Thread by @wilte

Started to read:
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez
goodreads.com/book/show/4110…

failing to include the perspective of women is a huge driver of an unintended male bias that attempts (often in good faith) to pass itself off as 'gender neutral.

This is what de Beauvoir meant when she said: men confuse their own point of view with the absolute truth

The female-specific concerns that men fail to factor in cover a wide variety of areas, but as you read you will notice that three themes crop up again and again:
the female body
women's unpaid care burden
male violence against women

I will show that even in this super-rational world increasingly run by super-impartial supercomputers, women are still very much de Beauvoir's Second Sex - and that the dangers of being relegated to, at best, a sub-type of men, are as real as they have ever been.

A 2007 international study of 25,439 children's TV characters found that only 13% of non-human characters are female (the figure for female human characters was slightly better. although still low at 32%).
br-online.de/jugend/izi/deu…

Whiteness and maleness are silent precisely because they do not need to be vocalised. Whiteness and maleness are implicit. They are unquestioned. They are the default.

The truth is that white and male is just as much an identity as black and female.

public housing scheme in Brazil called Minha Casa, Minha Vida (My House, My Life);

But even if male and female toilets had an equal number of stalls, the issue wouldn't be resolved, because women take up to 2.3 times as long as men to use the toilet.

digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewconten…

When planners fail to account for gender, public spaces become male spaces by default.

These are not niche concerns, we have to start accounting for the lives of the other half of the world.

This isn't just a matter of justice: it's also a matter of simple economics.

Globally, 75% of unpaid work is done by women

a University of Michigan study found that husbands create an extra seven hours of housework a week for women

independent.co.uk/life-style/hus…

fifty year's worth of US census data has proven that when women join an industry in high numbers, that industry attracts lower pay and loses 'prestige', suggesting that low-paid work chooses women rather than the other way around

academic.oup.com/sf/article-abs…

recent Australian analysis found that the optimum length of paid maternity leave for ensuring women's continued participation in paid labour was between 7 months to a year

Things are worse for women in the US, which is one of only four countries in the world that doesn't guarantee at least some paid maternity leave.

one in four American mothers return to work within two weeks of giving birth.

in contrast to other industrialised nations, US women's paid labour force participation is actually decreasing - with a 2013 study finding that the lack of family-friendly policies accounts for nearly a third of the discrepancy

pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10…

Prior to the introduction of the use it or lose it leave for fathers, only about 6% of men in Sweden took paternity leave, despite the fact that it had been available for them since 1974.

Men didn't take the leave on offer until forced to by the government (uptake now ~90%).

Chapter 4: for the vast majority of hiring decisions around the world, meritocracy is an insidious myth.

A belief in meritocracy may be all you need - to introduce bias, that is.

Studies have shown that a belief in your own personal objectivity, or a belief that you are not sexist, makes you less objective and more likely to behave in a sexist way.

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

It is no accident that those who are most likely to believe in the myth of meritocracy are young, upper-class, white Americans.

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Decades of research in numerous countries show that teaching evaluation forms are worse than useless at actually evaluating teaching and are in fact biased against female instructors by an amount that is large and statistically significant

scienceopen.com/document_file/…

Several studies conducted over the past decade or so show letters of recommendation are another seemingly gender-neutral part of a hiring process that is in fact anything but.

The sad fact was that there never was a star-quality female hacker', he wrote. 'No one knows why.' I don't know, Steve, we can probably take a wild guess.o

Quotas which, contrary to popular misconception, were recently found by a London School of Economics study to 'weed out incompetent men' rather than promote unqualified women.

independent.co.uk/news/business/…

A study of 4,000 job ads found that women were put off from applying for jobs that used words associated with masculine stereotypes such as 'aggressive', 'ambitious' or 'persistent'.

psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi…

the metabolic rate of young adult females performing light office work is significantly lower than the standard values for men doing the same type of activity.
google.com/amp/s/www.nyti…

In fact, the formula may overestimate female metabolic rate by as much as 35%, meaning that current offices are on aver age five degrees too cold for women. nature.com/articles/nclim…

We continue to rely on data from studies done on men as if they apply to women.

Specifically, Caucasian men aged twenty-five to thirty, who weigh 70 kg. This is 'Reference Man' and his superpower is being able to represent humanity as a whole.

Of course, he does not.

According to the Washington Times, the US Army buys different boot styles for hot and cold weather, mountain and desert warfare and the rain'.

Just not for the atypical sex.

amp.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/…

precarious work isn't ideal for any worker, it can have a particularly severe impact on women.

For a start, it is possible that it is exacerbating the gender pay gap

tuc.org.uk/research-analy…

As result, argued Boserup, where the plough was used, men dominated agriculture and this resulted in unequal societies in which men had the power and the privilege.

According to a 2011 paper, Boserup's hypothesis holds up to scrutiny. scholar.harvard.edu/nunn/publicati…

Clean stoves: developers have consistently prioritised technical parameters such as fuel efficiency over the needs of the stove user, frequently leading users to reject them

Perhaps silly women obstreperously choosing air pollution for no good reason made for a better headline than endemic poverty.
news.yale.edu/2012/06/29/des…

Rachael Tatman, a research fellow in linguistics at the University of Washington, found that Google's speech-recognition software was 70% more likely to accurately recognise male speech than female speech - and it's currently the best on the market

makingnoiseandhearingthings.com/2016/07/12/goo…

Thankfully for frustrated women around the world, Tom Schalk, the vice president of voice technology ATX, has come up with a novel solution to fix the 'many issues with women's voices. What women need, he said, was'lengthy training - if only women 'were willing to submit to it.

When a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured than a man, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured. She is also 17% more likely to die.

Thomas Stoffregen: sex differences in susceptibility to motion sickness. 

cehd.umn.edu/kin/people/tas…

Paper proposed developing male and female influenza vaccins
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

There are still vast medical gender data gaps to be filled in, but the past twenty years have demonstrably proven that women are not just smaller men: male and female bodies differ down to a cellular level. So why aren't we teaching this?

women made up only 18% of participants in trials for endovascular occlusion devices and 32% of participants in studies on coronary stents

women represented 90% and 92% of participants in facial wrinkle correction trials and den tal device trials, respectively.

Women are 70% more likely to suffer depression than men, for instance, but animal studies on brain disorders are five times as likely to be done on male animals.

In Sweden a woman suffering from a heart attack will wait one hour longer than a man from the onset of pain to arrival at a hospital, will get lower priority when waiting for an ambulance, and will wait twenty minutes longer to be seen at the hospital.

The US has the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, problem particularly acute for African Americans

World Health Organization: death rate of black expectant & new mothers in US matches that of women in much lower-income countries like Mexico and Uzbekistan.

Chapter 12: Women's unpaid work tends to be seen as a costless resource to exploit, writes economics professor Sue Himmelweit.

And so when countries try to rein in their spending it is often women who end up paying the price.
tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…

a decrease in the time British women spend doing unpaid work from five to three hours correlated with a 10% increase in their paid labour-force participation

In 1977 UK child benefits pay out changed from tax break on salary ♂️ to cash to ♀️ (wallet ➡️ purse)

following the policy change the country saw 'a substantial increase in spending on women's and children's clothing, relative to men's clothing.

There's a very simple reason that a powerful woman is experienced as a norm violation: partly because that's how women are represented in the media (consumerist, trivial, irrational) but it's also because women are so under-represented.

Social power for women is therefore intrinsically incompatible with professional power: if a woman wants to be seen as competent she has to give up being seen as warm.

being seen as uncaring is a norm violation for women in a way that it just isn't for men.

Democracy is not a level playing field: it is biased against electing women.

As of December 2017, women made up an average of 23.5% of the world's parliamentarians, although this figure hides significant regional variation

archive.ipu.org/wmn-e/world.htm

Studies (O'Brien & Rickne) in the US and New Zealand have shown that men 'become more verbally aggressive and controlling of both committee hearings and parliamentary debates following an expansion in the proportion of women in the legislature.'

An analysis of fifteen years of Supreme Court oral arguments found that 'men interrupt more than women, and they particularly interrupt women more than they interrupt other men'.

scholars.northwestern.edu/en/publication…

An individualist solution might be to tell women to interrupt right back
bbc.com/worklife/artic…

perhaps working on their 'polite interrupting skills.
bbc.com/worklife/artic…

But there's a problem with this apparently gender-neutral approach, which is that it isn't gender-neutral in effect: interrupting simply isn't viewed the same way when women do it.

Rebuilding after a disaster & forgetting ,♀️ point of view: they built homes without kitchens.

A related issue arises in refugee camps when humanitarian agencies distribute food that must be cooked - but forget to provide cooking fuel.

peace agreements signed between 1989 and 2011: when women are included in peace processes there is a 20% increase in the probability of an agreement lasting at least 2 years, and a 35% increase in the probability of lasting at least 15 years.

The higher the socioeconomic status of women in a country, the lower the sex gap in deaths due to natural disasters

It's not the disaster that kills them, it's gender
eprints.lse.ac.uk/3040/

The irony of ignoring the potential for male violence when it comes to designing systems for female refugees is that male violence is often the reason women are refugees in the first place (p.306)

Gender-sensitive provision is not just about safety, however, it's also about health.

In the UK, homeless shelters can (and do) request free condoms from the NHS, but they cannot request free menstrual products.

Closing the gender data gap will not magically fix all the problems faced by women.

But getting to grips with the reality that gender-neutral does not automatically mean gender-equal would be an important start.

"Oh, I'm crocheting the hyperbolic plane."

In Daina Taimina the traditionally feminine skill of crochet collided with the traditionally masculine sphere of maths.

Cc @ionicasmeets

discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/k…

Crocheted model of pseudosphere (the hyperbolic equiavalent of a cone) by Daina Taimina
cabinetmagazine.org/issues/16/croc…

Afterword @CCriadoPerez

We have to start accounting for the three themes that define women's relationship with the world:

1️⃣ The (invisble) ♀️ body
2️⃣ ♂️ sexual violence against ♀️
3️⃣ Unpaid care work

It's the irony of being a woman: at once hyper-visible when it comes to being treated as the subservient sex class, and invisible when it counts - when it comes to being counted.

There is one more trend I kept coming across while writing this book: the excuses.

The consensus is clear: women are abnormal, atypical, just plain wrong. Why can't a woman be more like a man?

We must increase female representation in all spheres of life.

Because as more women move into positions of power or influence, there's another pattern that is becoming even more apparent: women simply don't forget that women exist as easily as men often seem to.

Women are also leading the way when it comes to closing the gender data gap.

The likelihood of a study involving gender and sex analysis increases with the proportion of women among its authors

pure.au.dk/portal/en/publ…

The solution to the sex and gender data gap is clear: we have to close the female representation gap.

All 'people' needed to do was to ask women.

Excellent book ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Meticulously sourced with clear message. Fun to read, with snarky asides ("Thanks, Aristotle")

Eye-opening on the bad planning my gender is capable of (eg houses w/out kitchens). So, important to ask women and collect their data

Thanks @CCriadoPerez