Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

This book opened my eyes to the systematic exclusion of women in areas I didn’t see before. Did you know, for example, that crash tests are in most cases done with male dummies only, which results in cars being way more dangerous to drive for women? Or that most medicine trials are done with no or only a few women (so a drug might be safe for men but too potent for women, or the other way around)? And there’s many situations like this, where the default human is male (and white) and everything else is an anomaly and not even considered. This creates data gaps, where we don’t even know how women are affected.

Caroline Criado Perez argues that we need to start collecting sex-aggregated data in studies and stop excluding them from decisions that affect them. And I agree.