How Can Women Be So Invisible?

As I continue to read Invisible Women, I find myself more and more upset, just as the author is very upset by what she is revealing. And I also find myself more and more drawn in; the writing seems better and the statistics are becoming part of what makes the book so good. I fear that my own male prejudice was showing in my previous post about this book. And that is kind of the point of this book.

The author’s hypothesis (already proven beyond the shadow of a doubt after the first two chapters) is that the world and nearly everything in it suffers from a male-centered bias. The standard human anything is considered male. One example from the book — anatomy and female anatomy. When one studies anatomy, the vast majority of the images are of male bodies, even when the presence of a penis is not required to illustrate that particular part of the anatomy. Female is treated as an afterthought, if it is considered at all. One might be tempted to think this is no big deal; the differences are minor or a matter of scale. Unfortunately, that’s simply not true. And this book shows over and over again just how much this is so.

There is a myth in the United States that life, and business in particular, is a meritocracy. That this is simply not so, is clear by how disproportionate representation is across a great many sectors of society. For example, if life were a meritocracy, for the most part, the percentages of women in orchestras would be close to matching that of the population in general. And until blind auditions were instituted in 1970s, there were close to zero women in orchestras. In chapter 4, The Myth of Meritocracy, the author shows that about a decade after this simple change, women filled approximately half of the chairs in the New York Philharmonic. Not a meritocracy after all.

This myth is most obvious in the tech world. And the author here asks the very important question, Are women really less capable or are they taught to see themselves as less capable? After all, until age five, boys and girls

draw roughly equal percentages of male and female scientists, averaged out across boys and girls. By the time children are seven or eight, male scientists significantly outnumber female scientists. By the age of fourteen, children are drawing four times as many male scientists as female scientists.
Chapter 4, Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

It seems that girls are taught subtly that they are not what scientists and computer programmers look like. We need to do something about this.

In Chapter 5, The Henry Higgins Effect (Why can’t a woman be more like a man?), the author revisits much of what Sheryl Sandberg brought out in her bestseller Lean In about the gender inequity in business. Much of this is simply because men do not have the same experiences as women, so it never even enters the thought of (male) leadership that there should be pregnancy parking, for instance. Additionally, we have different expectations of men and women, so while a man showing conviction and confidence is perceived as a leader, a woman expressing those same qualities is labeled bossy, or worse, a bitch. And if women fit the stereotype of nurturing and supportive, they are overlooked. The playing field is far from even. Pretending it is a meritocracy when there isn’t even a common scoresheet to measure that merit, is proof that isn’t a meritocracy.

In chapter 6, Being Worth Less Than a Shoe, the author explores poorly regulated industries that pose undue dangers to and unfair treatment of the disproportionate number of women who work in them.

In 2015 the New York Times reported the story of manicurist Qing Lin, forty-seven, who splashed some nail-polish remover on a customer’s patent Prada sandals. ‘When the woman demanded compensation, the $270 her boss pressed into the woman’s hand came out of the manicurist’s pay’, and Lin was fired. ‘I am worth less than a shoe,’ she said. Lin’s story appeared in a New York Times investigation of nail salons which revealed ‘all manner of humiliation’ suffered by workers, including constant video monitoring by owners, verbal, and even physical abuse. Lawsuits filed in New York courts include allegations of sixty-six-hour weeks at $1.50 an hour and no pay at all on slow days in a salon that charged manicurists for drinking the water.
Chapter 6, Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

And because women do the majority of the unpaid care work around the world, many of these women find part-time work, which often is in these precarious situations with little to no protection. It’s time we learn to value the contributions of women in the same way we do those of men.

A recurring theme throughout the book is what the author calls “the gender data gap”. Most studies conducted focus exclusively or primarily on men. Those that include a significant number of women often don’t disaggregate the data by sex. So we often have little to no data on how these studies affect men and women differently. And there is often a great deal of difference, when the data is disaggregated. This fact is front and center when the author covers women in agriculture in chapter 7, The Plough Hypothesis.

In this chapter she covers in great depth the disaster of design and distribution that surrounds the history of “clean” stoves in the developing world.

The trouble with traditional stoves is that they give off extremely toxic fumes. A woman cooking on a traditional stove in an unventilated room is exposed to the equivalent of more than a hundred cigarettes a day.
Chapter 7, Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

The clean stove was developed to solve this problem at a low cost. The fact that they weren’t universally accepted and adopted was blamed on the ignorance of women, saying that they needed to be “educated” in proper stove usage. But the real issues included:

the stoves increased cooking time and required more attending
the stoves required more maintenance
women’s lack of purchasing authority

Simply talking to the women before designing the stove would have prevented many of the problems. Indeed, one manufacturer did survey women and the results were very different.

Based on their findings they set about fixing the stove technology to fit the women. Realising that ‘a single HEC stove cannot possibly replace all of these traditional stoves’, the researchers concluded that ‘significant fuelwood reductions can only be achieved with locally customizable solutions in different parts of the world’. The result of their data-led design was the mewar angithi (MA), a simple metal device that ‘was engineered to be placed in a traditional chulha in order to provide the same airflow mechanism in the traditional chulha as occurs in the HEC stoves’.
Chapter 7, Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

The author covers another design issue in chapter 8, One-Size-Fits-Men. This is the idea that gender neutral products work equally well for men and women. Too often, that is simply not the case.

The standard width of the keyboard keys on a piano seems to be gender neutral. But because men have larger average hand size than women, there is a disproportionate number of male virtuoso piano players. Despite the creation of a piano keyboard with narrower keys, most manufacturers don’t offer it for sale. The adherence to the standard design is hard to overturn, even though it would benefit both women and men with smaller hands. And the chapter goes on to show similar situations with other product designs, such as smartphones, voice-recognition software, and artificial intelligence.

In chapter 9, A Sea of Dudes, Perez addresses the male bias in technology and venture capital. Women are half of the world’s population. Yet when product ideas that serve women (breast pumps and menstrual tracking apps, for instance) are presented for funding, the male-dominated VC firms nearly universally pass. The only hope these women often have is of finding a woman on these boards.

Women struggle to be taken seriously in the tech world because they don’t fit the sterotype.

It all feels rather catch-22ish. In a field where women are at a disadvantage specifically because they are women (and therefore can’t hope to fit a stereotypically male ‘pattern’), data will be particularly crucial for female entrepreneurs. And yet it’s the female entrepreneurs who are less likely to have it, because they are more likely to be trying to make products for women. For whom we lack data.
Chapter 9, Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

Once again, the gender data gap rears its ugly head. And this leads to situations like this, when Apple completely forgot about at least 50% of their users.

When Apple launched their AI, Siri, she (ironically) could find prostitutes and Viagra suppliers, but not abortion providers.17 Siri could help you if you’d had a heart attack, but if you told her you’d been raped, she replied ‘I don’t know what you mean by ‘I was raped.’18 These are basic errors that surely would have been caught by a team with enough women on it – that is, by a team without a gender data gap.
Chapter 9, Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

Perhaps the most maddening section for me thus far was Part IV: Going to the Doctor. The first chapter in this part (chapter 10, The Drugs Don’t Work), covers how women’s biology differs from men and, because of this, drugs don’t work for women the same way they do for men.

Drug trials don’t often account for the differences between women and men, so the dosage and effects of drugs are often based on a 70kg man, not particularly accurate for all men, but potentially fatal for women. And there doesn’t seem to be much happening to address this. Many countries require drug trials to include women and even disaggregate the data when they fund these trials. Despite these mandates, they are not always followed. As I said in my title to this post, How can women (half the world’s population) be so invisible? It’s simply maddening!

I most recently finished reading chapter 11, Yentl Syndrome. This chapter focuses on how medicine and medical research treats men and women the same despite their differing biologies. The most extreme example of this is the fact that even though the typical image of a person having a heart attack is a middle aged man clutching his chest or left arm, women have more heart attacks than men. And that isn’t even the worst part. Their symptoms of heart attack are completely different from men’s!

Women (particularly young women) may in fact present without any chest pain at all, but rather with stomach pain, breathlessness, nausea and fatigue.
Chapter 11, Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

As with drug treatments in general, the treatments for cardiovascular disease are male-biased as “sex differences have not generally been integrated either into ‘received medical wisdom’ or even clinical guidelines.” Similar issues arise with the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis, ADHD, and Asperger’s. This leaves women undiagnosed, suffering, and in danger for their lives. Why is this okay?

As I said at the beginning of this longer than usual post, I have come to share the author’s concern and sharp attitude about the nonchalance surrounding how half of the world’s population is being poorly served or ignored. Surely our mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and daughters deserve better than this. I look forward to learning more about how we can address these issues as I continue to read.

A Fantastic Read

Recently I was texting with my son. We were sharing what we like to read. He asked me if I was familiar with Brandon Sanderson. I told him the name sounded familiar but that I had never read anything by him. For the most part, he is an author of fantasy. Until recently, I haven’t cared much for fantasy. My son knows that, so he mentioned there is a logic to the magic in his books. But more than anything, he writes good characters. I was sold. For me, great characters almost make the story. It is hard to write people the reader cares about without putting them in a good story.

So I asked my son to recommend a good starting place to read some Brandon Sanderson. He recommended a fantasy story but then remembered a science fiction novel that he had written, the first of a series. I am a big sci fi fan, not mindless pulp, but the kind that explores ideas and people struggling with those ideas. My son recommended Skyward. I looked it up on Goodreads, read the description, and immediately got the ebook from my library and started reading. I just finished it. Wow!

When I started reading it, I texted by son to say that it felt like Top Gun in space. The story is about a young girl who wants to be a pilot but has all sorts of obstacles in her way. And the characters! I loved them. Even the ones I didn’t like were real enough that I cared about them. I wanted to know more about these people. Like all great fiction, I felt like I had found new friends. And for a week, I kept coming back to those friends as much as I could.

Whenever I am reading a book, I often find areas that fall flat to me, places where I need to reread a passage to understand what it said. That never happened in this book. In fact, I couldn’t find anything that I didn’t like about this book. And now that I have finished it, I can’t wait to start reading the sequel — Starsight. In fact, I think I’ll go start now. Happy reading!

An Abundance of Stats

When I started reading Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez, I was excited. It was named the best business book of 2020 by McKinsey & Company. As I read the introduction, I became even more interested to learn what I wasn’t seeing about how women are being discriminated against in the name of neutral gender policies. And the book does not disappoint on the facts and illustrations. Unfortunately for me, the book bogs down a bit with the statistics, so it is taking me longer to read than I anticipated. I’ve read three chapters so far, and it has felt like a long sheet of statistics with prose holding them together. That makes it sound like I don’t like the book. I do. However, it could be written in a more engaging manner. Regardless, the knowledge it shares and the awakening it is stirring within me is worth the time invested so far.

Chapter 1 is entitled Can Snow-Clearing Be Sexist? It shows how prioritizing the largest roads is implicitly male biased. Most women drive less than men, take more public transportation, and walk much more. In one country (I don’t recall which), when they prioritized the smaller roads and sidewalks, municipal costs actually went down. Many more accidents happen on the smaller roads and sidewalks when they are not cleared. This illustrates how a more holistic view of resources not only is more women-friendly — it also saves money.

Chapter 2 is called Gender Neutral with Urinals. This centers around the idea of how simply making all restrooms in a building “gender neutral” works against women. Men end up using all the bathrooms while women tend to use exclusively the previously ladies-only restrooms. This is because the men’s rooms lack the female friendly features they need, such as a place to dispose of feminine hygiene products. Also, bathrooms are traditionally allocated the same square footage to men’s and women’s rooms. However, due to the smaller footprint of urinals, more men can be served by the same sized bathroom than women. In order to serve men and women equally, women’s rooms need to be allocated more space. I never knew or even considered this. Very informative and enlightening!

Chapter 3 is The Long Friday and highlights the differences in men’s and women’s responsibilities in caring for others and how this affects women’s careers negatively. This one came as no surprise, but the detailed statistics from around the world are eye-opening. There are some places making progress but many more that aren’t. There is a much room for the world to get better at this.

While I might like the book to be a bit more narrative, the content is fascinating and informative. I can see already how it is changing my view of the world and the problems in it. I expect I will learn even more as I continue to read and bring this knowledge to my personal and work lives.

Enjoyable Light Reading

Ernest Cline’s debut novel Ready Player One was a runaway bestseller when it was published in 2011. It combined video game and pop culture references with a wonderful story and vibrant characters. The author’s second novel Armada is in the same vein. Unfortunately, neither the story nor the characters are of the same quality as his first book.

Don’t get me wrong. I thoroughly enjoyed Armada. I couldn’t put it down, finishing it in only two days. However, the plot was The Last Starfighter meets Ender’s Game. I found it predictable. The author attempted to overcome this by actually referring to those two stories, but that was a bit too meta and didn’t really work for me.

The characters weren’t nearly as engaging as his debut. I didn’t spend enough time with most of them to build any kind of relationship or feeling for them. But, again, I still really enjoyed the book.

Like his first book, the author loads the story with 80s pop culture, video game, and science fiction references. Somehow many to most of them feel a bit tacked on and occasionally remote. I had to look up more than I did in his first book. But maybe that’s just me.

My bottom line for this novel is that it’s good enough. It is a light, fun, quick read. It didn’t challenge me or make me think. It was bubble gum for my reading life. And sometimes that’s all I’m looking for.

The Experience of Women

Last evening, I finished reading Red Clocks by Leni Zumas. It won the 2019 Oregon Book Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Neukom Award for Speculative Fiction. And for good reason, I think.

The story is a dystopian future in the vein of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. In many ways, I prefer Red Clocks. This is mainly because it is much more accessible and hits much closer to the world we live in today. Atwood’s story takes place in a future where a conservative Christian coup has taken place and overthrown the government of the United States. The result is a society that subjugates women in the name of protecting them. It is certainly a scary prospect but feels a bit remote.

Zumas’ tale could take place any time in the next decade, should things go in that direction. No date is given but it feels like today with a few twists.

Two years ago the United States Congress ratified the Personhood Amendment, which gives the constitutional right to life, liberty, and property to a fertilized egg at the moment of conception. Abortion is now illegal in all fifty states. Abortion providers can be charged with second-degree murder, abortion seekers with conspiracy to commit murder. In vitro fertilization, too, is federally banned, because the amendment outlaws the transfer of embryos from laboratory to uterus. (The embryos can’t give their consent to be moved.)
Chapter 10, Red Clock by Leni Zumas

The story is about four women that are each dealing with challenges in their lives that are made more challenging by these laws. The magic is in the storytelling; the author never goes into a lengthy exposition about why these laws are wrong. The strength of the novel is in simply showing how these laws affect the women, individually and personally.

The girl slumps down against a green filing cabinet. Holds her head in both hands, knees up to her chest, rocking a little. “I just want it out of my body. I want to stop being infiltrated. God, please get this out of my body. Make this stop.” Rocking, rocking.

She is terrified, realizes the biographer….

Mattie is a kid, light boned and soft cheeked. She can’t even legally drive.

Four and a half months.

Of swelling and aching and burning and straining and worrying and waiting and feeling her body burst its banks. Of hiding from the stares in town, the questions at school. Of seeing the faces, each day, of her parents as they watch the grandchild who won’t be their grandchild be grown. Having to wonder, later on, where is the someone she grew.
Chapter 100, Red Clocks by Leni Zumas

This story helps to break the illusion that difficult questions like these are black and white. They affect real people whose welfare and future need to be taken into account.

The characters are compelling and fully human. This is exactly the kind of speculative fiction that I like most, taking a current possibility and extending it into a near future to explore what the consequences might be. The result is both entertaining and thought provoking. Thank you, Professor Zumas.

Digital Reading and Writing

I love to read. And my preferred method of reading is on my ereader. Currently I have a Kobo Aura ONE that I use. That’s the hardware. I don’t use the default Kobo software, though. It is good enough, but I found an open source project that I like even better. I was able to load it on my Kobo alongside the existing software. It’s called KOReader. Using this ereader software, I can read on my phone or my ereader, anywhere, any time. And I can queue up any number of books that I want to read. That way I have many choices for my next book when I finish the one I am reading. I also always have my books with me, on my phone or ereader. I try to use my down time to read rather than play games or surf social media.

Today, while I was surfing social media, I saw an ad on Facebook for an eInk tablet called reMarkable. Normally, I don’t click on Facebook ads, mostly because they usually aren’t anything I care about. But this was for a product that I am familiar with. I passed on the first version of the reMarkable tablet. It seemed to have all the flaws of a version one. But this ad was for the second iteration. I decided to click through and learn more.

It bills itself as the tool for reading and marking up PDF files. It also allows users to take notes digitally with an included pen. They even say they have given it the feel of writing on paper. In fact, they call this “digital paper”. You can take notes in your own handwriting and convert them to typed text with OCR. And all this syncs with your phone and computer. What it does not do is distract you with email, games, or social media. It sounded amazing and like something I would use. It is a little on the expensive side, but I decided to pre-order it.

It also serves as an ereader, reading epub files, so I was thinking that it could become my everyday ereader. I have a couple of magazine subscriptions that come with a PDF version of the print edition. I plan on reading those on the reMarkable tablet, so I was thinking maybe I could move all of my reading to it. I did some research and others are saying that it is a subpar ereader. When I searched to see if KOReader was available for it, I found that it is!

Now I am very excited to receive this device and see how it measures up to my plans for it. It won’t ship until September, so I have a bit of a wait. In the meantime, I’ll continue to read on my Kobo and take notes in my notebooks. Happy reading!

Women Focused Reading

Without intending to consciously, I find myself reading what I think of as feminist literature. Years ago I read The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. I’ve started to get back into science fiction and decided to read it’s sequel, The Testaments. I started reading it on Saturday and just finished it.

On Saturday, I read about another feminist speculative fiction novel entitled Red Clocks by Leni Zumas. It’s about a future where “abortion is once again illegal in America, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment grants rights of life, liberty, and property to every embryo.” This dystopia seems a little closer and a little scarier. I’m looking forward to reading it.

I don’t remember where I learned about it, but yesterday I started reading Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez. It’s already eye opening. The ideas aren’t all that new to me, but it is giving me a perspective I didn’t have before. Here is an example from the introduction.

The presumption that what is male is universal is a direct consequence of the gender data gap. Whiteness and maleness can only go without saying because most other identities never get said at all. But male universality is also a cause of the gender data gap: because women aren’t seen and aren’t remembered, because male data makes up the majority of what we know, what is male comes to be seen as universal. It leads to the positioning of women, half the global population, as a minority.

Obvious, but somehow I had never realized how ridiculous it is to refer to women as a minority as they are half of the population. I’m looking forward to learning even more as I read.

Learning From Others

Today I finished reading Mandela’s Way: Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage by Richard Stengel. It’s sort of a biography formatted into lessons. I really appreciated this format. It allowed the author to focus on ideas throughout Mandela’s life rather than focusing on a time-based approach.

I bought this book many years ago and only just read it. I expected it to be a sort of leadership or business book applying the lessons of a great leader to those worlds. I was surprised to find that it was much more approachable than that. It is really a series of life lessons that apply to all aspects of life.

I sometimes read a book and struggle to make myself come back to it and finish. At first that happened to me with this book. I think that was because I was looking at it through a business lens. Once I shifted my perspective and saw it as a biography of life lessons to learn, I found myself eager to continue reading.

While I did not find any of the lessons earth shattering or new, there is great value in seeing how common life principles were lived by someone so much a part of history as Mandela was. And the author does not shy from Mandela’s flaws; this is no hagiography. In my opinion, that only make is more valuable. Life is messy. Learning how others applied life principles, successfully or not, is a great way to spend my time reading.

Escaping My Echo Chamber

We all live in an echo chamber constructed by the algorithms that build our newsfeeds. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media do their best to feed us more of what we like in order to keep us on their site or in their app. I recently decided that I wanted to get out of this box.

I think it is important to seek out ideas different than my own. I want to understand how the world works not only from my own perspective but from that of others who may think differently than I do. But I recently started to notice that all of the news I was seeing seemed to have the same slant. It felt repetitive and one-sided and made me uncomfortable. It reinforced what I already think and believe, but what about people on the other side? Surely they must have a valid perspective that led them to think the way they do. So I decided to take action.

The first thing I did was to seek out more news sources. I don’t read, listen to, or watch much news. I mostly listen to NPR in the car and occasionally look at Facebook online. I started by seeking out two separate news sources, one from the left (CNN) and one from the right (Fox News). I looked daily at each home page and read one or two of the articles there. After a few days of this, I’d had enough. I still felt like I was in an echo chamber, or rather two completely separate echo chambers with little depth to the reporting.

What I wanted was a more nuanced and complete picture of what is going on. Both of these sites operate on the “headline news” model. What’s happening now is what’s important to them. Getting there first is the driver as well as keeping people on their sites to view their ads. I wanted something deeper. I knew there were real people behind these stories, but I wasn’t seeing that in the reporting.

My next step was to subscribe to The Flip Side, a service that sends a daily email about a particular topic in the news with excerpts from the left, right, and in-between. It is a quick five-minute read each day that helps give me perspective on the headlines without drowning me in the partisanship. Very valuable and free. This was an improvement, but I was still missing a more complete picture.

So I sought out long form journalism with different perspectives, one left, one right. I settled on The Atlantic and Reason, respectively. I noticed that I had been reading and appreciating a lot of articles in The Atlantic. And Reason was a magazine I was familiar with and respected. I started to read what was on each website when I wanted to find out more about what was in the news. I found more substance and reporters genuinely seeking to understand things rather than spout a party line. Granted, they each are coming from their own world view, but they do so with thought and care that goes much deeper than throwing up a flashy headline as clickbait.

My final, and to me most important step, was that I now subscribe to both of these publications. I value what they do and having both of their perspectives. And if I value what they do and want them to continue doing it, I need to support them financially.

Today I get my news from both the left and the right and feel like I have a better perspective on the world and better insight into why each side feels the way they do. And I think that helps me be a better citizen than being stuck in an echo chamber that just tells me what I already know and like.

Both Republican AND Democrat

I try not to be dogmatic about my political positions, and they don’t collectively fit neatly within either of the two major US political parties. Recently, I’ve found myself looking more at the humanity of our issues and the people struggling with them in an effort to find practical solutions. Unfortunately, our politics don’t seem to be moving in that direction. I see a growing need to balance communal well-being and individual rights. It’s a “both/and” situation rather than an “either/or”. We need both collective action and individual responsibility. And the only open path in that direction is kindness and a willingness to see the humanity in the “other”.

Members of both political parties rally around their principles even as they demonize the opposition. It might be more accurate to say that they have weaponized their principles. They behave like ruthless players in the game of Monopoly attempting to destroy their opponents. It has become us vs. them rather than simply us working together to find mutually agreed upon ways to address our collective issues.

We need to recognize that we are all members of one family, US citizens. And like all families, we won’t always agree. But how we choose to disagree is critical to us continuing to behave like a family and move forward together. Politicians set up issues in false pairs, implying that we cannot address the challenges presented by refugees at our southern border while at the same time improving the lot of our underemployed and working poor in our own country. We can do both, but that requires us to be willing to listen to and learn from our political rivals. This is the lesson we need to learn from our modern divided politics.

The election of Donald Trump as president was the result of our unwillingness to listen rather than its cause. Because ideological purity had become so much a part of modern politics, rural America felt isolated and unheard, even unrepresented. Trump tapped into that and made them feel seen and heard. But the way he did it has divided the country even further. Trump encouraged supporters who chanted “Lock her up!” while Clinton referred to half of his supporters as a “basket of deplorables”.

The answer to this dilemma is neither the blustering hyperbole of the president nor the self-righteous indignation of his opposition. Instead all of us on both sides need to see that our opposition has a perspective that we are lacking. We need to learn from each other what we are missing from our political evaluations. We need to “seek first to understand, then to be understood“. And the first step in this direction is to see the humanity in our rivals and to treat them with kindness. Like all good things in life, this will be difficult, requiring action with no guarantee of reciprocity. But if no one is willing to go first, the only direction we are heading is more divided politics.