By Caroline Criado Perez
Revealing data bias that harms women
Subject
Themes
The world has been built around a body, a schedule, and a set of needs that are presumed to be universal. That body is male. The consequences of this assumption ripple through medicine, urban planning, workplace policy, technology, economics, and disaster response, leaving women systematically underserved, overlooked, and in some cases endangered. The gap is not the result of deliberate malice but of a failure to collect data disaggregated by sex, a failure to include women in research, and a failure to question the default assumption that male experience represents human experience.
The world has been built around a body, a schedule, and a set of needs that are presumed to be universal. That body is male. The consequences of this assumption ripple through medicine, urban planning, workplace policy, technology, economics, and disaster response, leaving women systematically…
Published in 2019, Caroline Criado Perez's work arrived in a moment when feminist data advocacy was gaining traction across multiple academic and policy fields. The book synthesises research from economics, urban studies, medicine, development studies, and political science into a single sustained…
A fundamental assumption runs through medicine, urban design, technology, economics, and public policy: that male experience is human experience. This assumption is rarely stated explicitly because it does not need to be. It operates as a default, shaping what gets measured, what gets studied, and…
Every economy in the world runs on a foundation that its own accounting systems are unable to see. Meals are cooked, children are collected from school, elderly relatives are washed and dressed, households are cleaned and managed. These tasks are performed overwhelmingly by women. They take up…
Medical knowledge is built on decades of research that systematically excluded women. The exclusion was formalised in 1977, when the FDA required women of childbearing age to be removed from early-phase drug trials following the thalidomide scandal. The intention was to protect women from harm. The…
A significant part of women's daily lives is organised around the management of risk. They plan routes to avoid unlit streets, leave parties early to catch safer transport, decline jobs whose hours would require them to travel alone at night, and calculate whether a public toilet is safe to use…
When women are absent from decision-making, the decisions made do not reflect women's needs. This is not speculation. The evidence across multiple countries and contexts shows that the composition of representative bodies, whether parliaments, planning committees, or aid agencies, has measurable…
In 2011, a Swedish official jokes that snow-clearing is safe from the "gender people" during a budget meeting. His comment triggers an investigation into Karlskoga's road maintenance schedule. What the town's planners find is that major roads are cleared first, while pavements and cycle paths wait.…
On 24 October 1975, 90% of Icelandic women stop working. They do no paid work, no cooking, no cleaning, no childcare. Supermarkets run out of sausages because the men who stock the shelves have brought their children to work. Offices fill with toddlers. Schools and fish factories close. Icelandic…
When Sheryl Sandberg is pregnant at Google, she spends months crossing the company's vast car park on swollen feet before finally asking founder Sergey Brin for pregnancy parking spaces. Brin agrees immediately. He had simply never thought of it. Sandberg is embarrassed that she had not raised it…
Danish economist Ester Boserup proposes in the 1970s that societies which historically used the plough would be less gender-equal than those using handheld tools like hoes. Ploughing requires substantial upper body strength and cannot easily be combined with childcare. Where the plough was adopted,…
Janica Alvarez pitches her breast pump start-up at investor meetings. Some investors linger on a porn site that appears when they search for her product, then crack jokes. Others refuse to touch the device. Ninety-three per cent of venture capitalists are men, and they routinely decline to back…
Kathy's heavy periods leave her so faint she cannot stand. Four medical professionals tell her the problem is anxiety and mental illness. Her primary-care doctor insists, more than once, that all her symptoms are in her imagination. After nine months, she demands an ultrasound. It reveals…
A statistic claiming 70% of people in poverty are women circulates through UN reports, charity press releases, and newspaper articles. Nobody can trace its origin. World Bank researchers call it false. Others say it may be true. The problem is that poverty is measured at the household level,…
An earthquake hits Gujarat, India in 2001. Nearly 400,000 homes are destroyed. The rebuilding programme does not consult women. When the new houses are completed they have no kitchens. They also have no attached animal shelters, because caring for livestock is women's work and no one thought to ask.…
By Caroline Criado Perez
Subject
Themes
The world has been built around a body, a schedule, and a set of needs that are presumed to be universal. That body is male. The consequences of this assumption ripple through medicine, urban planning, workplace policy, technology, economics, and disaster response, leaving women systematically underserved, overlooked, and in some cases endangered. The gap is not the result of deliberate malice but of a failure to collect data disaggregated by sex, a failure to include women in research, and a failure to question the default assumption that male experience represents human experience.