Men Are The Default, Women Are The Exception
How and why we ignore half of the world’s population
“When researchers in one study attempted to prompt participants to see a gender-neutral animal as female by using female pronouns, children, patents and carers still overwhelmingly referred to the animal as ‘he’. The study found that an animal must be ‘super-feminine’ before even close to half of the participants will refer to it as she rather than he.”
Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women
Immaculately researched, lucidly written and passionately argued. Perez’s data-driven expose of the seen and unseen inequalities that plague our 21st-century world is unputdownable. Pulling data from all walks of life, Perez’s “feminism for dummies” is an essential guide for identifying inherent male-bias, understanding the unintended consequences of inequality and a call to action to fix the widening gender data gap.
It’s unquestionably a man’s world. Jobs, medicines, automobiles, room temperatures or anything else you can think of is built, designed and optimised for men. Because seeing humans as men is the default. The archetypal human body is male and women are inferior. Women, as Perez says, are treated as “scaled-down men” and as Aristotle put it, “mutilated males”. And this “male, unless otherwise” perception…
