Invisible Women
by Caroline Criado Perez
Summary
Criado Perez's book is organised around one concept that sounds small and is not: the gender data gap. The world runs on data, and the data, overwhelmingly, has been collected from men, with the male body and the male life pattern treated as the default human and women as a deviation too noisy to model. The book is a global audit of what that costs.
The examples became famous because they are unanswerable. Crash test dummies built on the male body, leaving women more likely to be seriously injured in identical accidents. Drugs tested on male subjects and male cells, with dosages and symptoms, heart attacks above all, calibrated to men, so that women present atypically only if the typical was never them. Voice recognition that mishears women, phones sized for larger hands, protective equipment that fits no body on the ward, offices chilled to a male metabolic formula. The unpaid care work missing from every economic statistic while structuring half the population's days; transport networks built for commutes rather than care journeys; the Swedish town that discovered clearing pavements before roads cut winter injuries, because it had finally asked who walks. Disaster response, tax codes, urban planning, medical research, each chapter runs the same experiment and gets the same result.
The prose is a campaigner's, brisk and cumulative, the argument built by pile driver: hundreds of pages of receipts.
Best for readers who want the case that sexism is often a data problem before it is anything else, and the book that put the phrase gender data gap into the language.
Historical Context & Significance
Invisible Women won the Royal Society prize in 2019 and, in the same season, the Financial Times and McKinsey business book of the year, a pairing that measured its reach: the same book honoured as science writing and as management reading, and it went on to sell over a million copies in more than thirty languages.
Caroline Criado Perez arrived as a campaigner with results already banked, the Bank of England note bearing Jane Austen and the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square both stand because of her campaigns, and the book converted that method, the documented unanswerable case, into systematic form.
Its practical afterlife has been unusually concrete: cited in medical curricula, procurement standards and policy reviews, credited with pushing sex disaggregated data up research funders' agendas, and answered by the usual counter literature disputing particular examples. The phrase it planted did the lasting work; the gap now has a name to be measured against.