#Invisible women

[pillarsalt]

Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women (2019)

[woman-for-women]

[killallxys]

"The fact is that worth is a matter of opinion, and opinion is informed by culture. And if that culture is as male-biased as ours is, it can’t help but be biased against women. By default." - Invisible women

Can't stress enough to read Invisible women. The injustice is atrocious.

[itellmyselfsecrets]

“Men are more likely than women to be involved in a car crash, which means they dominate the numbers of those seriously injured in car accidents. But when a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured than a man, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured, even when researchers control for factors such as height, weight, seat-belt usage, and crash intensity…She is also 17% more likely to die and it all has to do with how the car is designed - and for whom…When men and women are in a car together, the man is most likely to be driving. So not collecting data on passengers more or less translates as not collecting data on women. The infuriating irony of all this is that the gendered passenger/driver norm is so prevalent that…the passenger seat is the only seat that is commonly tested with a female crash-test dummy, with the male crash-test dummy still being the standard dummy for the driver's seat. So stats that include only driver fatalities tell us precisely zero about the impact of introducing the female crash-test dummy.” - Caroline Criado Perez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)

[balkanradfem]

what are some good resources for someone just getting into being a radfem?

Here's a link to the radfem reading list! Link

I personally would recommend:

'Who Cooked the Last Supper' PDF link

'Invisible Women' PDF link

'The Second Shift' PDF link

'Loving to Survive' PDF link

I also recommend all the works from Andrea Dworkin but those go very deep into the violence and trauma, the ones I listed are very good entry points that deal with statistics and data!

[maaarine]

Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (Caroline Criado-Perez, 2019)

"The good news is that this kind of male bias can be designed out and some of the data collection has already been done.

In the mid-1990s, research by local officials in Vienna found that from the age of ten, girls’ presence in parks and public playgrounds ‘decreases significantly’.

But rather than simply shrugging their shoulders and deciding that the girls just needed to toughen up, city officials wondered if there was something wrong with the design of parks.

And so they planned some pilot projects, and they started to collect data. What they found was revealing.

It turned out that single large open spaces were the problem, because these forced girls to compete with the boys for space.

And girls didn’t have the confidence to compete with the boys (that’s social conditioning for you) so they tended to just let the boys have the space.

But when they subdivided the parks into smaller areas, the female drop-off was reversed.

They also addressed the parks’ sports facilities.

Originally these spaces were encased by wire fencing on all sides, with only a single entrance area – around which groups of boys would congregate. And the girls, unwilling to run the gauntlet, simply weren’t going in.

Enter, stage right, Vienna’s very own Leslie Knope, Claudia Prinz- Brandenburg, with a simple proposal: more and wider entrances.

And like the grassy spaces, they also subdivided the sports courts. Formal sports like basketball were still provided for, but there was also now space for more informal activities – which girls are more likely to engage in.

These were all subtle changes – but they worked. A year later, not only were there more girls in the park, the number of ‘informal activities’ had increased.

And now all new parks in Vienna are designed along the same lines.

The city of Malmö, Sweden, discovered a similar male bias in the way they’d traditionally been planning ‘youth’ urban regeneration.

The usual procedure was to create spaces for skating, climbing and painting grafitti.

The trouble was, it wasn’t the ‘youth’ as a whole who were participating in these activities.

It was almost exclusively the boys, with girls making up only 10-20% of those who used the city’s youth-directed leisure spaces and facilities. (…)

In the city of Gothenburg in Sweden, around 80 million kronor is distributed every year to sports clubs and associations.

Of course, the funding is meant to benefit everyone equally. But when city officials examined the data, they found that it wasn’t.

The majority of funding was going to organised sports – which are dominated by boys. Grants benefited boys over girls for thirty-six out of forty-four sports.

In total, Gothenburg was spending 15 million kronor more on boys’ than girls’ sports.

This didn’t just mean that girls’ sports were less well funded – sometimes they weren’t provided for at all, meaning girls had to pay to do them privately.

Or, if they couldn’t afford to pay, girls didn’t do sports at all."

[disillusionedmonster]

I finished "Invisible Women" and I think it should be mandatory reading. I usually like to summarise books in a post with my favourite quotes but I cannot do it with this one. There is just so much and every part is quotable. I really cannot recommend it enough. I have already passed my copy to one of my little sisters to read. Please if there is one feminist book to read, "Invisible Women" is it.

[ovaruling]

— Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez

[eclecticwordblender]

the second sex by simone de beauvoir and invisible women by caroline criado perez are my guns, germs and steel and sapiens respectively.

[pillarsalt]

Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women (2019)

[dramioneficrecommendations]

I’ve been reading Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez (an awfully depressing and eye opening read), and it made me think of how women are underrepresented in fanfiction as well. I know fanfiction is supposed to be fun, but I can’t help it but find it sad that they’re underrepresented even in works written mostly by women, in the area so dominated by female creators.

And don’t even get me started on misogyny in fandom and how female characters always get judged more harshly than men in fanfiction.

[woman-for-women]

[neverenoughmarauders]

I’m still in shock….

I have a friend who sat through a 1h seminar on what to do if she was kidnapped / taken hostage (her work is the kind of work you’d need to know stuff like that). This is the sort of seminar that the people running it probably do a few times a year. After the hour my friend raised her hand to ask: what, if anything, is different if you’re a woman? (You know - what if you’re in the half of the population that aren’t men). And the guys were like: oh yeah this whole thing is assuming you’re a man. If you’re a woman there’s lots of other stuff. We can set up another slot to talk about that.

Like wtf?

I don’t know how many women there were in the room but I got the impression there were quite a few. Did they ever conceive the idea that this should be information to be given out without people asking? I get we’re a long way from perfect (I’m sure that there’s so much other stuff if we’re disabled, queer, from a different ethnicity, etc etc. but seriously, we’re not even at the stage where they can run a seminar that includes women? Or rather more dangerously, you let women sit through a seminar that makes them unprepared for what could be coming?!?)

Maybe I’m an idiot, but whereas I try to stay on top of the questions I have to ask when I’m in the minority, I usually like to believe the f** obvious stuff is covered.

[eggwhiteswithspinach]

The result of this deeply male-dominated culture is that the male experience, the male perspective, has come to be seen as universal, while the female experience--that of half the global population, after all--is seen as, well, niche.

#Caroline Criado-Perez (Invisible Women)

[maaarine]

Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (Caroline Criado-Perez, 2019)

"The upshot of failing to capture all this data is that women’s unpaid work tends to be seen as ‘a costless resource to exploit’, writes economics professor Sue Himmelweit.

And so when countries try to rein in their spending it is often women who end up paying the price.

Following the 2008 financial crash, the UK has seen a mass cutting exercise in public services.

Between 2011 and 2014 children’s centre budgets were cut by £82 million and between 2010 and 2014, 285 children’s centres either merged or closed.

Between 2010 and 2015 local-authority social-care budgets fell by £5 billion, social security has been frozen below inflation and restricted to a household maximum, and eligibility for a carers’ allowance depends on an earnings threshold that has not kept up with increases in the national minimum wage.

Lots of lovely money-saving.

The problem is, these cuts are not so much savings as a shifting of costs from the public sector onto women, because the work still needs to be done.

By 2017 the Women’s Budget Group estimated that approximately one in ten people over the age of fifty in England (1.86 million) had unmet care needs as a result of public spending cuts.

These needs have become, on the whole, the responsibility of women. (…)

In 2017 the House of Commons library published an analysis of the cumulative impact of the government’s ‘fiscal consolidation’ between 2010 and 2020.

They found that 86% of cuts fell on women.

Analysis by the Women’s Budget Group (WBG) found that tax and benefit changes since 2010 will have hit women’s incomes twice as hard as men’s by 2020.

To add insult to injury, the latest changes are not only disproportionately penalising poor women (with single mothers and Asian women being the worst affected), they are benefiting already rich men.

According to WBG analysis, men in the richest 50% of households actually gained from tax and benefit changes since July 2015."

[maslows-pyramid-scheme]

I started Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men today, and I have a few thoughts so far:

Firstly, I like how she weaves different, typically unconnected examples of misogyny into a coherent and compelling whole, even if her execution isn't always the best.

Secondly, relatedly, I hate her writing style so goddamn much - it sucks, and, when she jumps between points, it undermines the power of her point.

Thirdly, it's not a radical feminist book, it's a liberal feminist book.