A solid history, an unambitious future
Reviewed: Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
by Caroline Criado Perez
When Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century was published in English, it was a sensation. Piketty’s tome revealed, empirically, how workers are doomed in their competition with the owners of land, machinery, and patents, showing precisely why the rich were getting richer while the Western middle classes slid into precarity. The famous formula “r > g” explained many social dynamics, not least of which was why dynasties populated by generations of fail-sons continue to thrive around the world. Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men undertakes a similar task in exposing the sources of women’s social inequality today but does so with one major failing.
It’s a common sight: Jordan Peterson fans, teenage edgelords, and the like ask with faux sincerity, why is it that women aren’t among the great thinkers, inventors, and artists of history? Criado Perez painstakingly demonstrates that they are, and that their absence from what constitutes common knowledge is no accident. Blinkered views on women’s nature and place in society have an ignoble origin, back at least to Aristotle, and persist to this day. It’s a captivating, and essential, history.
Invisible Women does an excellent job of illustrating how “gender-neutral” data collection structurally disadvantages women. Consider cars: in crashes, a woman is 47% more likely to be seriously injured than a man, 71% more likely to be moderately injured, and 17% more likely to die. Criado Perez writes: The reason this has been allowed to happen is very simple, cars have been designed using crash-test dummies based on the ‘average’ male.
The central demand of the work is for the inclusion of women in research of all kinds. Criado Perez also makes bolder suggestions regarding gender-based economic inequality, including calls for universal public childcare and a reconsideration of care work as something that “underpin[s] the functioning of a modern society.” In fact, she goes on to chide calls for “equality of opportunity” as anything but an empty slogan: it results positive discrimination in favor of men.
While these ideas are useful and just, they sit uneasily with the book’s core flaw: its liberalism. Despite the ideological revisions that the book calls for, including reexamining how individuals and institutions interact with women, when Criado Perez engages with actual politics, the results are underwhelming. This is especially clear when looking at her examination of electoral politics in the United States.
Published in 2019, Invisible Women can’t let the disasteous 2016 presidential election in the US go.
Hillary Clinton is mentioned 7 times in the text, favorably, in comparison to her primary challenger Bernie Sanders (4 times). Looking at the list of policy changes mentioned earlier, which candidate would have been more likely to implement such changes?
Sanders is quoted three times, criticizing the Clinton campaign as arguing “I’m a woman! Vote for me!” — but what, besides scoring another First, was that candidacy good for? What distinguished Hillary Clinton from any number of centrist, hawkish Democrats besides her gender?
In fact, Criado Perez goes so far as to argue that the simple presence of women in positions of power leads to progressive policymaking, which must come as news to Amy Comey Barrett, or Sarah Palin, neither of whom are mentioned in this text. Indeed, perhaps the most powerful woman of the 20th century, Margaret Thatcher, is fully absent from Invisible Women. Searching for her, I found only a quote by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich stating that “Well-behaved women rarely make history.”
Yet it is well-behaved, right-wing women who are repeatedly praised in this book. Examples from the US include the “3 GOP women were left out of the Senate’s Obamacare repeal” who then worked to block said repeal. However, these are Republicans, hardly allies of women in the first place.
The senators in question, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Shelly Capito have CPAC conservatism scores of 49%, 41%, and 62%, respectively.
The bete-noire Bernie Sanders? 3%.
Similarly, the non-partisan GovTrack puts Sanders as the most left-wing Senator, with the aforementioned three Republicans in the center/center-right at 55, 53, and 36, respectively.
Would American women be better off with a Senate populated with similar Republicans or with more progressive senators in the Sanders mould? There are no mentions of the largely female US House “Squad” members in this text, either.
It’s unimaginable that a center-right government would do anything about the very real issues discussed in this book. It is a common right-wing tactic to cynically hold up a rogue member of a minority group to disguise its plutocratic, white supremacist agenda. Criado Perez pulls the same trick, but its unclear whether this is unwitting or not.
It’s a shame that Criado Perez concludes her book in such an uninspiring way. At the conclusion of Capital in the 21st Century, after unearthing the structural barriers to equality, Piketty made ambitious, concrete proposals (aggressive progressive taxation, a global wealth tax) for working people to fight back against the gravitational pull of the “r > g” dynamic. Considering how serious gender inequality is for the women of the world, they deserved a more robust response than a plea for more girl-bosses.
