On the night I finished this book, I deleted the weather app from my phone, then reinstalled it, then deleted it again.
In most weather prediction models, the historical data used severely underestimates women’s daytime activity patterns. The time spent at home doing housework and caring for children is a blind spot in the models. When a storm comes, the warning system might underestimate how many people are at home and unable to evacuate.
I stared at that tiny weather icon and realized something for the first time. Behind every function on this screen that I swipe past every day, there is a set of data hidden. Half of the people in those data have been treated like air.
The world’s default factory setting is male
Women are invisible in large amounts of data collection. From office temperature settings to car seatbelts, from drug dosages in pharmacies to bench spacing in urban planning — these things only serve one type of body. The male body.
Offices are freezing cold in summer. The standard for air conditioning temperature was set in the 1960s, when men in offices wore three-piece suits. This temperature standard is still used today. Women sit at their workstations wrapped in blankets. Crash test dummies for cars have long used male body proportions. Women are more severely injured in car accidents because the test dummies were never built with women’s bodies.
The author, Caroline Criado Perez, fills every page with data. Behind each of those numbers is a living woman. She was more severely injured in a car crash than her male passenger. She was misdiagnosed during a heart attack because her symptoms didn’t fit the “standard.” She was trapped on the road during a blizzard because snowplows cleared the routes to male-dominated workplaces first.
Unseen people have suffering so transparent that even grievances are invisible
When you read this book, you will realize that you have experienced all of these things. You have squeezed yourself into a squarely designed public seat, those two armrests always digging into your hips. You have used that ballpoint pen designed for the length of a male hand, the base of your thumb aching after holding it for too long. You have bought protective gear for your child at a sporting goods store and found that the women’s version is always more expensive than the men’s. No one has ever thought that anything needed to change about women’s bodies.
Perez wrote about one thing that stuck with me the most. Women are at higher risk of experiencing sexual assault in public spaces, but the placement of city surveillance cameras prioritizes commercial areas and transportation hubs, turning a blind eye to the residential alleys, parking lots, and underground passages that women must pass through when coming home late at night. The decision-makers walk a different path.
Reading this book has a very strange rhythm. Perez’s tone remains steady throughout, like a meticulous accountant spreading out a ledger and pointing line by line — this entry is wrong, this entry is wrong too. Her anger is buried so deep that you can barely see it. But after you close the book, that anger seeps out from between the pages.
Seeing is the first step toward change
A man reading this book might feel shocked — I didn’t know there were this many things I didn’t know. A woman reading this book might feel suffocated — so all these small annoyances she endures every day were never just her imagination were never just my imagination. But the common feeling after reading is a massive fatigue: the task of filling the gender data gap in this world is enormous.
At the end of the book, Perez lists a long series of action recommendations, from things individuals can do to things that need to change at the policy level. Every single one is so specific that you could use it directly. She says change is possible — as long as we first admit that the problem exists.
This book gave me a pair of glasses. After putting them on, all those inconveniences I used to take for granted, those small details I would just endure and move past, those moments when I thought maybe I was just being too sensitive — they all have names now. Once something has a name, it’s not easy to ignore. No longer being ignored is the first signal that this world is starting to get better.
