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1-Page Summary of Invisible Women

Overview

Smartphones are designed for men. The temperature in offices is set to the metabolic rate of a man. Men are used as crash test dummies when designing cars.

We live in a world that was designed for and around men. How did this happen?

There’s a gender data gap. It’s partly due to the fact that we often assume men are the standard and women aren’t taken into account in business decisions. This leads to a lack of female representation in data, which is problematic because it prevents businesses from making effective decisions for their customers or clients.

The gender data gap can be the cause of many inconveniences in women’s lives. For example, they might have to wait longer for a bathroom because it wasn’t built with their needs in mind. At its most extreme, this gender data gap has lethal consequences; for instance, if women are involved in car crashes and there isn’t enough information about how they react compared to men when they’re driving, then we won’t know what types of cars are safer for them than others.

It’s not just women who suffer. Men and boys are also affected by the gender data gap. To address it, we need to understand how this gap affects us all in politics and economics. We can do that with a thorough analysis of snowplowing as well as interviews with those speakers and the author’s insights from business leaders.

Big Idea #1: We are conditioned to view the male gender as the default and ignore or erase female experience.

Archaeologists discovered a Viking skeleton in 1889, assuming the bones belonged to a male warrior despite the female pelvic bone. This assumption was not corrected for over 100 years because archaeologists are conditioned to view males as default gender.

The tendency to focus on the male body goes back at least as far as ancient Greece, when Aristotle described men as normal and women as aberrations. Even in anatomy, when female organs were considered at all, they were often viewed as exceptions to the norm. Some female organs weren’t even named until the seventeenth century.

Gender bias is still prevalent in today’s society. It can be seen even in something as simple as emojis, the newest form of communication. Before 2016, there was no gender assigned to emojis; it was up to each platform how they wanted to depict them. The platforms chose male symbols for certain things such as runners and police officers. This changed when Unicode began assigning genders to emoji symbols; this brought equality among men and women with regards to emojis.

In many other aspects of life, though, there is not representational parity. For example, statues and banknotes are skewed towards men. In the UK alone, there are more statues of John than all non-royal women put together! Also in the UK, only one woman has been depicted on bank notes: Jane Austen.

The way we learn about grammar and language is skewed in favor of men. This happens because there are more references to men than women in textbooks. In fact, a study found that the ratio of male references to female ones was 3:1.

As we will see in the next key point, this bias affects everything. It’s why our cars and smartphones are designed a certain way and why local authorities have procedures for snow shoveling.

Big Idea #2: Data centers on the male experience and overlooks the female experience.

In Karlskoga, Sweden, snow is cleared from the roads first thing in the morning. The sidewalks and pedestrian areas are cleared later. This is because full-time commuters tend to drive while part-time workers or carers tend to travel on foot.