As a woman, I had no idea this was even an issue.
It wasn’t until I was researching two recent articles — How Can This Be Called Science? and Live-Birth Bias: How Research Can Hide Harm by Design — that I stumbled across the term “gender data gap.”
I expected a small oversight. What I found was a gaping hole. And once I started digging, Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez landed in my lap like a sledgehammer.
It’s not just terrible. It’s outrageous. And yet — so normalized, so quiet — that we barely notice it. Until we do.
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What the Book’s About
Invisible Women is a forensic investigation into how data gaps — or more accurately, data bias — systematically disadvantage women.
Across government policy, healthcare, urban planning, disaster relief, and tech design, Caroline Criado Perez shows how the world is not just shaped by data — it’s shaped by missing data.
The world is built for men — because it was built using data about men.
The result? A world where women are more likely to be injured in car crashes, misdiagnosed in hospitals, overlooked in infrastructure planning, and excluded from everything from tech interfaces to public policy. This isn’t just a gap in understanding — it’s a built-in design flaw.
5 Data Gaps That Should Outrage Everyone
1. Car safety tests are based on the male body — and women pay the price.
Crash test dummies reflect the average male body. That means women are 47% more likely to be seriously injured in a crash and 17% more likely to die. Safety, it turns out, is gendered.
2. Medical research often ignores female biology.
Clinical trials have long prioritized male participants, and even today, many drugs are still tested and dosed based primarily on male biology — with dangerous consequences for women. Perez highlights how heart attacks, for example, often go unrecognized in women — simply because the “classic” symptoms reflect male physiology.
3. Unpaid labor remains invisible — and uncounted.
Globally, women do the majority of unpaid caregiving work, yet this labor is rarely factored into economic models, policy planning, or even time studies. What’s not measured gets ignored — and undervalued.
4. Urban planning assumes a male commuter.
Cities are often designed around the needs of the full-time, car-owning, nine-to-five worker — typically a man. Meanwhile, women are more likely to travel in multi-stop, caregiving-based patterns on foot or public transport. The systems fail them by design.
5. Tech tools don’t recognize female users.
Voice assistants often struggle to recognize higher-pitched voices. Phones are designed for larger hands. Even AI algorithms replicate gender bias because they’re trained on data that excludes women. If the data is skewed, so is the outcome.
My Take
Reading Invisible Women is a quiet, escalating rage. Not because the book is inflammatory — it isn’t. It’s calm, meticulous, deeply sourced. And that’s what makes it all the more devastating.
This isn’t about token inclusion. It’s about measurable harm. When women aren’t counted, they don’t count. And when decisions are made on that kind of data, it’s not just flawed — it’s dangerous.
When data excludes half the population, it isn’t neutral — it’s negligent. What we don’t measure, we can’t fix. And what we ignore becomes invisible — until it hurts.
Why You Should Read It
If you care about health equity, public design, science, or simply making systems work better — this book is essential. It will open your eyes to things you’ve walked past, worked around, or quietly endured. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez is
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Further Reading on CriticalMindShift.com
If Invisible Women made your blood boil, you may also want to explore how skewed research can harm pregnant women and unborn children. In How Can This Be Called Science? and Missing by Design: When Sex, Gender—and Data—Are Censored in Health Research, we examine real-world examples of what happens when data is distorted — or deliberately excluded — in the name of health.
The following book is linked to Amazon.com for your convenience. If you decide to purchase through this link, we may earn a small commission — at no extra cost to you.
Sex Matters: How Male-Centric Medicine Endangers Women’s Health and What We Can Do About It [amazon.com]
By Alyson J. McGregor, MD
A physician’s firsthand account of how neglecting sex differences in medicine leads to misdiagnoses, improper treatment, and poorer outcomes for women.
The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths about Sex and Identity in Our Society [amazon.com]
By Debra Soh
A controversial but deeply researched argument on the importance of biological sex in science, society, and mental health.
Articles & Reports
When Science Is Censored – medium.com
Olivia Dobbs
A neuroscientist’s reflection on how advocating for sex-based research integrity was reframed as exclusionary.
Inclusion Policies and Sex/Gender Research – NIH
The U.S. National Institutes of Health’s official stance on why sex and gender should not be ignored in health science.
Sex, gender, and medical data: a way forward – The BMJ
A thoughtful critique from British Medical Journal contributors on why conflating sex and gender undermines data accuracy.
When you design a world around the average man, you don’t just make women invisible — you make their needs, risks, and potential disappear with them. Equity starts with data that sees us all.
