Invisible Women summary

On snowy mornings in Karlskoga, Sweden, snow is cleared from sidewalks, pedestrian areas, and roads. In that order. But it used to be the other way ‘round. Why? Because first thing in the morning, full-time commuters tend to drive, while part-time workers or carers tend to travel on foot. The Karlskoga council saw the full-time commuters as the priority.

But what they didn’t know is that this also meant they were favoring men over women. Full-time workers are mostly men, whereas carers and part-time workers are overwhelmingly women. The council realized they hadn’t thought to look at women in their data set. When they did, they saw the flaws in the snow-clearing schedule, and the new procedure resulted in far fewer snow-related pedestrian injuries. 

If you’ve ever attended a concert and compared the line for the ladies’ bathrooms with that for the gents, you’ll probably have noticed a disparity between the two.

How does that long line happen? It’s a direct result of the gender data gap. Public planning regulations frequently stipulate that venues allocate equal bathroom space for men and women. This looks good on paper – but dig a little deeper and you’ll see this planning decision is based on data that ignores women’s needs.

On average, men have bigger hands than women. Tools and devices are often designed to male hand measurements. As a result, the design of many everyday objects is, quite literally, hard for women to grasp.

Objects designed to male measurements prevent women from reaching their potential. Take the piano. A 2015 study rated pianists by level of acclaim. Internationally renowned pianists were ranked at the highest level. Of the 12 internationally renowned pianists, only two were women. Are men naturally better pianists? 

When it comes to health and safety, the word “standard” more often means “standard male”; as a result, many health and safety guidelines leave women out in the cold. This is certainly the case when it comes to the recommended office temperature, which was set in the 1960s, based on the metabolic resting rate of a 40-year-old, 70 kg male – leaving women working in offices up to five degrees too cold for the average female metabolic rate. But chilly offices could be the least of women’s worries.

Cars undergo stringent safety testing before they’re put on the market. But the crash test dummies required for those tests are all male. Dummies have been used since the 1950s, and, even today, the typical dummy’s dimensions remain in the 50th percentile for males. It’s 1.77m tall and weighs 76 kg, has a male spine and male muscle proportions. 

From infrastructure to design, men and male bodies are deemed “standard.” This is the case even in the medical field. A 2008 study of medical textbooks used across prestigious European universities found that, of 16,329 images illustrating neutral body parts, male bodies were depicted three times more often than female bodies. How does this bias affect women seeking medical care?

Gender bias and the gender data gap are particularly insidious problems in the medical field – because, when it comes to medicine, data is key. It determines how doctors recognize and treat diseases and how drugs and devices are developed and administered. Numerous studies have shown that male and female bodies differ at the anatomical, organ, tissue, and cellular levels. Gathering data on female bodies is therefore critical in providing women with effective medical care. 

From school textbooks to clinical studies, there is an endemic gender data gap. But the biggest gender gap of all occurs on a global scale – in the way we measure GDP.

The GDP measures national output in terms of goods and services. Domestic work, childcare, and eldercare are services typically performed by women. When this domestic and care work is unpaid, it isn’t factored into GDP. Yet it has economic value. Indeed, when a woman performs this unpaid work, she’s frequently supporting a partner whose income is counted toward GDP. 

The gender data gap comes about when we assume that one gender, in this case the male gender, is the default, and that these needs are standard needs. Why has it proven so persistent? For one thing, many people making high-level data-based decisions are male. In politics, men far outnumber women. That’s a serious problem: statistics show that female politicians are far more likely to address the gender gap in their policies than their male counterparts

Women are significantly underrepresented in politics. In December 2017, only 23.5 percent of the world’s politicians were women. Why aren’t more women entering politics? Perhaps because the current underrepresentation leads to the perception of politics as a “male” space – and this is bad news for women. In 2008, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley concluded that when a woman speaks in a stereotypically male context – like Wall Street, for example – she is judged more negatively than a man who says exactly the same thing. Women in the political sphere are deemed aggressive where men are assertive. This influences their likeability, which in turn affects their electability.