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Female Unpaid Care Work, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez, Women Issues
Photo Credit: Abrams Books
Women are doing far and away more than our fair share of [unpaid care work] – this necessary work without which our lives would all fall apart. And, as with male violence against women, female biology is not the reason women are the bum-wiping class. But recognizing a child as female is the reason she will be brought up to expect and accept that as her role. Recognizing a woman as female is the reason she will be seen as the appropriate person to clear up after everyone in the office. To write the Christmas and birthday cards to her husband’s family – and look after them when they get sick. To be paid less. To go part-time when they have kids.
Failing to collect data on women and their lives means that we continue to naturalize sex and gender discrimination – while at the same time somehow not seeing any of this discrimination. Or really, we don’t see it because we naturalize it – it is too obvious, too commonplace, too much just the way things are to bother commenting on. It’s the irony of being a woman: at once hyper-visible when it comes to being treated as the subservient sex class, and invisible when it counts – when it comes to being counted.
Excerpt from Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez, Abrams Press, New York, Paperback Edition 2021 (pp. 313-314).
[Original Hardcover Edition, published by Chatto & Windus (UK) and Abrams (USA), 2019.]
CAROLINE CRIADO PEREZ is a best-selling and award-winning writer, broadcaster, and award-winning feminist campaigner. Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men is the winner of the 2019 Royal Society Science Book Prize and the 2019 Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award. She lives in London (UK) where she also writes a weekly newsletter keeping up with the latest data on the gender data gap.
Three Worlds One Vision 
True, I must read that…👍👍
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Jim, I highly recommend that you do. As a woman, it was a stunning eyeopener for me. I suspect that men are unaware of this built-in, male-default system.
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I’ve heard about the book…it is on my TBR list 📖📖📖
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Excellent!
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Oh this looks like a great book thank you Rosaliene. I have been thinking of this, since I went to see a close friend on the week-end and was moved to see her in tears. “You’re coming with me” I said and I made her pack up a swag and overnight clothes, raided my camping cupboard and we went to a nearby national park for the night. Laughter and tears and long talks. Her emotional load at the moment is so heavy, caring for parents, caring for children, keeping up with her job, keeping her household going . The pressure was intense. I’ve been there. Women are often the sole bearers of these burdens and it is completely overlooked.
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Thanks for adding your voice, Kate. I’ve been there, too, when I raised my sons as a single parent and sole-provider. When I look back on those days, I don’t know where I found the energy to do it all.
It’s a must-read. She also cites data from Australia throughout her book.
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Thank you, Rosaliene. My first encounter with the notion of invisibility came when I read Germaine Greer’s “The Change.” She talked about how menopause and aging combined to cause women to lose a man’s gaze. She saw this as a loss, a relief, and a liberation. I see that it has been updated. Perhaps her views have altered.
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I haven’t read Greer’s book on “The Change.” I’ve only read the 2008 edition of The Female Eunuch, first published in 1970, about the history of the women’s rights movement. The menopause is a tough transition, but I’ve found that it does have its upside 🙂
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Thank you for sharing this excerpt, I now HAVE to read!!!!
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I highly recommend, Libby. It was a disturbing revelation for me and explains why we have made such little progress towards gender equality. She demonstrates with the data or lack thereof the numerous ways in which the woman is immediately classified as “someone to speak over. Someone to cat call. Someone to follow. Someone to rape” (p. 313).
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I literally added it to my Kindle read list as soon as I read your post! 📚🙏😬☺️💖
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Fifty percent of the population should not be treated as a minority. Everyone (men and women) should read this book, it is extremely insightful and very well research. This book is full of numbers and statistics that will make your head spin, and while it might be a turn-off at first, some numbers will stay with you for a very long time.
GENDER NEUTRAL DOES NOT MEAN GENDER EQUAL!
I am glad you recommended this book, Rosaliene.
We live in a men’s world, created for men -not women.
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Bridget, thanks for adding your own comments about Perez’s well-researched book. So many parts were disturbing. Others aroused the tigress in me. It’s also a must-read book for men. I doubt that they realize to what extent the world has been created in their image.
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I called myself the “invisible woman” for a very long time, even lived it. The book is a must read for women and every man. I agree they don’t know what privileges they have.
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So, maybe, Rosaliene, we have to have the courage and not behave in the way we always have!! Thank you very much for having proposed this challenging book:)
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You’re welcome, Martina. I do not believe that women lack courage in seeking behavioral change. Gains made by courageous women in the past are now under threat of being dismantled. A world designed by men for men can only be changed by men. Today, another man is taking humanity into what might become a nuclear War World III. We all know what our roles as women will be during a time of warfare.
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I partly agree with you, Rosaliene, but in the country you are speaking about has been having the right to vote for women since approx.1917, but, according to a journalist from there, this didn’t mean that they had more right, but more duties and they just accepteted this situation!!! In time of war, I don’t really know whether it is better to be a woman or a man!
Unfortunately, I havn’t got much strength to go into this subject, because I’am with Covid just now!
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Martina, so sorry to hear that you’ve down with Covid. Sending best wishes for your full recovery ❤
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Thank you very much, Rosaliene, for your good wishes! I thought of your:):)
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I absolutely love that book! I couldn’t put it down when I read it! I am glad though that some changes started happening after that book was published, like the EU requiring female crash test dummies (although, they don’t usually put them in the driver’s seat, even though women drive more than men)
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TCK, thanks for adding your voice. It was startling to discover the ways in which the male body is the default model for the human body. We the female gender have had to adapt the best way we could.
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We sure have! It can be tiring though
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Hi. Is she collecting data from certain nations, or from all over the world?
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Neil, she draws on data available worldwide. It might interest you to know that she refers to Philadelphia twice in Chapter 1 on “Can Snow-Clearing be Sexist?” (pp. 29-46) What has this got to do with your city, you may ask.
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Thanks for this, I hope I can find it. It sounds like an excellent read.
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Carol, it’s excellent in being informative and insightful in its revelation of the our global male-default system in data collection in matters that affect our day-to-day lives.
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I will look forward to reading it even more now. Thank you.
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My pleasure, Carol 🙂
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❤
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My wife sighed, “Honey, your career gains are my loss.”
I replied, “That’s funny — I thought you were the boss!”
P.S. And then we kissed — I couldn’t resist. 😉
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Wish I could respond in verse, Mister Muse. But I’m at a loss. Happy is the man who has found the secret to marital bliss 🙂
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Not really anything that I would argue with there. We brought our daughter up, though, never to feel subservient and always to stand up for herself
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Thanks for sharing, John. We do our best as parents to prepare our children for the real world.
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Thanks, Rosaliene. That looks like the next book on my list!
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My pleasure, Rebecca. It’s definitely an essential read.
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This sounds like a great read, Rosaliene. Women have come a long way but we have so much further to go! Knowledge is power, and understanding the dynamics helps us to point them out and change them. Thanks for the intro to what seems like an important book.
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Diana, it is, indeed, an important book for understanding the dynamics of our world.
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It’s crazy how deeply embedded the discriminatory expectations are in spite of the progress some women have made in reaching high positions in politics and science.
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JoAnna, it’s not crazy when, as Perez reveals in her book, the male of our species was set up as the human default in structuring human society.
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Set up in The Bible?
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Perez doesn’t seek to explain the origins of patriarchy. She only examines its manifestations in our day to day lives. To answer your question, I would recommend The Creation of Patriarchy by American historian Gerda Lerner (USA 1986). Perhaps, I should consider sharing some findings from her book.
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Thank you, Rosaliene. I hope we can move more toward balance.
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In a subsection titled “What We Define as Masculine Is Not Set in Stone” within the book The Highly Sensitive Man, the author writes: “… Society’s view of how a man should be and what attributes are desirable and attractive in him is something that is more flexible than we think. In her book A History of Male Psychological Illness in Britain: 1945-1980, historian Allison Haggett, Ph.D., describes the development of men’s psychological problems in the United Kingdom since the Second World War. When I talked to her, she explained to me that she finds the current, very narrow definition of masculinity in the Western world to be ‘problematic and restrictive,’ referencing numerous psychological and medical studies on men’s health.
Haggett also describes how our understanding of typical masculinity has changed radically throughout history and says that, from a historical perspective, it is much harder to define than we might suppose. In her book, she argues that masculine attributes are first and foremost socially constructed and not biologically determined. They are, therefore, prone to change and have often done so in the past.
She describes how, during the Georgian era (1714-1830), just before the start of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, the picture of a desirable man was completely different from the image we have today. At that time, masculinity was equated with wisdom and virtuousness. Not only was it socially acceptable for a man to express himself emotionally, it was positively desirable. The Georgian man was not afraid of being scorned for showing emotion. According to Haggett, this led to a culture of introspection among men, in which it was socially acceptable to be self-reflective and contemplative.
The central nervous system was also seen as being particularly important in understanding the human body at that time, and it was believed that a particularly nervous or sensitive disposition was a clear indication of a noble or educated background and refinement, not a sign of a lack of masculinity. The finer and more sensitive a man’s nervous system was, the better.
What we might now call ‘weak nerves’ used to be something that was valued. Our understanding of masculinity was, however, profoundly changed by the new focus on productivity and efficiency during the Industrial Revolution and the twentieth century’s two world wars. Since then, open displays of emotion by men, with the exception of anger, have been stigmatized and are commonly seen as something negative and embarrassing.
In order for men to assert themselves socially and professionally, it became increasingly important in the Western world for them to develop characteristics such as dominance, independence, and high performance. But as we have seen in this chapter, men have paid a high price for this. The rest of society has paid, too: their partners, their families, their children, their siblings, their parents, and their friends. It has affected all of us. …”
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Fgsjr, thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts. I’ve added The Highly Sensitive Man by Tom Falkenstein, a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist, to my To Read List. I agree with Haggett that “that masculine attributes are first and foremost socially constructed and not biologically determined.” The same is true for the woman. Our world is in need of the Georgian man to put an end to humanity’s senseless wars.
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That Georgian-man example really through me for a loop. Who’d’ve thunk it! …
Unfortunately, senseless wars will remain very profitable for big bankers and arms merchants.
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Women are often left out of health and exercise studies. Look carefully at “expert” recommendations as many of the exercise studies were done on men of a certain age and may not translate to women of varying age groups.
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According to the author of The Highly Sensitive Man (2019, Tom Falkenstein, Ch.1): “At the same time, academics are telling us that ‘we know far less about the psychological and physical health of men than of women.’ Why is this? Michael Addis, a professor of psychology and a leading researcher into male identity and psychological health, has highlighted a deficit in our knowledge about men suffering from depression and argues that this has cultural, social, and historical roots.
If we look at whether gender affects how people experience depression, how they express it, and how it’s treated, it quickly becomes clear that gender has for a long time referred to women and not to men. According to Addis, this is because, socially and historically, men have been seen as the dominant group and thus representative of normal psychological health. Women have thus been understood as the nondominant group, which deviated from the norm, and they have been examined and understood from this perspective. One of the countless problems of this approach is that the experiences and specific challenges of the ‘dominant group,’ in this case men, have remained hidden. …
While it is true that a higher percentage of women than men will be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder or a depressive episode, the suicide rate among men is much higher. In the United States, the suicide rate is notably higher in men than in women. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, men account for 77 percent of the forty-five thousand people who kill themselves every year in the United States. In fact, men commit suicide more than women everywhere in the world. Men are more likely to suffer from addiction, and when men discuss depressive symptoms with their doctor, they are less likely than women to be diagnosed with depression and consequently don’t receive adequate therapeutic and pharmacological treatment. …
This is backed up by numerous psychological studies over the last forty years that tell us that, despite huge social change, the stereotypical image of the ‘strong man’ is still firmly with us at all ages, in all ethnic groups, and among all socio-economic backgrounds. In the face of problems, men tend not to seek out emotional or professional help from other people. They use, more often than women, alcohol or drugs to numb unpleasant feelings and, in crises, tend to try to deal with things on their own, instead of searching out closeness or help from others.”
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Very intriguing data, fgsjr. Could it be that the ‘strong man’ image versus the weaker, emotional-prone female is now working against our male population?
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Yes, it could mean that actually not very strong boys/men are contending with actually strong girls/women, and in an increasingly gender-balanced workforce.
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So true, Evelyn. Perez devotes an entire section to health issues that negatively impact the lives of women.
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Thank you for sharing!!.. thanks to technology change is in the winds regarding many issues “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past and present are certain to miss the future.” (John F. Kennedy), unfortunately there are those who are stuck in the past and wish to remain there (often times having to deal with the male ego 🙂 ), but I do believe by working together in time wisdom will prevail and women will be seen in the respectful manner they should.. 🙂
Until we meet again..
May your day be touched
by a bit of Irish luck,
Brightened by a song
in your heart,
And warmed by the smiles
of people you love.
(Irish Saying)
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Dutch, that day cannot come fast enough. Time is running out for all humans, male and female, to work together as equal partners to deal with our climate and ecological crises.
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Thanks for sharing, Rosaliene. Adding this one to my TBR.
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My pleasure, Bette 🙂 I think it’s essential reading for all women.
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Another good one to add to my list. Thank you!
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My pleasure, Chandra. Thanks for dropping by 🙂
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Thank you so much for sharing this book. I’m looking forward too reading it a passing on to my daughters!
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My pleasure, Belladonna. It’s a book every woman should read.
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