Reviews with content warning for Chronic illness - Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

Reviews tagging 'Chronic illness'

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez

12 reviews

lonelyhyperion's review against another edition

challenging dark funny informative medium-paced

3.0

Very informative and an easy read despite being so statistic-heavy. Interspersed with a good amount of humour to lighten the depressing nature of the topic. I think in some places it lost me because the "fixing the data gap" solution rang a bit hollow when you comprehend the vastness of the problem. And as other reviews point out, there was a lack of discussion of trans identities...

PS -- interesting to read this in the run up to the 2024 American election, as Kamala Harris makes a quick appearance in the book!

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feistygarlicroll's review against another edition

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4.0

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unluckycat13's review against another edition

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The author is a TERF, this is a TERF book. Not to undermine the honestly good work and important information in this book, but you can't remove it from the author's views. While it starts out seeming reasonable enough-- I think it's understandable even if not great to not separate sex and gender-- the author eventually begins to build her argument into women being an immutable biologically separate organism with most things in life attributed purely to biology. Of course there's no proof of this because of the data gap. The studies will surely show she's right though, as they always say.

The book does start out acknowledging queer and disabled people, and it does talk about other countries with a non dismissive and non bigoted attitude, however the author is very quick to paint groups of people (such as western women, or British women) with a singular brush. Despite admitting that the so called standard male doesn't represent men in general, she's very argumentative in favor of a standard female model. It's hard to untangle her personal views on sex and gender from the rest of the book and the more you begin to think about it, the worse it gets.

I would generally not recommend this book, and while it is a nice organization of some studies I have heard most of them before elsewhere.

Being a book about sexism, you can expect a TW warning for basically literally every topic, albeit only passingly.

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sydneyhenshaw's review against another edition

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dark informative inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

4.75

I really enjoyed this book and I learned a lot from it. It really helped me realize that some issues that seem frivolous can actually really add up or be more dangerous than they seem. I appreciated it covering the realities for women all over the world and telling a diverse bunch of stories. I wish it would have spent a bit more time touching on intersectionality and how largely that impacts data gaps also.

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isabellaci's review against another edition

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informative medium-paced

3.25

I read this as an audiobook; why were abbreviations, that are harder to say, not just said as their full title.
From what I remember there was 0 mention into how imperialism and colonialism affects women in the Global South, even as there was mention of exploitation of the countries mentioned.
nor was capitalism explicitly mentioned
Say that transwomen exist, I dare you!
Everything being put down to the gender data gap in lieu of misogyny got grating towards the end of the book. I realise that the gender data gap is caused by misogyny.
Not a direct mention on how the military/police affect women, esp those in the Global South; but the comfortability of soldiers or police was discussed.
Did not know when the book was published as the audiobook only said at the end of the reading which made trying to figure out the context of the writing harder.

All in all its not a bad book. The actual data and some specific studies themselves were interesting. However a lot of the takeaways you could get from the book I had already heard prior to listening to this (likely from someone who had also read this book but just before i had).

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mdwsn27's review against another edition

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challenging informative slow-paced

4.5

I really wish there was an updated; post- pandemic, gender-neutral bathroom, Trump era, promotion of trans rights... version that incorporated greater recognition of intersectionality. I loved the contents of this book, but feel like there could be a broader focus on any data bias in the context of non, cishet white-male identit(ies). At points it felt a lot like a pure lit-review, but was informative nonetheless. A great and important read!

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