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emmaaamay 's review for:
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
by Caroline Criado Pérez
DID NOT FINISH: 90%
It feels like reading a book with a million factoids rather than a curated collection of topics with individual theses following a set narrative. Extremely poor organization and the writing that seemed to me more like throwing paint at a wall rather than using a brush; she’s trying to prove that data bias against women is prevalent and universal, but in doing so, she throws every slightly relevant statistic and topic on the page. The chapter titles are useless for determining the content of the chapter because the are obscure/non-descriptive or only mention something talking about for the first six pages of the chapter rather than the chapter as a whole.
The book is ultimately a conglomeration of stats bouncing from sub-topic to sub-topic. It’s a stream of consciousness type of read when it desperately needed organization. She also makes big claims with extremely poor citations—if they’re even cited to begin with. I’m not averse to believing a lot of her claims, but they need to be backed up with credible citations. Her bibliography is a ton of hyperlinks, which is likely useless six years after publication. She needed to utilize an academic form of citations given that she’s trying to do vaguely academic work. The claims she’s making are only as credible as the work she’s citing, and it’s difficult if impossible to determine credibility from glancing at a lone hyperlink. Finally, she often makes big claims but the says that there either isn’t any data collected or the data we have isn’t sex-disaggregated. So, she’s making a claim that can’t be proven.
I thought I’d love the book given the subject, and there were a ton of interesting and insightful points made but ultimately the lack of organization made this a bear to finish and I just couldn’t do it.
The book is ultimately a conglomeration of stats bouncing from sub-topic to sub-topic. It’s a stream of consciousness type of read when it desperately needed organization. She also makes big claims with extremely poor citations—if they’re even cited to begin with. I’m not averse to believing a lot of her claims, but they need to be backed up with credible citations. Her bibliography is a ton of hyperlinks, which is likely useless six years after publication. She needed to utilize an academic form of citations given that she’s trying to do vaguely academic work. The claims she’s making are only as credible as the work she’s citing, and it’s difficult if impossible to determine credibility from glancing at a lone hyperlink. Finally, she often makes big claims but the says that there either isn’t any data collected or the data we have isn’t sex-disaggregated. So, she’s making a claim that can’t be proven.
I thought I’d love the book given the subject, and there were a ton of interesting and insightful points made but ultimately the lack of organization made this a bear to finish and I just couldn’t do it.