"Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men" by Caroline Criado Perez
This book confirms this is a man’s world.
Read review below
If you’re a woman already inclined to despise men, maybe you shouldn’t read this book. Then again, maybe it’s because you already know everything Caroline Criado Perez had researched for this book. To be honest, a lot of these details came as a surprise to me, and now I feel better about complaining that my phone is too big for my hands and that Google never listens to me, but will listen to my husband. I am NOT crazy!
It took awhile for me to get into this audiobook (nonfiction as audio has always been hard for me though). It wasn’t until about halfway when I felt like Perez started dishing out all the infuriating and interesting statistics on the gender data gap. Other than all the interesting factoids, my biggest takeaways from this book:
It isn’t MEN preventing this world to be a man and woman’s world - it’s society. It’s society’s tendency to look away - just like I’ve been (even if it was unwillingly). However, being naïve is no excuse - you hear about it, so why not learn more and do something to change the stigma? Women are literally dying because medical trials only involve men, or because crash dummies in cars are only designed after men.
The default should not be man. Woman are always being asked in various ways, “well, why can’t you be more like a man?”. Well I ask you back, why can’t you be more like a woman? We are stuck with this mindset that all things (like the size of my smartphone), should be designed for a default population - men. According to the US Census Bureau in 2010, more than half of the population in the US is women! In the world, it’s half. So how are we still okay with this concept of man being the default?
So give this book a whirl if you want to learn more about the gender data gap. If you don’t have time to read the entire book, I recommend to at least read this article by Perez:
We Need to Close the Gender Data Gap By Including Women in Our Algorithms
In the meantime, I just heard Apple has a mini smart phone, so I’m going to go and replace my huge Android smart phone for something more compatible for my lady-like fingers.
| Pub Date: | March 7, 2019 | Page Count: | 411 Pages | ISBN: | 139781419729072 |