Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez has an astounding amount of raw data in so many separate and wide-ranging forms which culminate together to tInvisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez has an astounding amount of raw data in so many separate and wide-ranging forms which culminate together to the compelling claims of the different but all connected ways which women - on global, national and local levels - are disadvantaged by decisions made and policies enacted without expressed contributions & considerations from what would otherwise be essentially 50% of the beneficiary group, the women that is. From going in with the perspective of "I totally agree with the over-arching message of this topic, although I couldn't begin to describe it with a level of expertise", I found myself saying "fascinating" so all these very intricate analyses of examples of unconscious bias & inequity that I, as a Midwest fella (dude) probably wouldn't ever have the level of scrutiny to see in my experience alone. Let's break it down fellas
One of the first examples of these kinds of unconscious bias & inequities is public transportation system. So how does it work when you design a system for a public resource - what's the evidence you can observe to see that its working? What's the KPIs, if you will, to use corporate office jargon. Well Criado Perez details how historically, public transit was created to serve, and in turn perpetuated, this repeatable and expected pattern of travel; people in suburbs & housing districts outside the business-dense downtown use transit twice a day: once in the morning to come into town, and then in the afternoon to go home. Well with that as the KPI, you oughta create a system that maximizes that pattern and is most efficient economically and performatively. But far more often than men, women take several trips a day, in and AROUND downtown for childcare, shopping, and other "unpaid" work (this refers to chores & things needed to sustain a healthy life, but are not codified as working jobs, and it's a fascinating confounding variable which is not accounted for in GDP and many economic metrics). Anywho THEREFORE, these classically models of public transit systems will underserve their constituencies of women! What do you do! You change the system - London introduced a thing called the "hopper fare", where users pay according to time spent on the "tube" as they call it, as opposed to the whole number of trips. Did that disrupt the system, cost some workhours to workshop and then implement? Yea it did, but you'll make the money back with the newfound benefactors of women using the "tube" - just call it a subway, guys.
Criado-Perez puts forward examples like these in the context of a number of different industries or environments or aspects of life; another one that stuck out to me for the gravity of its importance is the underemphasized funding & research into medicine for women. Get this, this was crazy history for me to learn - in 1977, the FDA issued guidelines in response to a drug trail and women of childbearing potential would be excluded from drug trails. The decision was made that it would simply be too difficult (given status quo budgets, and too costly to raise said budgets) to account for sex differences in drug trails. Well uh oh! It wouldn't be until decades later that its discovered that some of the "adverse drug reactions" (ADRs) women experience differently than men are acetaminophen is metabolized a rate of 60% that that of men, kidney filtering is slower, and all this not to even mention accounting for the environmental factors puts groups & communities of women at higher risk for diseases and conditions which are entirely missed or misdiagnosed, since they don't conform to the prescribed lists of symptoms of those seen more commonly in men - this is called "Yentl Syndrome" by Criado-Perez.
Though an act of congress passed in 93, it became law to require women to be included in federally funded trials - although by 2015 the GAO found the NIH does a "poor job" at enforcing this standard. But do these inequities in medicine persist today? Yea they do. So you might ask like I did, "doesn't this mean there is massive business to be capitalized on creating better, more equitable, more wholistic solutions which serve women, nearly half the beneficiaries of this industry, or any other that has these same inequities?". Well the problem sorta is the answer. If there isn't enough sex-disaggregated data to substantiate there is a problem in the first place, who's gonna have the incentive to make a solution? Remember one paragraph ago when I said women of childbearing potential were excluded from drug trails for a few decades? In order to identify these problems in the first place, let alone address them to implement sustainable solutions, there has to be supply of "sex disaggregated" data, where KPIs (I dislike how often I'm using that here) can be more accurately assigned given the breakdown of demographic information. The blanket one-size-fits-all approach has famously not worked for tons of things, and Criado Perez has the receipts to prove it.
Here is one that made me really think of my own personal experiences and cross-sez friendships and relationships that I've either been a part of or observed; a 2012 study in America found that women only participate in an equal rate of discussion when they are a "large majority" of the group (doesn't specify ratio or group size, I imagine the original study does). And FASCINATINGLY, men were to speak the same amount independent of group size. It was also found that men interrupt women & men at a consistently higher rate than women, and that men interrupt specifically women at a higher rate than THAT! That was a fascinating metric for me to learn about in clinical context. Extrapolate the effect of this study onto pretty much every aspect of life that presumably serves women & men equally, but actually has unintended inequities & biases, and you start to see the bigger picture.
The point is, where there are not women present creating the framework of prototyping and assigning those KPIs, these inequities and failures to account for an underserved beneficiary will not only go unnoticed, they can PROPOGATE and then be unfortunately labeled as "just a consequence of the system" or worse, as "the way things have always been". Well when I'm reading this book I say to myself "this is a problem! We need people who want to fix it!" Why would people resist that attitude? Sorry folks here is a sad but true phenomenon; when an underserved demographic becomes institutionalized as exactly that, living at a lower standard, asking for equity is seen as an unfounded or unearned ask. I say to thee, not only is it a well-deserved standard to ask for given the data, but it's innately deserved as a human right. Furthermore, plenty of evidence shows that including women in decision making processes creates more efficient and sustainable solutions. Here's one, get this - an analysis of 182 peace agreements in the last 40-ish years found that those with women included in the process had a 20% higher rate of lasting more than 2 years, and 35% of lasting more than 15. That's just the data folks! Funding for early childhood education, which is another example of "unpaid" work traditional served by women increases odds employment, car & house ownership, having a savings account, and lowers the odds of crime.
Here's what I came to say - you can't fix something until you realize it's broken. Criado Perez has done a mighty fine job educated and convincing me what systems and processes are broken, and she has the expertise to expound on its origins & prognosis, and through this analysis, tell us what solutions we can realistically and honestly work toward. I give this book, four "I didn't know that! we gotta do something about that"s outta five!...more
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