Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez. Caroline is an award-winning and bestselling writer and campaigner. She is a graduate from Oxford University.
The role of a data gap is certainly male leaning. The most difficult task is addressing the data gap bias in cultural diversity across many countries.
What this reveals to me is a bit more complex requirement. The data gap must be aligned within the geographic region and time stamped cultural practices. This will provide much deeper insights.
The opening two chapters address Daily Life. Chapter One is addressing how plowing snow in Sweden is sexist. In America by comparison snow plowing priority is quite different.
The Public Works departments of cities and towns clear roads primarily to keep large traffic patterns clear of snow. The priority does change when winter weather advisories are issued.
When the midwest is hit with large snowfalls that cause delays in public transportation, obviously due to the lack of passable roads, the downstream effect can be delays in various organizations (arts, health, education) and ultimately a prioritization will be to clear roads so the delivery of the US mail can continue.
Snow plow gap?
However in Sweden it would appear Caroline is stretching the data to reveal a gap:
The original snow-clearing schedule in Karlskoga hadn’t been deliberately designed to benefit men at the expense of women. Like many of the examples in this book, it came about as a result of a gender data gap – in this instance, a gap in perspective. The men (and it would have been men) who originally devised the schedule knew how they travelled and they designed around their needs. They didn’t deliberately set out to exclude women. They just didn’t think about them, they didn’t think to consider if women’s needs might be different. And so this data gap was a result of not involving women in planning.
pg. 81
Across the American midwest large snowfalls that trigger delays in public services, obviously due to the lack of passable roads, the downstream effect can be delays in various organizations (transportation, arts, health, education) and ultimately a prioritization will be to clear roads so the delivery of the US mail can continue.
Gender Neutral With Urinals
Within Chapter Two, Gender Neutral With Urinals displayed a different type of data gender gap. In addition, the Arts Centre has gender neutral bathrooms at London’s famous Barbican Arts Centre is set within a modern global metropolis.
Has Caroline ever been to a major music concert at Chicago’s Solider Field? I can share first hand that even before the concert women do in fact occupy toilets within the men’s bathrooms. CTA buses ran right out side my apartment and now recall my roommate falling asleep on a CTA bus at Wrigley Field only to wake up passing Tinley Park on the bus route to Kankakee. In addition, addressing transportation in Chicago was interesting to say the least having lived both by Wrigley Field and Glenview commuting via Metra into the Loop.
There seems to be a certainly unique culture gap in Caroline’s position regarding the location of medical offices in Europe versus Chicago. It is impossible to cluster medical providers into a common center to redefine zoning laws:
Zoning laws are based on, and prioritise the needs of, a bread-winning heterosexual married man who goes off to work in the morning, and comes home to the suburbs to relax at night.
pg. 97
This would not be embraced within Chicago as economic costs would collapse the best efforts and intentions.
Agrarian versus modern geographic regions in 2020
However, this position seems to lack strength when addressing the struggle of women in Mumbai. Greater London is population of 9.4 million and Greater Chicago at 3.0 million in comparison to Mumbai’s population of 20 million.
Certainly you cannot help but agree with the conditions faced by women across Mumbai. Yet this seems to be culturally based upon an agrarian society, not a modern western metropolis:
A typical Mumbai slum might have six bathrooms for 8,000 women, and government figures from 2014 revealed that the city as a whole has ‘3,536 public restrooms that women share with men, but not a single women’s-only facility – not even in some police stations and courts’.
pg. 117
In addition, the survey data seems to lack of interpreting the region’s cultural values and economic system. The context is missing when attempting to compare data from a modern metropolis versus an agrarian village:
A 2015 survey found that 12.5% of women in Mumbai’s slums defecate in the open at night: they ‘prefer to take this risk to walking 58 metres, the average distance of the community toilet from their homes.’
pg. 117
Historical and cultural impacts impact data gaps
In 2021 the data indicating those in the slums of Mumbai defecate in the open at night is a cultural practice across Southeast Asia dating back hundreds of years. After landing in Saigon in 1953 former Lt. Keith Hondaker reveals in The Eagle Weeps the initial shock by US servicemen witnessing the Vietnamese cultural practice of public defecation (in broad daylight) along roads both in and out of Saigon.
Mobile phone handsets
Another data gap is within Chapter Eight One-Size-Fits-Men. Caroline is addressing in 1998 did a pianist successfully shrink the size of a traditional piano in order to fit people smaller hands. Is custom pianos another cultural gap? Perhaps, however the cultural idea of UX in 1495 simply did not exist.
Market driven display size
While Caroline acknowledges the Google Nexus large screen size, t mobile phone screen size is market driven with device screen size competition centered around reductions in supply chains since 2000. In addition, consider the original iPhone. Released 14 years ago in 2007 it had a 3.5” screen with only 163 pixels per inch (PPI) at 480×320 resolution. The market heated up when Google countered in 2010 with the Nexus One hosting a 3.7” display but with 265 PPI at 480×800 resolution. Clearly in an emerging billion dollar market, the mobile phone display size race was just ramping up.
The answer to the problem of smartphones that are too big for women’s hands seems obvious: design smaller handsets. And there are of course some smaller handsets on the market, notably Apple’s iPhone SE. But the SE wasn’t updated for two years and so was an inferior product to the standard iPhone range (which offers only huge or huger as size options). And it’s now been discontinued anyway.
p. 351
A 2021 refresh
Today the iPhone 13 mini is a 5.4” display with 476 PPI supporting 2340×1080 resolution, while in contrast, the Google Pixel 6 Pro supporting 6.7″ display with a 512 ppi supporting a 1440?×?3120 resolution. Instead, consider the much deeper lessons of the early mobile phone wars between Apple and Google in Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution.
And surprisingly, the 2017 data used in this chapter is rather old considering how quickly wikipedia provides updates to mobile phone vendors and the March 2019 publication date of this book.
In conclusion, certainly there are many, many valid examples of data gaps impacting women. At the same time, I certainly looked for solid insights to help me empower my daughter, but missing the cultural and historical time gaps scatter Caroline’s message from an otherwise very insightful book.
EFN Ekonomikanalen | Caroline Criado Perez: Algorithms make sexist data even more sexist
edbookfest | Caroline Criado Perez talks to Sally Magnusson at the Edinburgh International Book Festival
New Scientist | Caroline Criado Perez: Inside the data gender gap
5×15 Stories | Caroline Criado Perez on Invisible Women
The Fawcett Society | Invisible Women: In Conversation with Caroline Criado Perez and Helen Lewis
iabuk | Caroline Criado Perez at Engage 2019