I’ve had Invisible Women on my TBR list ever since I saw Briana’s review of the book at Pages Unbound, but I’ve postponed reading it for the longest time because I just knew I was going to be angry while reading and I was right. After reading chapter one while waiting for a bus, I put down my kobo, turned to my friend and asked: “did you know that transportation can be sexist?!”

In Invisible Women, Criado Perez argues that because we tend to think of a generic human as male (aka the ‘default male’), women are overlooked and their needs not met. She looks at a variety of domains where the default male has harmed women, from the seemingly mundane (public transportation and toilets) to places in crises (from homes rebuilt without kitchens to mass rapes after disasters). While, as she repeatedly mentions, sex-based data tends to be lacking because people don’t think to investigate how certain issues affect women specifically, what data we do have shows that women are being systematically harmed by the idea of the default male.

Here are two of the quotes that I highlighted, which should give you a taste of what this book is like:

“[D]uring the 2002-4 SARS outbreak in China, pregnant-women’s health outcomes were not systemically tracked and ‘consequently’, the WHO points out, ‘it was not possible to fully characterise the course and outcome of SARS during pregnancy’. Another gender data gap that could have been so easily avoided, and information that will be lacking for when the next pandemic hits.”

I’m reading this in the time of “the next pandemic” and I’m not sure if things have improved. I think there is more discussion about the effects of COVID-19 and the vaccine on women’s health, but it seems like this is because women are talking about it on social media and it’s harder to ignore. If we were still be in 2002, would we be even hearing about this?

“‘When the local government says “We don’t want women”, the international community compromises and says “OK.”‘ As in post-disaster contexts, the reasoning given varies (cultural sensitivities; including women would delay negotiations; women can be included after an agreement has been reached) but they all boil down to the same line that’s been used to fob women off for centuries: we’ll get to you after the revolution.”

It’s depressing reading. And it gets even more depressing when you realise that one third of the book (at least on my kobo) consists of citations, which means that we’ve had plenty of time to remedy this but… haven’t? Some of the solutions to these problems are simple: sex-segregated spaces for refugees (so that Muslim women can remove their hijab), putting lamps on the roads to the toilets; others are harder: improve urban planning and public transportation, create medicines for men and women and not just for the default male, rethink the idea of the GDP to consider the unpaid labour that paid labour depends on, etc. But all the solutions can be summed up as ‘we should make sure women are consulted when big decisions are made instead of assuming they are smaller versions of men‘.

Overall, this book was exactly like what I imagined it would be. It can be hard to read this and realise just how badly women have been overlooked and failed, but this is an important book that brings a wealth of data and makes the case for why the world needs to start considering the welfare of women.