I just finished this wonderful book by Caroline Criado Perez on Audible and have been talking to everyone about it ever since. (As an added bonus, the audiobook is read by the author, and she’s a great reader!) This post provides some highlights and reflections.
Overall, the book is a dense collection of data on the prevalence and effect of what the author calls a “global gender data gap”. In fact, the book is so dense with information that, when I attempt to summarize it to others, I find myself just paraphrasing from the book, which is why this post gives “highlights” rather than “summary”.
In any case, what Criado Perez means by “gender data gap” is the phenomenon that women’s experiences are systematically discounted in information gathering and decision making. This occurs in several ways: research may be done using exclusively or primarily male participants (such as in medicine); research data may not be disaggregated by sex, making it difficult to spot sex differences (such as in estimating effects of disasters or poverty); existing data on how women experience certain things differently may be overlooked or discounted (such as in design and policy-making).
Some of these statistics, I have known for some time, such as the fact that most medications are only or primarily tested in male subjects, although I did learn that the usual excuse — that women are more variable due to hormonal cycles — is probably not valid. This has resulted in medications that don’t really work in women being routinely prescribed, of course, but also medications that might have worked for women to not go on the market. I also learned that illnesses that present different symptoms in women than in men, such as heart attacks, are often underdiagnosed in women. Illnesses that affect only women or primarily women are systematically underresearched. This explains why period pain, a common condition in my experience, is not medicalized or treated. A good friend of mine has period pain so severe, she has passed out several times because of it. She has gone to the doctors multiple times (different doctors), who performed more or less the same examinations on her, and pronounced that there’s nothing wrong with her (because she didn’t have uterus cancer). Apparently, the drug that later became Viagra had a potential of reducing period pain, but research initiatives to this end have not been funded.
My favourite stats from this book — I like it because of how dramatic and unexpected it is — is the fact that when a man and a woman get into a car crash, the woman is 47% more likely to be seriously injured, and 17% more likely to die (there is an edited extraction containing this bit here). This is because almost all of the cars are safety-tested in male dummies only. While European companies test their cars with female dummies in the passenger seat (but not in the driver seat), the female dummies are often just scaled-down male dummies.
And, of course, there are things that shouldn’t come as surprise were it not for the obvious and serious consequences. Female mechanics are often handed wrongly-sized tools and protective gear, modeled off of a “50th percentile man”. Female police officers are often given bullet-proof vests that don’t fit… and so don’t proof bullets.
I can go on and on, recalling stats I’ve read from the book, but I’ll stop and let you read for yourself.
Aside from the usual sexism and misogyny, Criado Perez believes that a lot of the gender data gaps are caused by the natural ignorance of alternative experiences compounded with the overrepresentation of men in decision making:
Essentially, people tend to assume that our own way of thinking about or doing things is typical. That it’s just normal. For white men this bias is surely magnified by a culture that reflects their experience back to them, thereby making it seem even more typical. Projection bias amplified by a form of confirmation bias, if you like. Which goes some way towards explaining why it is so common to find male bias masquerading as gender neutrality. If the majority of people in power are men – and they are – the majority of people in power just don’t see it. Male bias just looks like common sense to them.
In a sense, this is understandable. (Which is not to say that it is excusable.)
A while back, I had a similar data gap experience. My office mate and I sometimes get into strange conversations. At one occasion, we and another student in the department got into an hour-long conversation about toilets. In this conversation, much to all of our surprise, we discovered that there are more male toilets on our floor than female toilets — and it’s not just because urinals take up less space. There are three stalls (in addition to three urinals) in the male washroom and two in the female one.
I was fascinated by this discovery and even more fascinated by the fact that we’ve been in the department for 4 years without realizing this. But of course, people usually don’t talk about toilet space, and people mostly only go to one washroom. It’s not the sort of thing you happen upon.
I have since dropped this discovery onto several people and taken great enjoyment doing it. It goes like this. I meet someone in the hallway and say “hey, how’s it going? Did you know that the women’s washroom on our floor has fewer stalls than the men’s washroom?” Everyone has been equally fascinated.
So, there you go. A data gap has been filled. What is interesting about this experience is that a couple of people have brought up the (perhaps natural) question of “can we do anything about it?” My response has been, “probably not, and probably not worth it”, since it is (unfortunately) in fact true that there are more men on our floor than women. But there is something about noting the inequality while also recognizing that one probably cannot do anything about it that is therapeutic, I think, especially for men. People who have not met a lot of injustices in their lives tend to think that every problem has a fast solution — because they haven’t encountered many problems before. This belief is sometimes good if it mobilizes them when faced with problems. But it can also be harmful because it often leads to a victim-blaming kind of belief whereby people who still have problems just haven’t tried hard enough to solve them. I used to be someone like this and I think it’s good for people to occasionally confront problems they cannot solve so they can better appreciate the position of someone less fortunate. One toilet at a time.
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