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A review by the_gandy_man
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez
3.5
I knew that sexism was pervasive in society, but this book did a fantastic job at showing me that I actually had no idea how pervasive it is. It's very effective at uncovering places where I would not expect sexism to have such a negative impact, focusing on how women do more unpaid work such as childcare, eldercare, housework, etc. and how harmful our society is to those people.
I really like everything this book has to sexism. I also think it assumes that gender is binary and that sex and gender are equivalent. It does note the difference between sex and gender at the beginning, but then says we're just going to treat them as the same for the whole book. I didn't like that. I'm not really the person to explore that, it's just how I felt.
The other problem I had with the book is probably more of a me problem. Sometimes there's too much listing statistics. "This % in this country and this % in this country etc. etc." There were stretches where I got bored because it didn't feel like Perez was saying anything new, just citing statistics to support the claim I already accepted. Maybe that's just a non-fiction thing, this is the first non-fiction book I've rated.
There were also a few times (not nearly enough to matter) where a stat felt questionable. The only example I can remember was when she listed words that were more likely to be used describing men than women and vice versa. This sort of statistic can be deceptive since you could have a ton of words that are getting at the same thing, and then through variance some of them happen to be used more for women than men so you cherry pick those words to fabricate a trend that supports your agenda. There were a few things similar to that where I just had the thought "this stat could be misleading". That being said, I don't believe any of them were, especially considering the massive mountain of other stats that also support the same claim. I just wish some of the stats were presented in a way that leaves less room for doubt. Maybe this is again just a non-fiction thing and any book with a ton of stats is going to have a few that could feel questionable (and again it's not the content of the stat or what the stat is saying that I found questionable, just the manner in which the stat is you know what you get it it's like the example I gave. I'm rambling. The least important part of this review is bigger than the rest of the review. I will not be fixing it. Good book.)
I really like everything this book has to sexism. I also think it assumes that gender is binary and that sex and gender are equivalent. It does note the difference between sex and gender at the beginning, but then says we're just going to treat them as the same for the whole book. I didn't like that. I'm not really the person to explore that, it's just how I felt.
The other problem I had with the book is probably more of a me problem. Sometimes there's too much listing statistics. "This % in this country and this % in this country etc. etc." There were stretches where I got bored because it didn't feel like Perez was saying anything new, just citing statistics to support the claim I already accepted. Maybe that's just a non-fiction thing, this is the first non-fiction book I've rated.
There were also a few times (not nearly enough to matter) where a stat felt questionable. The only example I can remember was when she listed words that were more likely to be used describing men than women and vice versa. This sort of statistic can be deceptive since you could have a ton of words that are getting at the same thing, and then through variance some of them happen to be used more for women than men so you cherry pick those words to fabricate a trend that supports your agenda. There were a few things similar to that where I just had the thought "this stat could be misleading". That being said, I don't believe any of them were, especially considering the massive mountain of other stats that also support the same claim. I just wish some of the stats were presented in a way that leaves less room for doubt. Maybe this is again just a non-fiction thing and any book with a ton of stats is going to have a few that could feel questionable (and again it's not the content of the stat or what the stat is saying that I found questionable, just the manner in which the stat is you know what you get it it's like the example I gave. I'm rambling. The least important part of this review is bigger than the rest of the review. I will not be fixing it. Good book.)