Invisible women by Caroline Perez – Part 1

Invisible women – exposing data bias in a world designed for men by Caroline Criado Perez

 

I came across this book whilst browsing in a Karachi bookstore and it immediately caught my gender lens because I usually zoom into any issues which require legislative reinforcements to enhance the women empowerment agenda.

 

It opens with a very telling line from THE Simone de Beauvoir: “Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men, they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.” In 1949 she wrote: “humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself, but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.” It’s self-explanatory and I have nothing to add to it.

 

Some questions and comments this book raises are listed as follows:

1. Is the gender gap just about silence? My answer to that is that it used to be but now more and more the silence is being broken and it is more about inaction than silence.
2. When the world is reliant on Big data and that is corrupted by big silence, the truths get half truths. Garbage in garbage out. That is perhaps the biggest problem the world is and will be facing if the data does not get corrected by breaking of the silence.
3. In effect I have often expanded on the major big ticket items of women empowerment and they remain the same even in the big data analysis: “the female body, women’s unpaid care burden, and male violence against women”.
4. The trouble with data remains that it is not that it is not collected; it simply is not sex disaggregated. This defeats the purpose of fair analysis. And this is the gap that legislative reforms need to fulfill.
5. A whole movement had started some time back about language being gender conscious. We believe it did fulfill its desired objectives. It made the point clearer that it was unacceptable to be blind to gender insensitive language. Interestingly some languages have gendered words and others don’t which makes it equally unequal as a society. However, soothing we can all learn from each other from.
6. It is only natural that if women are going to be seen they will be heard and counted. Whilst there has been a conscious effort for the optical changes my question remains on how much data disaggregation is happening for the norm versus the small elite minority which does get to be heard.
7. An equally important chapter in the book is on the patterns of travel that working women have to undertake which are not accounted for and are labelled trip chaining. The inconvenience, time loss, affects on job seniority caused by the extra home chores for professional women because of infrastructural imbalances is significant. Reforms can be made by better city planning and by compensation to women travelers for these extras which are inviable for data bias purposes but fairly significant for negative biases on their work output if not accounted for. Eva Kail who is Vienna’s head of gender planning since 1990s set some positive reforms in place which can be evaluated for other countries. Mayor of Barcelona Ada Colau is another such progressive politician.
8. The main idea is to have a sensitivity to the term women’s time poverty. This in essence means that data analysts realize that “women’s paid and unpaid work combines into a longer working day than men’s”. Thus, transport systems especially mixed use areas, need to be designed in such a way that enable women to do their unpaid work and still manage professional responsibilities. Is there a movement in parliaments on such reforms is the underlying question?
9. Toilets is an underlying development issue: reports suggest that “girls and women collectively spend 97 billion hours a year finding a safe place to relieve themselves.” This itself is a project for sustainable CSR that once reduced in terms of magnitude will improve gender equality, gender violence and GDP growth rate.
10. I wish to mention Iceland’s progress towards women empowerment legislation. The journey started in 1976 with the Gender Equality Act. In 2017 it topped WEF’s Global gender Gap index for the 8^th year running. My point being that it is a process which took time. However, other countries can save the same time by selectively applying relevant gender positive reforms from their template in a shorter timeframe.
11. The data bias needs to be measured in terms of many indicators: one of them could be how many extra hours does a husband create a week for women in unequal unpaid work; for now the number is 7 hours. All these indictors of extra work have health consequences of a fatal sort for women ad thus must be legislated against. The trouble again is that the work women do is invisible! Unaccounted for.
12. Women missing out on vital contributions to their pension funds is an area of work which requires deliberations from international organizations with their member states. Along with this is the invisibility of the numerous jobs women end up doing other than their main one. If all these jobs are not accounted for the data bias is bound to increase. When pensions are linked with number of children produced there is some equity in the system. There is some reform required in the US and 3 other countries where there is no guarantee of a maternity leave constitutionally. Even women parliamentarians in UK are not facilitated on voting on legislation when on maternity leave in this day and age.
13. CSR by corporates which facilitate working women with household chores needs to be replicated in mass and not be the minority.
14. There is a system in some countries which discriminates against women because tax systems exempt overtime hours from tax. In Sweden this is contrasted with tax relief on domestic services.
15. School curriculums are creating brilliance biases against girls and these need correction by careful analysis.
16. More data is required about women’s exposure to chemicals in certain types of jobs to safeguard their heath. How safe are workplaces for women’s health?

 

I conclude Part 1 with the following comments:

The above issues are not earth shattering breaking news and yet they are on pending lists of women empowerment agenda 2030. Corporates, IFIs, Member states need to tackle through legislative reforms and sustainable CSR. This is the only way summit of the future will be successful.