Invisible Women

Caroline Criado Perez is a British journalist and campaigner, best known for getting Jane Austen onto the Bank of England's £10 note and a statue of the suffragist Millicent Fawcett into Parliament Square. Here she gathers hundreds of studies to show a gender data gap: in research, design and policy, the typical human is assumed to be male, and data on women is either never collected or not broken out by sex.

The consequences range from inconvenient to deadly: smartphones sized for larger hands, crash test dummies modeled on the average male body, heart attacks in women misdiagnosed because the textbook symptoms are men's. Policies that look neutral, such as snow-clearing schedules, fall unevenly once you count who walks, who drives and who does unpaid care.

The book won both the Royal Society Science Book Prize and the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year in 2019, an unusual pairing that reflects its reach. Publishers Weekly called it provocative and vital but objected that it sometimes equates womanhood with traits such as small stature or having given birth. In Skeptical Inquirer, Carol Tavris argued that the core idea goes back to Simone de Beauvoir.

Finance and business readers will get the most from the material on product design, workplace policy and the treatment of unpaid work in economic statistics, all of which bear on market sizing, hiring and how we measure output.

1. Missing data is still a decision. A dataset that does not break results out by sex quietly assumes everyone behaves like the default user. The bias goes into every model built on it.
2. Averages hide segments. Products and policies designed for the average user may fail half the market. That is a commercial risk as much as an ethical one.
3. Unpaid work is real output. Care work that never enters GDP still shapes labor supply, productivity and household finances. Ignoring it distorts how we read economic statistics.
4. Neutral rules can have unequal effects. Schedules, benefits and safety standards that treat everyone the same can still favor one group if the underlying patterns of life differ.
5. Better data is often cheaper. Several of Criado Perez's examples, from city planning to medicine, show that designing for a fuller population saves money over time.

The book is organized into six parts, moving from everyday life through work and design to medicine, politics and disasters.

1. Daily life. Urban planning, transit and public services built around the commute of a man in a car. The best-known example is a Swedish town that found its snow-clearing schedule favored drivers over pedestrians, who were disproportionately women.
2. The workplace. Office temperature standards, workplace safety research, hiring algorithms and the myth of meritocracy, along with the large share of unpaid care work that women do and that economic statistics leave out.
3. Design. Phones, voice recognition, tools, protective equipment and car safety testing calibrated to male bodies.
4. Going to the doctor. Medical research that has long excluded women or failed to analyze results by sex, leading to misdiagnosis and drugs dosed for men.
5. Public life. How tax systems, GDP accounting and political institutions undercount women's work and voices.
6. When it goes wrong. Disaster relief, refugee camps and post-conflict rebuilding that ignore women's needs. A closing section argues that the fix is to collect sex-disaggregated data and to include women in the rooms where decisions are made.

Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development, to healthcare, to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, because it treats men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And women pay tremendous costs for this bias, in time, money, and often with their lives. Celebrated feminist advocate Caroline Criado Perez investigates shocking root cause of gender inequality and research in Invisible Women†‹, diving into women’s lives at home, the workplace, the public square, the doctor’s office, and more. Built on hundreds of studies in the US, the UK, and around the world, and written with energy, wit, and sparkling intelligence, this is a groundbreaking, unforgettable exposé that will change the way you look at the world.