TAKE THE INVISIBLE WOMEN CHALLENGE. Men need to read this book by Caroline Criado Perez. It will change your worldview. Women can skip it because they live it every day. With the subtitle, Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, the author shows (with 70 pages of references) the subtle and egregious ways bias against women plays out in daily life, work, product design, medicine, and politics. While you might imagine a familiarity with these topics, the author presents them with details and evidence that will surprise every reader. This book should be required for everyone. Three hundred pages to a new you.
The book introduces a few important concepts…
Default Male: This concept is seen throughout society. Drugs are tested, diseases are studied, cars are designed, laws are made, economies are measured… all with the default male in mind. Thus, women die and are disadvantaged. Examples? Crash dummies are male. GDP doesn’t include women’s caring and homemaking work. Doctors don’t recognize women’s symptoms. Houses built after disasters lack kitchens.
Data Disaggregation: Most research aggregates data for men and women (usually a minority or not included). In this way, sex differences are lost.
Quotas: From the workplace to medical research to product design to politics, requirements to consider/include women always result in more qualified people and better products. Said another way: Quotas do not make spaces for less qualified women. They bring in more qualified women and drive out less qualified men!
Chapter 1: Can Snow-Clearing be Sexist? The city of Karlskoga, Sweden, first cleared the snow from the streets and then from the sidewalks. When they reversed this, hospital admissions decreased – predominantly pedestrians, and predominantly women. “The original snow-clearing schedule in Karlskoga hadn’t been deliberately designed to benefit men at the expense of women. Like many of the examples in this book, it resulted from a gender data gap – in this instance, a gap in perspective. The men (and it would have been men) who originally devised the schedule knew how they traveled, and they designed it around their needs. They didn’t deliberately set out to exclude women. They just didn’t think about them.”
TAKE THE CHALLENGE!
Check out https://amazon.com/shop/influencer-20171115075 for Omega Cats Press books and book recommendations.
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