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nel0nen's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative reflective sad slow-paced

4.5


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mmcloe's review against another edition

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challenging informative reflective fast-paced

3.25

It was OK! The facts Criado Perez presented were insightful and often illuminating - I think her early chapters on urban design and her later chapters on nation-building were among the most impactful for me.

That being said, this book leaves a ton of gaps in its pursuit to close gaps. I was shocked to find that queer people of any stripe were completely absent. One offhand mention of lesbians and no mention of trans people whatsoever. Some of the most impactful strides made in women's rights on a practical and theoretical level have been made by queer women, so it was incredibly disappointed to see them missing. Similarly, many of the chapters seemed to presume a white, "Western," middle class woman as the default. Later chapters started doing well to address women's challenges globally but the early narrow focus led to some overly repetitive chapters and talking points. The author also didn't really engage with capitalism or imperialism as structural forces; their symptoms were often mentioned but not the diseases themselves, which have brutally imposed the gendered regimes we know today. She's the daughter of a very powerful CEO, so I guess that makes sense.

Also, the citational practices in this book were absolutely unhinged. The endnotes are almost entirely URLs that I have no way of knowing whether or not the links are dead. I would've appreciated more rigorous citations, a lack of which is another major cause of gender data gaps. 

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maddramaqueen's review against another edition

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challenging informative sad slow-paced

3.5

A bit gender essentialist and white feminist for me, but the actual information is interesting and inarguably worth knowing.

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bilbili's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.75


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khymihr's review against another edition

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informative medium-paced

5.0


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lolasbooks12's review against another edition

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challenging informative medium-paced

4.5


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idesofmarch's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative reflective tense medium-paced

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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haleybre's review against another edition

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informative slow-paced

4.0


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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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