Invisible Women

I have been trying to read "Invisible Women: exposing data bias in a world designed for men" by Caroline Criado Perez but I have given up. Which is disappointing because I have much sympathy with the author's argument, I just don't like her style. Her passion comes across to me as hectoring and, although she provides a great deal of evidence, I find an endnote in every other sentence very distracting.  I'm a reader who follows them all up but in this case not only is the quantity overwhelming but I also found the quality worrying. I prefer to see research evidence from the horse's mouth rather than filtered through media reports. It doesn't claim to be an academic book but for this reader rigour is important. Anecdotes are good hooks to capture reader interest but they are not data.

A couple of examples of things that bugged me in the first 100 pages.

1. On page 97 Criado Perez asserts that women receive less credit for jointly authored academic papers than men do. This article from the New York times is the reference to back up this assertion. A respectable author but I still dug around, followed the link to the working paper, checked to see if it had been published in a peer-reviewed journal (it has), thought briefly about comparing the working paper with the published version but decided life is too short. But I'm not convinced that there would be similar evidence in Europe and found myself irritated by generalisations based on a narrow US context.

2. In the early section on transport, the author clearly believes that if more women were involved in transport planning, transport policy would be more female friendly. This is very much like the belief that more women on boards would make them more effective and I've ranted on about that quite enough. The section on toilets must surely demonstrate that this assumption is flawed: I am sure that there are female architects involved in designing public buildings but there is always a queue for the ladies.

The accounts of the toilet problems of women in less developed countries were horrifying but Criado Perez is too young to know that the UK situation used to be much worse than now. Women used to have to pay a penny to use a public loo: men paid nothing. A wonderful Labour MP named Barbara Castle did more for women than many other female MPs ever had when she got that charge abolished.

I realised that I am not the target audience for this book. I'm not entirely sure who is but it may open up some useful conversations. Criado Perez' argument is important but we also need to recognise that there is some danger in expecting significant and fast change from increasing female representation.

Then I opened the June issue of economia. I always start with the disciplinary listings since someone observed that true equality in the profession would not be achieved until there were as many women being hauled up for disciplinary offences as there were men. On that basis we still have some way to go.

But look at this. Page 14. Strapline at the top of the page. "From the Institute this month: A woman steps up as ICAEW president..." Can you imagine reading "A man steps up as ICAEW president"? Maybe this just proves Criado Perez' point.