The author’s choice to include case studies that veer on the unusual and obscure, such as snow-plowing and virtual reality headsets, shows how the absence of women’s data and experiences permeates aspects of life the reader may never have considered. Additionally, Criado Perez acknowledges women’s societal obligations may expose them to more potentially life-threatening conditions to begin with, such as long-term exposure to smoke inhalation caused by poor ventilation and cooking fuels in developing countries. market have been analyzed for sex-based reactions.
Women consume 80% of the pharmaceuticals in the United States, yet less than half of the prescription drugs available on the U.S.
The author cites clinical trials that do not include women, drug research that does not disaggregate results based on sex, and incorrect reference points and measurements for how life-threatening conditions may present in women, such as heart disease and adverse drug reactions.
In this way, Criado Perez painlessly guides the reader through abundant research, evidence, and insights.Ĭriado Perez’s venture into the absence of data surrounding women’s health and bodies is the most compelling part of the book. By interspersing facts and statistics with quick and witty asides, she avoids swamping the reader in a soup of numbers. By employing this structure, Criado Perez emphasizes the exponential effect and rampant consequences for society as a whole of the lack of accurate data from women’s experiences.Ĭriado Perez’s strength lies in her ability to interweave quantitative and qualitative observations in a digestible format. The author neatly partitions these experiences into six interconnected areas of study: daily life, the workplace, product design, going to the doctor, public life, and ‘when it goes wrong’ – a final section exploring policy failures related to disasters. Organized in an approachable fashion, Invisible Women begins with case studies of women’s daily lives, then expands outwards throughout each section by highlighting the different roles women play in successively broader segments of society. This societal default leaves a shortage of accurate and effective data on the female experience, leading to costly errors and miscalculations in policy decisions pillared on big data.Ĭriado Perez implores the reader to consider the far-reaching implications of this data gap for everything from traditional societies to those that heavily rely on data-driven machine learning. Criado Perez asserts that due to this widely accepted norm, women’s bodies and experiences are treated as abnormalities, niche use cases, or, at best, afterthoughts. At its core, the Default Male represents the conscious and unconscious societal practice of treating men’s bodies and experiences as the model standard. Through extensive research into data that quantifies women’s experiences in their homes, workplaces, and communities, Criado Perez exposes huge gaps in coverage and presents a compelling case that excluding the female experience costs time, money, and even lives.īuilding on French philosopher and feminist activist Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex theory, Criado Perez introduces the reader to the concept of the Default Male. In her book, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, author and activist Caroline Criado Perez delves into the widespread data inequities between men and women.
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