Read It in 2 Minutes: Invisible Women, by Caroline Criado-Perez

A Summary for People too Busy to Read it Themselves

Have a few more minutes to spare? Read it in 8 minutes instead, below the line.

Read It In 2 Minutes:

• Some schemes designed to improve quality of life actually harm women because they fail to account for gender differences. Brazil’s scheme to clear the favelas (suburban shantytowns) was good in theory but poor in practice. Favelas have no zoning regulations because they’re technically illegal residential zones, so women could work out of their homes running small businesses (like cutting hair or preparing lunch plates). When they were moved into new social housing complexes they were not allowed to do this work, and were often miles away from the city centre, with poor public transport and no childcare options.
• 62% of women are scared in multistorey car parks, 60% on train platforms, 49% waiting at bus stops, and 59% walking home from the station/stop. For men, these figures are 20–30%.
• Austerity cuts are not actually ‘savings’, it’s just a shifting of burden from the public sector onto women. 1/10 people over the age of 50 in the UK have unmet care needs because of funding cuts, and women are the ones looking after them. Women’s unemployment rose 20% in the first 2 years of austerity, the highest level in 25 years (male unemployment did not drastically change).
• Women score more highly on 4/5 of the key leadership traits (emotional stability, extraversion, openness to new experiences, agreeableness, and conscientiousness) and yet they are less likely to be backed by venture capitalists. Women generate 10% more in cumulative revenue over a 5-year period so it makes no financial sense not to invest in them. 2018 data from the Boston Consulting Group found that for every dollar of funding, female-owned startups generate 78 cents, whereas male-owned ones only generate 31 cents. With half the level of investment, women generate twice the revenue.
• Female-dominated industries are often regulated despite high exposure to dangerous chemicals. Nail salon fumes, chemical hair relaxers, cleaning products can all be harmful but there are very few regulations in place to protect workers.
• Occupational safety standards are based around men. Women are more likely to be injured on the job because the levels for lifting, radiation exposure, toxin exposure etc are based on men. PPE also is designed for men so it doesn’t fit correctly and ends up not being used.
• When a woman is in a car crash she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured than a man, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured even when factors like height and weight are controlled for. They’re also 17% more likely to die. Women are viewed as “out of position” drivers so they do not have to be considered when it comes to safety regulations. Even when ‘female’ crash test dummies are used, they’re just short male ones, without consideration for physiological differences.
• Symptom descriptions in medical manuals tend to be oriented around common male symptoms. For example, only 1 in 8 women experience chest pain when they are having a heart attack and yet this is the primary symptom listed with only a brief acknowledgement that “women experience atypical chest discomfort.” — in reality, they often experience stomach pain, breathlessness, nausea and fatigue with no chest pain at all.
• Most drugs have not actually been proven safe for women, which leads to situations like the thalidomide crisis where there are incredibly harmful unpredicted side effects (in this case, issues with foetal development). In 1977 the FDA published guidelines excluding women of childbearing age from drug trials, meaning that women ingest 80% of pharmaceuticals in the US, and yet they aren’t included in tests.

Read It In 8 Minutes:

Cultural Male-Centeredness

• An equal number of men and women play video games, but only 3.3% of games spotlighted at E3 in 2016 starred female protagonists.
• The England national football team page on Wikipedia is about the men’s national football team. The women’s page is called the England women’s national football team. In 2013 Wikipedia divided writers into ‘American Novelists’ and ‘American Women Novelists’.

Public Policy/Urban Planning

• Policy areas are often viewed to be gender-neutral even when they aren’t. For example, men and women use transport very differently. Women are much more likely to engage in ‘trip-chaining’ where they make multiple stop-offs e.g pop into the chemist, then drop kids off at school, then pick up a sick relative. This means they pay higher fares on public transport unless there are schemes in place like London’s Hopper fare, where you can get on and off as many times as you like during an hour and only pay a single fare.
• Some schemes designed to improve quality of life actually harm women because they fail to account for gender differences. Brazil’s scheme to clear the favelas (suburban shantytowns) was good in theory but poor in practice. Favelas have no zoning regulations because they’re technically illegal residential zones, so women could work out of their homes running small businesses (like cutting hair or preparing lunch plates). When they were moved into new social housing complexes they were not allowed to do this work, and were often miles away from the city centre, with poor public transport and no childcare options.
• Issues like access to proper sanitation can have a chain effect on gender violence. A 2016 study found that Indian women who use fields to relieve themselves are twice as likely to face non-partner sexual violence as women with a household toilet. Failing to provide proper toilets actually increases costs because of medical expenses, lost earnings, legal costs etc.
• 62% of women are scared in multistorey car parks, 60% on train platforms, 49% waiting at bus stops, and 59% walking home from the station/stop. For men, these figures are 20–30%. Women are actually less likely to be victims of a crime in these situations, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong to be afraid. Women experience much higher levels of sub-criminal aggressive behaviour like catcalling or intimidation. A 2017 study found that 90% of people who experience sexual harassment on the tube would not report it. Better street lighting, CCTV and live update time signs at bus stops help women feel safer using public transport.
• Austerity cuts are not actually ‘savings’, it’s just a shifting of burden from the public sector onto women. 1/10 people over the age of 50 in the UK have unmet care needs because of funding cuts, and women are the ones looking after them. Women’s unemployment rose 20% in the first 2 years of austerity, the highest level in 25 years (male unemployment did not drastically change).

Work/Economy

• Women do a much higher share of unpaid work (e.g cleaning, caring for children or ill relatives), even when working the same number of paid hours as their male partner. This affects their health outcomes because they overwork themselves after surgeries and have increased risks.
• Part-time workers (75% of whom are women) don’t get the same benefits as full-time ones. Paid less per hour, rare to find high-level posts, negatively impacts pension contributions. “Choice that isn’t a choice” to work part-time, men tend to earn more so women are expected to drop their hours to look after children or the elderly.
• Automated hiring programs can disadvantage women. Tech-hiring platform Gild combs applicants’ online data trail, to rank them by ‘social capital’ (how integral they are to the digital community). Gild found that frequenting a particular manga site predicted strong coding ability, so they gave higher scores to participants who visited the site. Women who spend their time doing housework don’t have the same amount of time to look at manga sites, especially ones that have a sexist tone that puts most women off. The hiring algorithm is unintentionally disadvantaging female applicants.
• Women score more highly on 4/5 of the key leadership traits (emotional stability, extraversion, openness to new experiences, agreeableness, and conscientiousness) and yet they are less likely to be backed by venture capitalists. Women generate 10% more in cumulative revenue over a 5-year period so it makes no financial sense not to invest in them. 2018 data from the Boston Consulting Group found that for every dollar of funding, female-owned startups generate 78 cents, whereas male-owned ones only generate 31 cents. With half the level of investment, women generate twice the revenue.

Work Safety

• Standard office temperature is based on the average 40-year-old 70kg man, so offices are on average 5'C too cold for women. This leaves them uncomfortable, less productive, and more likely to become ill.
• Occupational safety standards are based around men. Women are more likely to be injured on the job because the levels for lifting, radiation exposure, toxin exposure etc are based on men. Although men are more likely to die in acute work accidents, women die more from work overall due to long-term factors like occupational cancers. Women are biologically different, in skin thickness, fat percentage etc. so the way they absorb and store toxins in the body is different.
• Female-dominated industries are often regulated despite high exposure to dangerous chemicals. Nail salon fumes, chemical hair relaxers, cleaning products can all be harmful but there are very few regulations in place to protect workers.
• PPE is designed on a male form so it either is painful to wear or women just don’t bother wearing it. Women in the army are 7X as likely to have musculoskeletal injuries even when they are equal in fitness level to their male counterparts because the equipment is not designed for them. Women carry objects differently, reducing stride length and using their leg muscles to compensate for heavy objects. In the military/police etc equipment makes this impossible, leading to hip and pelvic stress fractures.

Product Design

• Voice recognition software is designed for male voices, so women struggle to use it as effectively. Instead of fixing the technology, companies advise that women lower their voices if they’re having problems. This can become hazardous when voice recognition software is used for speech-to-text professionally e.g for medical note dictation. A 2016 paper analysed dictated medical notes and found that 15% of errors were critical, “potentially leading to miscommunication that could affect patient care”.
• Fitness tracking tech regularly underestimated the calorie burn of activities predominately done by women (e.g pushing a pram or doing housework), and equipment (e.g treadmills) often vastly overestimates calorie burn overall as they are based on average male weight.
• Products designed for women e.g pelvic floor trainers, breast pumps, often meet with ridicule when they try to get funding. They are often designed by men with no consideration of what women actually need, leading to them being uncomfortable and difficult to use.
• Phones are designed to male hand size, meaning women can no longer comfortably hold them, meaning they’re more likely to be dropped. They’re also too big to fit in female pockets.
• VR technology causes motion sickness far more often in women than in men (perhaps due to differences in postural sway), and the headset is oversized. Narrow computer displays favour men in spatial awareness tasks, so women find it less effective.
• When a woman is in a car crash she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured than a man, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured even when factors like height and weight are controlled for. They’re also 17% more likely to die. Women tend to sit further forward because their legs are shorter, meaning their risk of internal injury is much higher. Women also have less muscle on their necks and upper torso, so they’re more prone to whiplash, which is exacerbated by the fact modern car seats are too firm to protect women from whiplash injuries.
• Women are viewed as “out of position” drivers so they do not have to be considered when it comes to safety regulations. Even when ‘female’ crash test dummies are used, they’re just short male ones, without consideration for physiological differences. It’s worse for pregnant women, 62% of 3rd-trimester women can’t even use a seatbelt properly, so their car safety is even worse.

Health

• 10% of women will need to have an operation at some point because of prolapse (where your organs start dropping through your vagina), this rises to 50% of women over 50. Yet, there’s a huge lack of data and treatment for improving pelvic floor (which has a lot of evidence for helping to prevent prolapse). The current treatment of inserting mesh into the vagina leaves hundreds of women in severe debilitating pain, and one in Scotland has died.
• Symptom descriptions in medical manuals tend to be oriented around common male symptoms. For example, only 1 in 8 women experience chest pain when they are having a heart attack and yet this is the primary symptom listed with only a brief acknowledgement that “women experience atypical chest discomfort.” — in reality, they often experience stomach pain, breathlessness, nausea and fatigue with no chest pain at all.
• Women are much more vulnerable to certain diseases. Amongst men and women who smoke the same number of cigarettes, women are 20–70% more likely to develop lung cancer (even when you normalise for height). Women also make up 80% of people with autoimmune disorders, and yet we don’t know why.
• Most drugs have not actually been proven safe for women, which leads to situations like the thalidomide crisis where there are incredibly harmful unpredicted side effects (in this case, issues with foetal development). In 1977 the FDA published guidelines excluding women of childbearing age from drug trials, meaning that women ingest 80% of pharmaceuticals in the US, and yet they aren’t included in tests.
• When women are included in trials, it tends to be in the early follicular phase of their menstrual cycle when sex hormones are lowest (e.g, they’re most like men). In reality, hormones hugely affect drug efficacy, and how they affect women varies over the menstrual cycle — meaning that dosages may be too high or too low at certain times of the month.
• Women’s pain is taken less seriously — in Sweden, a woman suffering from a heart attack will get lower priority than a man when waiting for an ambulance and will wait 20 minutes longer to be seen once they arrive at the hospital. Women also on average have to wait much longer for a diagnosis of chronic pain due to the continuing stereotype of the ‘hysterical’ woman.
• Although women have a higher life expectancy than men, it is not increasing at the same rate that men’s is. They also live longer but spend more years in ill health so the number of ‘active years’ is actually the same.