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maegwin_of_hernBook 04/2024: Caroline Criado-Perez, Unsichtbare Frauen. Wie eine von Daten beherrschte Welt die Hälfte der Bevölkerung ignoriert
This book's original title is "Invisible women. Exposing data in a world designed for men", and it's about how collecting data neglect women's experiences or even their whole existence.
The main point of the book is this: Men are standard in pretty much every aspect of life, be it city planning, housing, work, politics, car design, medical research, agriculture, or even first aid after a catastrophe. Women are "other", so if they are thought of at all, they come up most often as an afterthought.
Examples include:
This last point leads to the biggest hole in the data driven work: Unrecognized care work. Most care work is done by women - doing the groceries, cleaning the house, washing the laundry, preparing the meals, taking care of children, taking care of elders, etc. This work is not paid. It is seen but not acknowledged or valued. And most important of all, it doesn't count towards the gross domestic product, even though society would collapse in an instant if women stopped doing it. A while ago, women in Iceland went on strike and refused to do the care work, and all of a sudden the men, facing the unexpectedly time consuming and exhausting work, agreed to give women a fairer share.
The book is written in an easy to understand (at least the German translation is), and it's a huge book with lots of references to back up its claims. Criado-Perez is from the United Kingdom, but she brings examples from all over the world. It's not a fun book to read, but the content is necessary to know if you want to understand how the world works for women. It was eye-opening even for me, who already had some knowledge on this subject. I really recommend it.
This book's original title is "Invisible women. Exposing data in a world designed for men", and it's about how collecting data neglect women's experiences or even their whole existence.
The main point of the book is this: Men are standard in pretty much every aspect of life, be it city planning, housing, work, politics, car design, medical research, agriculture, or even first aid after a catastrophe. Women are "other", so if they are thought of at all, they come up most often as an afterthought.
Examples include:
- Medical studies rarely include women, and now we have medicine that doesn't work as well or in the same way as it does for men.
- Men's driving habits increase their chances of getting into an accident, but because car seats and belt buckles are not designed for female drivers, women are much more likely to get seriously injured in a car accident.
- Voice command doesn't work properly for women because they have been trained on deeper male voices.
- After an earthquake in India in 2001 destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes, they were rebuilt - but without kitchens. Most likely because no women were involved in the coordination efforts, so no one even thought of this. Also, these houses were missing spare areas for the animals, because that was women's work, and thus, it wasn't seen.
- Public transport in cities is usually built like a star - all lines lead to the city center and out of it. Which makes sense for people who are mainly transmuting from home to work and back. But not for people who have multiple trips per day, e.g. bringing kids to school, doing groceries, going to work, having appointments, doing tasks for elder members of the family, etc. These trips usually go all over the place, and thus are even more time consuming because the infrastructure wasn't planned with this type of transit in mind. And this type of transit is mostly done by women.
This last point leads to the biggest hole in the data driven work: Unrecognized care work. Most care work is done by women - doing the groceries, cleaning the house, washing the laundry, preparing the meals, taking care of children, taking care of elders, etc. This work is not paid. It is seen but not acknowledged or valued. And most important of all, it doesn't count towards the gross domestic product, even though society would collapse in an instant if women stopped doing it. A while ago, women in Iceland went on strike and refused to do the care work, and all of a sudden the men, facing the unexpectedly time consuming and exhausting work, agreed to give women a fairer share.
The book is written in an easy to understand (at least the German translation is), and it's a huge book with lots of references to back up its claims. Criado-Perez is from the United Kingdom, but she brings examples from all over the world. It's not a fun book to read, but the content is necessary to know if you want to understand how the world works for women. It was eye-opening even for me, who already had some knowledge on this subject. I really recommend it.
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