Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men – Caroline Criado Perez
Written by Elisa Garbil – 30.05.2025
Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women is not just a powerful feminist critique, it is a critical tool for understanding how data invisibility translates into systemic risk, institutional failure, and operational inefficiency. Through case studies spanning transportation, healthcare, economics, disaster relief, and tech, Criado Perez shows how a world designed for “default male bodies” excludes women in ways that are not only unjust but dangerous.
The lives of men have been taken to represent those of human overall. When it comes to the lives of the other half of humanity, there is nothing but silence.
Caroline Criado Perez – Invisible Women
The premise is deceptively simple: if you do not measure it, you cannot manage it. And if you do not measure women’s realities, whether it is in clinical trials, product design, urban planning, or public policy, you design failure into your systems. Perez meticulously documents how this gender data gap is not just an oversight, but a built-in bias that has lethal, economic, and institutional consequences.
Examples in Invisible Women range from the absurd to the horrifying:
- Crash-test dummies modelled on average male bodies lead to higher female injury and mortality rates in car accidents.
- Clinical drug trials that exclude women for fear of “hormonal complexity” result in dosages that are too strong or ineffective for female patients.
- Voice-recognition systems and personal protective equipment that fail to accommodate higher-pitched voices or smaller bodies create exclusionary environments in sectors from construction to finance.
There is no doubt that women are dying as a result of the gender data gap in occupational health research.
Caroline Criado Perez – Invisible Women
These examples are not isolated. They stem from a deep structural issue: systems designed by, and primarily for, men. The result is a form of embedded risk that is invisible to those who benefit from it, and dangerously visible to those who suffer because of it.
In governance, health, and economics, failure to account for the realities of 50% of the population introduces systemic vulnerabilities that are often overlooked in traditional risk assessments. These include:
- Public health risks from misdiagnosed pain and incorrect prescriptions,
- Workforce attrition and burnout due to unpaid labour and care burdens disproportionately borne by women,
- Institutional inefficiency when urban planning ignores female commuting patterns or disaster response plans fail to address gendered needs,
- And reputational damage in an era of increasing ESG scrutiny and stakeholder demands for inclusion.
Globally, 75% of unpaid work is done by women, who spend between three and six hours per day on it compared to men’s average of thirty minutes to two hours.
Caroline Criado Perez – Invisible Women
The unpaid labour economy, which is dominated by women, is a foundational yet invisible pillar of global economic activity. Women tend to be the ones having to stop working when they get children, even if there is good paternity and maternity leave. Women tend to have to take up most of the domestic work in the house, even if there are no children. Do look at your own relationship and consider who does what most? Women tend to do the repetitive tasks – like cooking, groceries, cleaning, laundry – while men do the occasional tasks – mowing, fixing things. Leading to a disparity in the amount of work women and men do. Often these repetitive tasks are expected even when women work full time, leading to a risk of burnout and, unfortunately, due to the medical world not believing women, a strain on the health services. Issues that could be solved by just sharing the work, and having medics listen to you when you come to them with a problem. Ignoring this in strategic planning, healthcare budgeting, and productivity models is not only unethical, it is statistically and economically flawed.
The real reason we exclude women is because we see the rights of 50% of the population as a minority interest.
Caroline Criado Perez – Invisible Women
For leaders in policy, development, and international organisations, this book is a critical warning. A world built on male-centric data is not just unfair, it is unsustainable. The consequences are cumulative: erosion of trust in healthcare systems, barriers to female economic participation, inequitable disaster response, and declining legitimacy of institutions that continue to fail half the population.
This isn’t just about “adding women in.” It’s about transforming the way we collect, analyse, and act on data, so that we manage risk comprehensively rather than through a male-default lens.
Criado Perez’s work should be required reading not only for feminists or sociologists, but for strategists, policymakers, economists, health leaders, and business executives. If your frameworks, datasets, and metrics do not include women, then your forecasts are flawed, your models are incomplete, and your outcomes are skewed.
Quotas, which, contrary to popular misconception, were recently found by a London School of Economics study to ‘weed out incompetent men’ rather than promote unqualified women.
Caroline Criado Perez – Invisible Women
Invisible Women is a masterclass in how bias becomes systemic, and how that system produces fragility, inefficiency, and harm. It forces us to confront that gender inequality isn’t just a moral issue, as it is a profound design flaw in our institutions, policies, and risk frameworks.
Quotes That Might Make you Read the Book:
Women’s physical pain is form more likely to be dismissed as ’emotional’ or ‘psychosomatic’.
Caroline Criado Perez – Invisible Women
Male bias is so firmly embedded in our psyche that even genuinely gender-neutral words are read as male.
Caroline Criado Perez – Invisible Women
Whiteness and maleness are silent precisely because they do not need to be vocalised. Whiteness and maleness are implicit. They are unquestioned. They are the default.
Caroline Criado Perez – Invisible Women
When women join an industry in high numbers, that industry attracts lower pay and loses ‘prestige’, suggesting that low-paid work chooses women rather than the other way around.
Caroline Criado Perez – Invisible Women
