Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez
We all know that we live in patriarchal societies, but to what degree is the world built for men? This is a question Caroline Criado Perez answers in Invisible Women and let’s just say that the answer should make us all angry.
Data is used in the modern world to dictate decisions related to every aspect of our lives – education, healthcare, infrastructure and so on and because so much data fails to account for gender, much of our systems are biased towards men. Gender biases cost women money, time, and often their lives.
From car crash dummies that do not take body differences between men and women into account, leading women to die in car accidents more often than men, to drugs that are only tested in men and could potentially have life-altering effects on women, this book gets quickly infuriating as it exposes so much that we are unaware of. This should be mandatory reading for everyone, regardless of gender – how can we accept a world that is built for only half of the population?
Caroline Criado Perez has become famous for her war against the gender data gap, and we should all join her – her research is thorough, and the book includes more than enough sources to back up her claims.
If you are not feeling angry enough by the end of the book to make you want to burn the world – 1. what is wrong with you?! and 2. check out her podcast, Visible Women, where she continues exposing more examples of this, including how little we know about women’s period blood because of the taboo over menstruation.
