valued and financially rewarded has a huge impact on society as a whole. Government cutbacks don’t mean that the work is not longer being done, it means that the work is shifted and being done at a cost and loss elsewhere: As Criado Perez writes: “Women’s work, paid and unpaid, is the backbone of our society and our economy. It’s about time we started valuing it.” To date, however, the data on this is scant - the work, and the women, are invisible.
It will come as no surprise to any woman reading this that many gadgets and tools are designed with men in mind: from pianos to mobile phones, seat belts to PPE equipment, urban design to mechanical tools - our world has a male bias. On reading further, however, I was shocked to learn that this gender blindness is also prevalent in AI, voice recognition and, most worrying: medicine.
Drugs work differently on males and females. Body temperatures are different, gut transit times are different, heart attack symptoms are different, and many maladies present differently in male and female bodies. However, “for millennia, medicine has functioned on the assumption that male bodies can represent humanity as a whole”. The impact then of research here is crucial, but as Criado Perez points out, it is often dismissed, incomplete, or missing altogether.
Each chapter takes the reader through different areas of our everyday, including the workplace, public life, design and medicine, and points out both the lack of data for women and the danger this poses. While this is impeding and restricting women in many circumstances it is literally killing them in others.
The message is clear: we need women in positions of power because “decades of evidence demonstrate that the presence of women in politics makes a tangible difference to the laws that get passed.” While we are moving in the right direction, there is still much work to be done and EVERYONE benefits when women’s needs are accounted for.
This book made me rethink my own attitudes and question much of what I have taken for granted. I finished it feeling less angry - more determined. Criado Perez believes “that the onus is on those of us who feel able to weather the storm, to do so.” Writing this review and recommendation to you is my own first small step in raising awareness. I implore any of you in leadership to read this and consider what positive changes you are able to make in your world.
