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Welcome to the WIRED Book Club, a series where we invite you to read along with us as we delve into recent titles that give an insight into the worlds of technology, science and business.
Here’s the deal: each month we select a different non-fiction book that piques our interest, and that we think our readers will enjoy too. We’ll give you roughly a month to read the book, then we’ll discuss our thoughts on the WIRED Podcast. At the same time, we’ll announce the next book.
This month’s book is Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. The book addresses the "gender data gap" by exploring the many ways in which the world is built for and by men, with physical products, scientific research and social systems all designed around the "default male".
We’ll discuss Invisible Women, and announce our next book club title, on the podcast on May 3. We’d also love to hear your thoughts on the book – send your reviews, comments and questions to podcast@wired.co.uk for inclusion in our discussion.
To get you started, here’s a brief excerpt from Invisible Women.
Pick up a copy of Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men: In paperback, in hardback, on Kindle, on Audible or hunt it down at your local library. Once you’ve read it, let us know what you think. Email podcast@wired.co.uk with your reviews, comments and questions – we’ll read out a selection on the WIRED Podcast on May 3, 2019.
It all started with a joke. It was 2011 and officials in the town of Karlskoga, in Sweden, were being hit with a gender-equality initiative that meant they had to re-evaluate all their policies through a gendered lens. As one after another of their policies were subjected to this harsh glare, one unfortunate official laughed that at least snow-clearing was something the ‘gender people’ would keep their noses out of. Unfortunately for him, his comment got the gender people thinking: is snow-clearing sexist?
At the time, in line with most administrations, snow-clearing in Karlskoga began with the major traffic arteries, and ended with pedestrian walkways and bicycle paths. But this was affecting men and women differently because men and women travel differently.
We lack consistent, sex-disaggregated data from every country, but the data we do have makes it clear that women are invariably more likely than men to walk and take public transport. In France, two-thirds of public transport passengers are women; in Philadelphia and Chicago in the US, the figure is 64% and 62% respectively. Meanwhile, men around the world are more likely to drive and if a household owns a car, it is the men who dominate access to it – even in the feminist utopia that is Sweden.
And the differences don’t stop at the mode of transport: it’s also about why men and women are travelling. Men are most likely to have a fairly simple travel pattern: a twice-daily commute in and out of town. But women’s travel patterns tend to be more complicated. Women do 75% of the world’s unpaid care work and this affects their travel needs. A typical female travel pattern involves, for example, dropping children off at school before going to work; taking an elderly relative to the doctor and doing the grocery shopping on the way home. This is called ‘trip-chaining’, a travel pattern of several small interconnected trips that has been observed in women around the world.
In London women are three times more likely than men to take a child to school and 25% more likely to trip-chain; this figure rises to 39% if there is a child older than nine in the household. The disparity in male/female trip-chaining is found across Europe, where women in dual-worker families are twice as likely as men to pick up and drop off children at school during their commute.
What all these differences meant back in Karlskoga was that the apparently gender-neutral snow-clearing schedule was in fact not gender neutral at all, so the town councillors switched the order of snow-clearing to prioritise pedestrians and public-transport users. After all, they reasoned, it wouldn’t cost any more money, and driving a car through three inches of snow is easier than pushing a buggy (or a wheelchair, or a bike) through three inches of snow.
What they didn’t realise was that it would actually end up saving them money.
Pick up a copy of Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men: In paperback, in hardback, on Kindle, on Audible or hunt it down at your local library. Once you’ve read it, let us know what you think. Email podcast@wired.co.uk with your reviews, comments and questions – we’ll read out a selection on the WIRED Podcast on May 3, 2019.
Copyright © Caroline Criado Perez 2019. Extract fromInvisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Meby Caroline Criado Perez, published by Chatto & Windus at £16.99
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
