432 pages
English language
Published 2019 by Penguin Random House.
Took me a while to understand the scope of what was included or excluded in this - the model I now have, although suggested in the opening chapter is really only confirmed in the afterword. It's not just about the data gap - it's about viewing the world through the lens of a Venn diagram of sex and gender, and the intersection between those.
Did you know men and women are physically different? Why don’t doctors get taught that? Why don’t vehicle safety tests take that into account? Why is medical and drug research heavily biased towards male subjects with minimal effort to evaluate the physiological differences that do show up?
The Invisible Woman takes a look at all the small (and big) things that get overlooked when women’s input isn’t considered. It discusses UI, personal protective equipment, company policies, city design, medicine, and more, with much of the discussion supported by some academic tier research.
I don’t universally agree with all her positions on political/policy changes to address the issue, but she does make a compelling case that this is something people need to be aware of and make deliberate effort to mitigate.
The introduction is a bit rough, barraging you with numbers that in my opinion don’t work particularly well to introduce …
Did you know men and women are physically different? Why don’t doctors get taught that? Why don’t vehicle safety tests take that into account? Why is medical and drug research heavily biased towards male subjects with minimal effort to evaluate the physiological differences that do show up?
The Invisible Woman takes a look at all the small (and big) things that get overlooked when women’s input isn’t considered. It discusses UI, personal protective equipment, company policies, city design, medicine, and more, with much of the discussion supported by some academic tier research.
I don’t universally agree with all her positions on political/policy changes to address the issue, but she does make a compelling case that this is something people need to be aware of and make deliberate effort to mitigate.
The introduction is a bit rough, barraging you with numbers that in my opinion don’t work particularly well to introduce you to the topic, but it’s worth powering through.
I also, as someone broadly interested in intelligence on the individual, collective, and artificial levels, took it more broadly as a cautionary tale of making decisions without making effort to understand a variety of positions, and the dangers of treating groups of people as one homogenous entity. In some ways, while the subject matter is different, there are a lot of parallels to David Epstein’s Range. You can’t make effective decisions without some understanding of several distinct perspectives on a problem.
So, from multiple angles, this book is worth reading. It does get a little dense at times and makes some points strongly, but if you let yourself you should learn a lot.
A persuasive case for the ways in which public policy (especially health and welfare) needs to be changed to cater for everyone, rather than just a subset of the population, starting at a minimum with better data collection so we can see the full extent of the problem. Some of the issues raised were 'obvious', but there were others I wasn't aware of (e.g. heart attacks causing very different symptoms in men and women). The author also manages to tread a careful path of drawing attention to issues without laying too much blame with any one group of people, generally opting for 'men don't know about this' rather than 'this is all the fault of men' (which, whilst it may be a fair comment, would probably alienate people).
The missing things I noticed were: assumption that sex/gender are the same thing (or at least the author seems to used them …
A persuasive case for the ways in which public policy (especially health and welfare) needs to be changed to cater for everyone, rather than just a subset of the population, starting at a minimum with better data collection so we can see the full extent of the problem. Some of the issues raised were 'obvious', but there were others I wasn't aware of (e.g. heart attacks causing very different symptoms in men and women). The author also manages to tread a careful path of drawing attention to issues without laying too much blame with any one group of people, generally opting for 'men don't know about this' rather than 'this is all the fault of men' (which, whilst it may be a fair comment, would probably alienate people).
The missing things I noticed were: assumption that sex/gender are the same thing (or at least the author seems to used them interchangeably), no coverage of trans/non-binary, and, most surprisingly, nothing much on sex workers. Despite these flaws, it's well worth a read, especially if you're involved in public policy, healthcare or data collection.
