Why the world is made for men: "Women will simply forget"

Caroline Criado-Perez, 36, is from Brazil and originally wanted to be an opera singer, but ended up studying English at Oxford. She lives in London and works as a journalist. Now her new book "Invisible Women - How a world ruled by data ignores half of the population" (btb Verlag, 15 euros) has been published in German.

Mrs. Criado-Perez, in your book "Invisible Women" you describe the permanent discrimination against women. We are chancellors, engineers and professors - and formally we have equal rights for a long time, right? In many countries of the world men and women are of course theoretically equal. But the world we live in is not neutral, it is made for men.

Because it's made by men? Take the car, for example, which is actually a gender-neutral means of transport. When the industry wants to test how safe a car is, it works with crash test dummies that are built like an average man. Women are usually smaller, lighter and have less muscle mass. If they want to use the gas and brakes in the car, they have to push their seat forward. If an accident occurs, the risk of injury is therefore higher for women. The headrest absorbs the impact shock of women's bodies less well, while the belt does not take breasts and pregnancy bumps into account.

Carelessness, or ignorance? Of course, there is no sinister body of men that insidiously wants to decimate women. We are not actively excluded - we are simply forgotten. Our idea of ​​a safe car is based on the assumption that the average man is also the average person. There are fundamental differences between women and men, both biologically and socially. And these differences are not taken into account.

How come? For thousands of years, women were not allowed to practice certain professions and were largely excluded from public life. Men made the decisions and only brought their perspective. As a result, their worldview was cemented as a benchmark, their bodies treated as the norm. And it's not just evident in smartphones that are too big for women's hands or unisex police uniforms that don't fit breasts. This is also shown by the fact that medical studies are carried out with men and it is then assumed that the drugs tested have the same effect on women. There is a huge data gap when it comes to a woman's life and body.

You launched a campaign in the UK in 2017: you wanted another woman to grace a banknote alongside the Queen. There is now a ten pound note with a picture of Jane Austen on it. You were then threatened with murder and rape. They had to leave London for a while. Experiencing this hatred was terrible. People were so incredibly angry. Because of a bill! This experience was so fundamental for me that I wanted to share it. Because I myself am the best example of this: You can change your mind! I wasn't a feminist for a long time, thought that was all nonsense. Then I read a book about how even when we use gender-neutral terms, we think of men and never women. When we say football, we mean men's football. That made me stumble. Without knowing or wanting to, in my own head I had made men the norm - and I'm a woman myself!. When I started paying attention, I saw this prejudice everywhere.

Are you hoping for the same effect on your readers? Sure. An acquaintance of mine who oversees medical studies noticed for the first time that in his Alzheimer's study men were always chosen as the reference point. Alzheimer's is more common in women.

Do you sometimes catch yourself with the old way of thinking? Naturally! In Great Britain there is an initiative that wants to get women interested in technical jobs. A good idea. Until someone said to me a few days ago: We not only need more women in science - we also need more men to work in kindergarten. That caught me off guard. The same mistake is behind this again: if there is an imbalance, we assume that women have to change and adapt.

Women in management positions attend courses for more self-confidence and assertiveness. Why do so many believe that a man's level of self-confidence leads to success? Studies show that women are more accurate than men in assessing their intelligence and abilities. The male behaviors are thus traded as a gender-neutral standard for the workplace. The question of whether we want an office full of people who overestimate themselves is neglected.

The Financial Times praised your "cool, fact-based" reasoning. What do you think of that? That pretty much sums up what I'm aiming for. Not because I think feminism is emotional per se. But when we try to point out systemic injustices, we often draw on our individual experiences. Recently, I was walking home from the subway with my boyfriend at night when two drunk men walked towards us. Suddenly I was totally tense. Have they seen me yet? What's the best way to avoid them? Can I defend myself with my key in an emergency? My boyfriend just kept talking about his day and cracking jokes. While the guys were invisible to him, they set off a chain reaction for me. I suddenly thought of stories from friends, acquaintances and colleagues, where two harmless men suddenly became dangerous. At such moments, I suddenly realize that we live in different worlds. Just walking the streets at night without giving me the slightest thought...

Hard to imagine for many women.Yes. And conveying these experiences is very difficult. They are seen as an isolated case, not in context. With the book I wanted to move away from that: Instead of telling the story from the perspective of individual women, I use examples to show the common thread: Female students around the world are less likely to receive scholarships or mentoring. Female cleaners work with chemicals only tested on men and get sick. After the 2004 Sri Lanka tsunami, women were not included in the reconstruction program and the new homes lacked kitchens. If a bill in the US is supported primarily by women, the states will spend less money on it. These aren't coincidences. This is a pattern.

What gender we belong to is not the only factor influencing our lives. It also makes a difference whether you go through life as a white or black woman. How did that affect your research? Very little. Not because these factors do not play a role, but because much less data is known about them. Again, the standard is a white man. If the datasets are to be broken down, with a bit of luck they can be divided into men and women. But there is no finer sorting. I can find out how many women professors there are in the US. I can find out how many black professors there are. But not like many black female professors. Either you are black or a woman. And that leads to an even bigger data gap.

And the solution? Collect even more data?Yes and no. Not only do we need to collect more data and information, we also need to disassemble it properly. If women and men are simply packed into a group and examined, important findings are lost. Data is fundamentally not neutral. They are not an unchanging substance that we simply find and process in nature. Behind every data set and every statistic there is a series of questions: What data do I collect? Which questions do I want to answer with this? Who do I ask about a topic? These are conscious decisions that someone makes. And maybe forget women.

With the use of apps, smartphones and ever more powerful algorithms, data is playing an increasingly important role. You have to look at this in a differentiated way. If data is collected about our preferences when shopping for shoes, we may be able to recommend nicer shoes. The motivation here is clear: something should be sold to us. But what about medical data? We just don't know enough about the female body. Doctors consistently misdiagnose women because they learned from men's bodies. In the United States, publicly funded medical studies have only recently been required to include women. This does not apply to private studies - and 80 percent of the studies are only carried out with men. But our bodies are different - different hormones, different bone structure and different distribution of muscle mass. So medicines work differently and illnesses progress differently.

What are the consequences of training an algorithm without women's data? Researchers at the University of Washington fed an algorithm with a set of images in which women were 33 percent more likely than men to cook. In a new set of images, the algorithm recognized a woman at the stove 68 percent of the time, even when there was a bald man standing there. The experiment should show that algorithms do not make neutral decisions, but that they reinforce our own prejudices. If an algorithm only sorts images for Instagram, it's a bit annoying, but not bad. But if an algorithm is only trained with male data and therefore does not detect breast cancer, it is deadly.

How can this be prevented?By having women everywhere. Diversity is not just there to launch a beautifully illustrated advertising campaign and then pat yourself on the back with satisfaction. Diversity decides whether a product works for everyone. Apple, for example, developed a health app for the iPhone - and forgot that around half of the population gets their period once a month. Of course that's not on purpose. But a woman would have noticed this design flaw.

Do we need a quota for women?Absolutely and everywhere. Every study on this shows that quotas do not favor underqualified women. They merely prevent underqualified men from being given preference. A quota forces us to observe that men are overrepresented. But it alone won't get us anywhere. If there is a women's quota in politics - who is able to fill it? A working-class woman who does a bunch of unpaid work on top of her job? Or a wealthy woman who can afford domestic help?

How can access be improved here? By taking social roles into account. When we organize town meetings or political events, we have to look very carefully at who is coming. Women do 75 percent of the so-called "care work" worldwide, i.e. washing, cleaning, cooking, looking after children and elderly relatives. And this while they are often still doing paid work. As a result, they have less free time than men. So if it's mainly men who get involved, it's not because women don't care about politics. You are probably busy with another task. Here we must actively seek to find out what prevents women from filling certain offices, jobs and roles. And then correct.

More on the subject

Designing a phone specifically for women is one thing, but how far can these special designs go? What if cars become unsafe for men? What if we make the pedals adjustable so women don't have to move forward into the danger zone? Or develop a harness that can be adjusted for pregnancy bumps and breasts? With that we would have a car that is safe for both men and women. With other products we just need two versions instead of somehow squeezing women into the “unisex” version. We must do the same for our political systems, our city planning and our workplaces: actively asking many different women about what they need. It's going to be difficult because everyone is so used to putting men in the spotlight. Any concession will feel like a disadvantage. But women have been making concessions to a world that doesn't think of them for millennia. It's really not that difficult to think about other people.