How 'Invisible Women' Exposes Data Bias in a World Designed For Men
When I left University this year, I swore I was done with research and would not touch anything academic for a long time. Yet, on a trip to Connolly Books in Dublin (if you are looking for revolutionary books, check it out), my interest was piqued by Caroline Criado Perez’ book ‘Invisible Women'. In her extensive research, Perez aims to show how, in a world largely built for and by men, we ignore half the population, often with disastrous consequences. The book is heavily based on research, comprising of a collection of case studies, stories, and new statistical research from across the world to uncover how women are hidden and forgotten in society.
If I’m being honest, I thought this book was going to be a slog to read. I was convinced it was going to be nothing but reams of statistics presented to the reader; interesting statistics perhaps, but just plain dry facts nonetheless with little story to tie them together. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Yes, it is a body of research, but it is also a book built on narratives and stories which will open the readers' eyes to injustices. There is history, culture, major popular events, language, philosophy, anecdotes, and so much more. So, even if academics aren’t your thing, there will be something to capture your attention.
Something which I appreciate about the book is that Perez explicitly states that it is not her intent to conduct 'feminist' research. She is not coming at this from a certain angle. Rather, she is just making observations about the world as it exists.
Further, Perez tells a story about an ex-boyfriend who complained that her worldview was coloured, and therefore misguided, by her feminism - he charged her with being too 'ideological'. In this story, the man infers that feminism is a niche view to have, not reflective of how the world actually operates, but hermeneutic. If we accept this man's comments, then the only other ways to guide our understanding of the world has to come from men in a world built for men. For example, language is male-dominated. 'Mankind', 'manmade', etc... In Spanish, a room of 100 female teachers would be 'las profesoras'. Yet, if only one male teacher was added to that room, the whole plural noun would be changed to the masculine, 'los profesores'. The hundred women are literally erased from the language due to the presence of a singular man. As explicated, the very fundamental of human life and communication, language, is men-centred. It is so ingrained in us not to question even these seemingly frivolous versions of sexism that to note this injustice and seek to rectify it is construed as a 'feminist worldview going way beyond its bounds'. Perez effectively shows how, at all levels, from language to history to art and science, this erasing of women is detrimental.
All this to say, Perez is not at all invalidating or dismissing feminist views by explaining how her book is not written from an angle. Rather, she is helping to bring feminism into the mainstream and showcasing how it is not a niche view that only certain women hold but rather one of the only accurate ways to read the world around us. If women have been silenced and forgotten since the dawn of time (literally), then, of course, taking a women-centred view will be skewed as radical or ideological. Perez highlights how the world has never been viewed through the lens of women, so necessarily, the dominant theories of rationality and common sense are male-centric, such as John Locke's atomistic philosophy of the mind or David Hume's empiricism.
There are three interesting examples from the book I want to highlight today. Of course, the research is so much more expansive, but I think these are the most effective examples to showcase to any potential readers out there what this book is all about!
Firstly, and you may know this already, but if I asked you who first discovered the structure of DNA, would you say Watson and Crick in 1953 or Rosalind Franklin? In our scientific canon, it is Watson and Crick who are credited with the discovery, even winning the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Yet, it was Franklin's famous 'Photo 51' which first captured the double helix structure of DNA, a breakthrough she was never properly credited for.
Secondly, even how we decide which art gets access to this elusive, mainly white, male, and upper-class sphere, which we call the 'canon', has nearly always placed women at a disadvantage. For example, did you know that one of the most famous composers of human history, Mendelssohn, had a sister who also wrote compositions? Fanny Mendelssohn was just as talented as her brother but was prohibited from publishing her music by her patriarchal father, brother, and society. Note also the resources for women composers were practically non-existent, so how could women ever make their way into the canon when, by virtue of their sex, they were barred from participating in society? Male composers had the benefit of being allowed to store their compositions in historical libraries, have money to hire orchestras and choirs and acquire full-time residencies in churches and concert halls. Women had no such help. So, Fanny's work was often published under her brother's name, allowing him to take the credit and profit from her labour.
Finally, you may assume history is a fixed thing, after all, the past cannot be changed. However, it is malleable since the only people able to interpret history are those living in the present moment. So, when archaeologists dug up what they could reasonably assume was a Viking warrior's skeleton, they presumed it was easily identifiable because of the armour, blades and weaponry left around the body. However, one chink in the armour for these modern archaeologists was that the skeleton was genetically female. Instead of interrogating the evidence they discovered, as they would do if the skeleton was male, these scientists went out of their way to prove that there is no way a Viking warrior could ever be a woman. They did this because the notion of a female warrior disrupts their current and patriarchal understanding of history where women were homemakers and supporters, not history makers themselves.
Thus, how we eliminate women from research and data has real, material, tangible negative impacts on both our society and how it will be interpreted in the future.
To conclude, I will leave you with some of my favourite quotes from Perez’s book. These are the quotes I believe are the most impactful and most representative of Perez’s purposes in conducting this research. If you get the chance and fancy a little bit of feminist reading this festive season, I couldn’t recommend ‘Invisible Women’ more highly.
"There is no such thing as a woman who doesn’t work. There is only a woman who isn’t paid for her work... We like to think that the unpaid work women do is just about individual women caring for their individual family members to their own individual benefit. It isn’t. Women’s unpaid work is work that society depends on, and it is work from which society as a whole benefits."
"When we exclude half of humanity from the production of knowledge we lose out on potentially transformative insights."
"For millennia, medicine has functioned on the assumption that male bodies can represent humanity as a whole. As a result, we have a huge historical data gap when it comes to female bodies, and this is a data gap that is continuing to grow as researchers carry on ignoring the pressing ethical need to include female cells, animals and humans, in their research. That this is still going on in the twenty-first century is a scandal. It should be the subject of newspaper headlines worldwide. Women are dying, and the medical world is complicit. It needs to wake up... We need a revolution in the research and the practice of medicine, and we need it yesterday. We need to train doctors to listen to women, and to recognise that their inability to diagnose a woman may not be because she is lying or being hysterical: the problem may be the gender data gaps in their knowledge. It’s time to stop dismissing women, and start saving them.”
“The fact is that worth is a matter of opinion, and opinion is informed by culture. And if that culture is as male-biased as ours is, it can’t help but be biased against women. By default."
"The result of this deeply male-dominated culture is that the male experience, the male perspective, has come to be seen as universal, while the female experience-that of half the global population, after all-is seen as, well, niche.”
