Jess Reviews~ Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez
Think of the average person. Perhaps you pictured a Caucasian man, not old nor young, not skinny nor fat, not tall nor short. If you did, you wouldn’t be the only one: many of our health and safety organisations use assumptions drawn from this average (male) body, which is assumed to be representative of the general population. This might seem fair until you look at data showing women are 47% more likely to be seriously injured in a car crash, or that police body armour, designed around this standard, is less likely to fit women and some ethnic minority men. Invisible Women charts the way hidden data biases impact women in their day-to-day lives, shedding light on a topic that has often been overlooked.
The experience of reading Invisible Women is not really one which I would describe as fun. That being said, it was definitely informative and eye-opening, a painful look at how women, despite making up over half the world’s population, are quite clearly a marginalised gender. From snow clearing to bus routes, failure to gather data about the lives of women means that services that should be gender-neutral are actually failing to serve the needs of the people who are using them. This book highlights the myriad ways that our society excludes female perspectives and how it costs them.
Most of this book is not the author’s original research in subject areas she is an expert on and that does show. I certainly noticed places (for example in a section covering linguistics) where her expertise was not quite enough to cover the source material with the nuance or accuracy it needed, and I’m sure people with different specialisms to me would have noticed similar deviations or oversimplifications in their area of expertise. I also feel like the writing style hammers home the main theme of “data gaps” (in those words) perhaps too much, rather than letting the implications of each point she makes resonate on their own.
However, I think it’s very important to note that this book isn’t trying to be ground-breaking research in itself, but rather to draw attention to the research that has already been done and which might have been overlooked. It may be a more surface-level skim through some topics, but it has to be in order to highlight the data across the sheer variety of areas that Perez covers, from medicine to economics to language to council policy on snow clearing. I think if Perez were an expert on every single subject she manages to cram into this book – which is already bursting with facts, figures, references, and citations – she would quite possibly be superhuman.
By the nature of how broad Perez’s subject matter already is, this book only briefly touches on the ways that data gaps are exacerbated by people belonging to multiple marginalised groups, but she recognises that people of ethnic minorities sit in a similarly large data blind spot. Finding data that is sex-disaggregated is hard enough in some areas, and it is a similar story for race-disaggregation. Her book also only covers data relating to cisgender women. Again, these omissions are understandable considering her original aims, and I hope that, inspired by the success of this one, similar books will eventually be published that pay as much attention to the research for other groups which suffer from similar data gaps.
As it is, this book stands as a fantastic summary of the problem which Perez set out to highlight, and as an invitation to further research – both on the part of the reader and in our governmental, academic and other institutions more generally. Off the back of my reading this book, I have bumped two more books up my “to be read” list which are more in-depth discussions of topics that Perez gives an overview of in Invisible Women. The first is Feminist City by Leslie Kern, which takes a more explicitly intersectional approach to the urban environment with women in mind. The second is Unwell Women by Elinor Cleghorn which tracks the history of women’s medicine from Ancient Greece to today. Reading Invisible Women has made me more actively engaged in learning about this topic, and despite my criticisms, I believe it is an incredibly important book for changing your perspective on our world today.
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