Book 7/100: Invisible Women — Caroline Criado Perez

Warning: if you identify as a woman this book will make you angry, sad, and disappointed. It is also a must read.

The warning should have been on the book cover. I would have been better prepared for the emotional rollercoaster I went through, and also stocked up on safety supplies such as tea, chocolate and planned yoga breaks.

It’s hard to avoid clichés when writing about this book. I am fairly involved in gender equality in all fields (and mostly science) and I consider myself averagely knowledgeable. The book left me speechless and shocked, showing me the extent of which the word has been created and developed around men. How often the default setting when nothing is specified is “man”. It’s in all aspects of our lives: car safety (a google search tells me that it is one of the most quoted studies), science, medicine, technology …

Caroline Criado Perez not only exposes these biases in a way that is impossible to argue with, she also does it with an extremely engaging writing style. Not once I found myself bored (has it happened when reading books full of citations and studies) and I was also able to understand clearly even the most complex scienctific examples.

I finished the book back in November, and after thinking about it for over a month, I can understand studies were ran by men on men and for men. I can’t understand how in the big data, gender specific analysis can’t be done because the data was never properly collected and tagged by gender or other factors.

It does explain thou why women health symptoms are minimized, even jokes are about “menflu”.

When we exclude half of humanity from the production of knowledge we lose out on potentially transformative insights

I also don’t have any action tip, nor does the book, besides getting more actively involved; as Caroline writes “there’s another pattern that is becoming even more evident: women don’t forget that women exist as easily as men seem to”

Happy reading!