Invisible Women
by Caroline Criado Perez · first published 2019
72% recommend28% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Data-rich, example-after-example account of how products and policies are designed around male defaults, from crash test dummies to snow clearing; suits engineers and anyone who wants evidence rather than a rant.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development to health care to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, because it treats men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And women pay tremendous costs for this insidious bias, in time, in money, and often with their lives. Celebrated feminist advocate Caroline Criado Perez investigates this shocking root cause of gender inequality in the award-winning, #1 in
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…take into account female's different weight distribution, muscle mass etc. This is one of the reasons why women are much more likely than men to die or be seriously injured in a car crash. The book 'Invisible women' by Caroline Criado Perez has a section about this, I highly recommend it.
on “A crash dummy aimed at protecting women drivers” ↗If you were shocked that this is only happening now, I'd highly recommend reading or listening to the book "Invisible Women" by Caroline Criado-Perez. She highlights instances of this across many industries. I think that it's particularly relevant to software engineers, or anybody else who has a chance of unintentionally introducing…
on “A crash dummy aimed at protecting women drivers” ↗…that we can improve things (something, something... tech disruption... something, something...) Stockholm's snow clearing policies are the subject of the first chapter of Caroline Criado Perez's book, Invisible Women, which has dozens of such examples. It's an interesting read, and I'd recommend it.
on “In Pursuit of Equality, French Cities Adopt Gendered Budgets” ↗People with different backgrounds offer different solutions to problems. This is an objectively good thing. Invisible Women[0] is an excellent book on the subject with multiple anecdotes and hard statistical data on how having diverse people making decisions is good for business. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41104077-invisible-women
on “You can’t bribe, threaten, or feed people to get them back in the office” ↗…studying the effects of medicine. For years we've simply ignored women's bodies (default man) in many studies but we're increasingly seeing reasons why that's not such a good idea. Really recommend the book Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez to anyone interested in this and the problems that stem from it for women.
on “To ensure vaccines work properly, men should get a good night’s sleep” ↗Feminists aren't an homogeneous group. Can I ask what feminist literature you've read about the nature of patriarchy? Maybe Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez could be good for you. It ties together a lot of different case studies from around the world to explore the unintended harm done to women by male-as-default thinking, from medical…
on “Rational Dress Society” ↗If you haven't read Invisible Women[0] yet, you should. Don't be intimidated by the page count, a good 50% of the book is just listing sources of _everything_. The tl;dr is that women, for example, have been excluded from all kinds of…
on “In the Gut's 'Second Brain,' Key Agents of Health Emerge” ↗…not listen to them if they tell me they've been hurt? Because it "could be complicated?" On a site dedicated to intellectual stimulation that won't cut it for me. I really recommend you to check out Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez to get a sense of the breath and number of barriers we put up for women. They are not being given a fair choice, and they're it loudly.
on “The fresh start effect” ↗People are currently judging our time harshly for it, mostly researchers and progressives and women, and are being yelled at for being "woke" Read "Invisible Women" by Caroline Criado-Perez for a strong take.
on “Trials avoid high risk patients and underestimate drug harms” ↗Invisible Women If you liked Freakonomics, you will like this. It's not a rant, just one example after another of how we fail to account for half of the population. I just finished The God of Small Things. The writing…
on “Ask HN: Which book are you reading these days?” ↗…neutrally” tends to not actually be written neutrally. “Guys” being one of the common examples, it is used neutrally but inherently has a male biases. This can be frustrating to many women, trans or cis. Invisible Women has a lot in it about this problem and knock on effects of it. Why are you using the word transsexual? It is largely a medical term at this point referring to the someone who has undergone full SRS.…
on “A large number of Stack Exchange mods resigning over new policies” ↗…ageless. How To Solve It: Modern Heuristics for example. But these are most useful to professionals and university students honestly. There are also pop-science type books like Algorithms To Live By or Invisible Women that are interesting to a wider audience but don't directly teach skills. The problem with throwing all the task specific books in the trash is that they do provide some kind of a bridge between the…
on “Ask HN: Are older programming books useful?” ↗…regimented world that's artificially constructed that way. if you don't believe the world is artificially constructed in myriad ways which are counterproductive to vast populations, i recommend the book Invisible Women.
on “The silent struggles of workers with ADHD” ↗…put me into a neat little bucket and decided I'm not worth listening to on that basis. I don't have the time for that kind of discourse but I wish you the best and would like to again recommend you read Invisible Women. Maybe the next time you come across one of us feminists you'll be able to discuss the points they're making without discrediting them on am imaginary basis.
on “Rational Dress Society” ↗Facts I find interesting and relevant at the time I was reading them. As an example, the book "Invisible Women" has a lot of great data in it. I don't wanna know the exact numbers, but concepts like: - The normal human dummy in crash tests define "normal" to be like a man, so women tend to have more injuries…
on “Writing summaries is more important than reading more books” ↗