Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez is my Feminist Book Club pick for this month. It is a book backed by solid research exposing data bias in a world designed for men, thereby showing just why the world and just about everything in it, is skewed in favour of men. And the overwhelming feeling that I’m getting after reading this well-researched book is that it’s still a man’s world which, let me tell you, is not a good feeling at all especially if you are a woman and a mother to a daughter. To be fair, I’m about two-thirds done with this book for I’m taking my time with it. Still, I have this intense feeling of sharing with you all that Perez has put into this book, making me wonder if the scales of gender parity will ever be balanced at all. So, today let me tell you through a few examples from this book why it’s a man’s world.

It’s a man’s world and how

The Inbuilt Male Bias

Perez writes that male bias is so firmly embedded in our psyche that even genuinely gender-neutral words are read as male. There have been studies conducted where participants, when instructed to think of words like designer or researcher and draw an image of it, have interpreted them as male. Male participants were found to be more than likely to depict a researcher as having no gender than as a female. From scientist to stuffed animals, things are more likely to be portrayed as male than as a female. So, you see how deeprooted this bias is and how this bias favours men?

In fact, did you know that until 2016 the world of emojis was curiously male? Why hadn’t it struck as odd that women, half the world’s population, were not represented in emojis? It is even stranger when you consider that 78% of women versus 60% of men frequently use emojis.

Are travel Patterns Gendered?

Did you ever consider that travel patterns could also be gendered and perhaps a collection of gendered data can lead to better planning? Consider this, since women do 75% of the world’s unpaid care work much of their travel in a day consists of dropping and picking up kids from daycares or grocery shopping. Simple activities, right? Note in a single day, a woman might make several small interconnected trips which are called trip-chaining while a man usually has simple travel patterns of a twice-daily commute to and from work. Also, it has been found that even if a household owns a car, it is the men who predominantly use it to travel to work while women use public transport. So, wouldn’t it be better for transport departments worldwide to ensure that public transport planning is done keeping this in mind? But, of course, it isn’t.

Ease and safety of travel are issues which concern women more and thereby, in the long run, affect even their employment. Sometime in 2010, a social housing project in Rio was moved to a not so developed and secluded part with no proper connectivity to the city centre. This resulted in a lot of women having to give up their jobs or travelling 2 or more hours either way daily for work. Add to that the fact that these housing complexes were built in such a way that there was no space for more than one generate to cohabit resulting in again a lot of women to have to give up on their employment for lack of childcare. And yes no child care facilities were built within the housing complex either. What this shows is that if data had been collected keeping in mind the gendered needs and how society functions a lot of these issues could have been avoided.

Women’s unpaid care work contributes $10 trillion to annual global GDP. So, if gendered data collection for welfare projects can lead to an increase in women’s employment, why not do it?

Did you know women do 75% of the world's unpaid care work? #FeministMondays #InvisibleWomen Share on X

Public Spaces. Definitely gendered, no?

As per government figures from 2014, Mumbai as a whole has 3536 public restrooms that women share with men but not a single women’s only facility. Now, considering the kind of threats of rape or abuse that women live with on any given day, wouldn’t it make sense to have more women’s only toilets? But when planning committees around the world mostly consist of men who don’t live with the fear that women do, would they really think that something as basic as a women’s only restroom is so important?

Urban planning fails to account for women’s risk of being sexually assaulted and this is not limited to sanitary provisions. Women who travel alone are more likely to be assaulted than when they travel with men. So, when planners don’t consider these problems faced by women, that bus stop which could have been built near a well-lit shop or apartment complex, thereby reducing the chances of a woman being assaulted at night, gets built in a dark corner.

When planners fail to consider gender, public spaces become males spaces by default. Half the global population has to deal with sexual assaults and are at the receiving end of abuse because of their bodies in public spaces which need to be catered to. It cannot be done without intent and awareness which in turn cannot be accomplished without the required data from the other half who also use public spaces, not just men. So, do you think it’s wrong to say that it’s a man’s world? I think not.

Working Long Hours = Hard work

Perez writes there is no such thing as a woman who doesn’t work. There is only a woman who isn’t paid for her work. As women have increasingly joined the paid labour force men have not matched this shift with a comparative increase in their unpaid work; women have simply increased their total work time.

Women are not variations or scaled-down versions of men then why are men the default? 

This is the reason I have always felt women don’t have the gift of time. The contrast in India between women and men when it comes daily unpaid labour is six hours as opposed to a meagre thirteen minutes for the latter. No wonder then that men can stay at work late or now during the pandemic keep working till midnight while women who do the same if not more amount of work in a restricted time frame are often penalised by the establishment for being encumbered by other responsibilities. Not only that, so many times, I have been told by woke male colleagues that you leave work at 5 pm so you don’t understand how much work we do. The fact is working late is by no means a sign of doing good work. If you ask me, this just means the employee isn’t disciplined enough or has poor time management skills. But it is hardly ever considered this way, leaving women to bear the burnt. Companies still view long hours in the office with job effectiveness, unreasonably rewarding employees who work longer hours. Who do you think this thought process benefits? Men. This translates into promotions and hikes that are not given to women. Fair? Hardly.

The myth of long working hours as the norm is based on male life pattern. It’s what happens when it’s a man’s world. Again, a case of the myopic view that the male way of life is the only way of life while women are just deviations.

Companies still view long hours in the office with job effectiveness, unreasonably rewarding employees who work longer hours. Who do you think this thought process benefits? Men.

Encumbered Women as opposed to Men

In India, 66% of women’s work time is spent on unpaid labour, while only 12% of men’s work is unpaid. What does this mean? In simple terms, when it comes to free time women are poorer when compared to men. And this is not only in India but almost all around the world women do the bulk of the unpaid work. And this has consequences for women.

It affects women’s health in more ways than you could comprehend. It is a known fact that women have worse outcomes than men following heart surgery. A study done in 2016 uncovered how women’s care burden is a major factor in this. To simply put it, men have women to take care of them post major surgeries and thereby have time to recover while more often than not women tend to go back directly to their caregiver roles and hence the poor outcomes.

A study by the University of Michigan found that husbands create an extra seven hours of housework a week for women. Housework which is mostly equal by gender for single men and women suddenly becomes more for women when men and women start to cohabit. So, as you can see, a woman lives an encumbered life affecting her mentally and physically and even financially because she often chooses employment with lesser pay to make time for the unpaid work that she invariably has to do as opposed to a man.

It's still a man's world and how. #NabaSays #InvisibleWomen Share on X

Look at any field and you’ll see how family and children encumber women and put them at a disadvantage in so many ways while a man with family hardly faces any in terms of career or pay or even the chores at home. As a result, overall, women are often found to be more stressed than men. Honestly, who can blame us?

As Perez states, women aren’t unencumbered and the work they do is invisible. Also, women end up working in jobs below their skill level that offer the flexibility they need but not the pay they deserve compounding the problem of gender-pay-gap and stagnation of wages. 

A study by the University of Michigan found that husbands create an extra seven hours of housework a week for women.

Then there are the policies which do not aid women at all, for example, those around maternity leaves. Even if there are maternity leave policies which provide the time off, a woman taking time off to give birth often has to start her career from scratch as if giving birth has melted her brains. As a result of policies which forget that half of the population can and often do give birth women often lose their jobs or stagnate in their careers. 

Some keep fighting while some give up. How many fires can you keep putting out day after day, every day?

The Male Default

Did you know that when Apple launched Siri, she could find prostitutes and Viagra suppliers but not abortion providers? Did you know that when they launched their health monitoring system in 2014 their comprehensive app forgot the period tracker? How could they when half of their customers might very well have been females who have periods? There is more.

The safety tests mandated by car manufacturers are done using a dummy which appropriates a standard male physique. Everybody knows a man and a woman’s body are different so why not mandate tests with a dummy that appropriates a woman too? But nobody seems to care. Do you know that women drivers are more likely to be seriously injured or even killed because cars are designed keeping in mind men’s bodies? Do you know that even in this day and age we do not have cars with seat belts that are suitable for pregnant women? Do you know that women who are more likely to be on the passenger seat are at a greater risk to be seriously injured in case of an accident because safety tests are focused on the driver seat using, as I mentioned, a male dummy? What does this mean? That we are dispensable?

Did you know that medical students are taught about physiology and female physiology, anatomy and female anatomy? Male being the default. But women are not variations or scaled-down versions of men then why are men the default? 

There is so much more in the book that infuriates me and I’m not even done with it. There is so much in this book which makes me feel two things. One that there is a genuine apathy in gathering data that can make the lives of women easier and better by devising policies based on it. Two that when there is data there is no intent to put it to use. Why?

Because it is still a man’s world. It’s a man’s world. Most of the decision making bodies are full of men. They don’t know the female experience and frankly, I think they don’t care because they don’t want anything that could threaten their control even if it means equal distribution of power. There are some genuine men, yes, but they don’t know what it’s like to go through this world in the body of a woman.

Just like it took a pregnant Sheryl Sandberg, who was head of online sales at Google at that time, to get parking spaces for expectant women as closer to the building entrance as possible, it would take a lot of women at a lot of important places to make the changes that would level the playing field for women. Until then, it was and would remain an uphill battle, an everyday struggle which we have somehow become used to fighting every day. Until then, it’s a man’s world and how!

As Perez says, gender-neutral doesn't mean gender-equal and the gender data bias shows just that. #InvisibleWomen Share on X

Do read the book Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez because it will make you see the world in a way that you had never seen before, ask questions that you didn’t think you had to and make sense of a lot of the things happening around you.

Credit: Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez.