Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by
Caroline Criado Pérez
My rating:
3 of 5 stars
This is a 3-star review. That is the average that I give as there are excellent parts of the book and some poor parts of the book.
I learned about this book by hearing an interview of the author on Bari Weiss' "Honestly" podcast. That is a podcast worth following, FWIW.
As presented in the interview, the premise of the book is that humanity does not generate nearly enough sex disaggregated data to allow us to make informed regulatory and policy choices on issues that specifically impact women. Women are different from men (I caution gender identitarians to avoid reading this book) and using non-disaggregated data that presumes the male body to be the "standard" actively harms women.
I like data. I like seeing how data can be used to improve everyone's quality of life. The premise (above) was very interesting to me. I was already aware of the medical impact of non-disaggregated data impacting women in the healthcare field (imagine drug qualification trials where women are a fraction of the human testing pool) and found the author's perspective as presented in the interview to be compelling.
And had the book stuck to that premise and demonstrated a commitment to basing all the arguments are hard data (rather than anecdata), I would have loved the book, and learned from the book.
But, no.
In a rarity, I am turning on my Kindle notes. I frequently found myself arguing with the author about either her use of highly selective data, the lack of evolutionary context, or her wandering from a discussion of statistically significant conclusions and into political opinion. More on the latter later.
The author uses questionable sources a few times. Vox.com is not a serious news source for this sort of work. The author leans heavily on one or two organizations that have an ideological objective. It would have been helpful if she could have presented more complimentary data examples from non-biased sources.
A few times, she takes tangential data and strings it into broad commentary on all human cultures as if an authoritative conclusion was justified. Admittedly, the book is about the lack of gender segregated data for a reason. There isn't much of it out there. And what is out there doesn't always paint a flattering picture of society. By the same token, one would not look at a wild game trail in the middle of the woods and extrapolate it into a 6-lane divided highway.
There were many occasions where I found myself asking why the author didn't refer to any biological/evolutionary context. In some cases, the author demonstrates her ignorance of processes that are beyond her experience. One example is a passage where she points out that bricks/blocks used in construction are too heavy for most women to effectively lift. If those bricks/blocks were lighter, then more women could participate in that sort of construction. What she ignores is that the bricks/blocks are as heavy as most men can lift on purpose. Smaller bricks/blocks means that more layers of bricks/blocks must be placed which means more mortar work needs to be done. Building a wall 8 blocks high with 8 lifts of mortar requires less precision mortaring work than building the same height wall with smaller blocks (i.e., 16 half-height blocks high with 16 lifts/layers of mortar). The bricks/blocks aren’t designed to be heavy for the purpose of excluding women from the construction field. They are designed to minimize the amount of precision mortar work to be performed.
As the author documents, there are significant physical differences resulting from the evolution of men and women. Some of those differences result in different abilities. Would the author suggest that the standard ballerina shoes be made bigger to make it easier for a 6-foot, 220-pound construction work to compete for prima ballerina?
There are many, many passages where the author successfully documents both the need for sex disaggregated data sets and how such information might be used in the future to improve polices and regulations. There are parts of the book that are absolutely 4-star and 5-star worthy. There are excellent sections detailing how both medical and automotive research/design suffer from the lack of sex disaggregated data.
I checked out in Chapter 14 because the author chose to go political. She asserted that the only reason Hillary Clinton didn't get elected was because of anti-woman bias.
No.
The objective of an informed electorate should be to select an intelligent and capable officeholder that will produce net-positive change on society.
Hillary Clinton is ineligible to be described as fulfilling that objective. A complete description of her lack of qualifications is beyond the scope of a Goodreads review but may be read
HERE.
At this point, it became clear that the author possessed serious experiential deficiencies. I opted to accept the positive sections as welcome pieces of new information and move onto something better. I'm labeling this as a plain DNF rather than a Dorothy Parker-esque finish as I made it most of the way through and the book does contain a wealth of valuable information and perspectives. But it isn't the homerun that I was anticipating when I opened the book for the first time.
View all my reviews
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