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

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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epellicci's review against another edition

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informative sad fast-paced

3.0

A touch disappointing for me. I felt like a lot of the data that Perez covers is research I had heard presented by other authors in more depth before. And because her aim was simply to uncover the information, it lacked to context and nuance that other books I have read, that focused on perhaps one of these issues at a time, did have. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this fact, it just wasn't what I was hoping for when I picked up the book.

Also disappointing, and somewhat ironic, was the fact that Perez doesn't disaggregate for factors like race and sexuality. She excuses this in her introduction, essentially stating that the data isn't available and so can't be discussed... but wasn't the point of the book to examine that fact and highlight the hidden costs of missing data on those ignored groups?

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billie_churchill's review against another edition

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challenging informative slow-paced

3.5

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