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Invisible Women Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

Vox: Women suffer needless pain because almost everything is designed for men. Why women are 50 percent more likely to be misdiagnosed after a heart attack and 17 percent more likely to die in a car crash.

“…In a new book, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, the British journalist and feminist activist Caroline Criado Perez argues that this is part of a larger problem: the “gender data gap.” Basically, the data our society collects is typically about men’s experience, not women’s. That data gets used to allocate research funding and make decisions about design. Because most things and spaces — from pain medications to cars, and from air-conditioned offices to city streets — have been designed by men with men as the default user, they often don’t work well for women…

See also Deloitte’s book review – “…Published in March 2019, Invisible Women: Exposing data bias in a world designed for men provides hundreds of examples similar to those described above, across multiple dimensions of life – from healthcare to politics, the workplace to infrastructure. Perez paints a detailed and troubling picture of widespread, systemic gender bias. The reason? A failure to account for women in data relied on in design and decision-making, argues Perez. Data is either not collected on women, or when it is, the data is not disaggregated by sex. As Perez bluntly puts it, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

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