Design flaws
Campaigner Caroline Criado Perez talks to Janet Christie about what data reveals about the gender gap, and how the world has been made to suit men
Interview by Janet Christie. Portrait by John Devlin
Awoman and her dog stand outside Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. Young, wearing black jeans, khaki jacket and trainers, hair scraped up in a high pony-tail, quietly checking her mobile while the small dog waits patiently, paws planted four-square. She’s a young Everywoman, could be anyone, and I race past her to meet campaigner and feminist Caroline Criado Perez who is in town speaking at the First Minister’s National Advisory Council on Women and Girls Circle session and meeting the First Minister.
It’s no surprise Sturgeon has time for the feminist, social justice and political campaigner as part of the Scottish Government’s commitment to reduce gender inequality as Criado Perez is someone everyone wants to listen to right now.
Of course when I meet Criado Perez five minutes later, she turns out to be the woman I’d rushed past outside and as soon as she opens her mouth, I can see why people take notice when she speaks. Articulate, fasttalking, irreverent and funny, she’s engaging and persuasive, full of what she’s in Glasgow to discuss, rings and bracelets flashing as she gesticulates and laughs.
“I’m talking about the gender data gap and how it affects policy, how historically we have designed everything from health to travel infrastructure to the economy around this mythical Reference Man, as if the average male is the average human. And as a result we haven’t bothered collecting data on women in order to design things for both women and men.”
As well as being a force on social media, the 35-year-old Liberty Human Rights Campaigner of the Year Award winner 2013 and OBE is the woman that got the Bank of England to put a woman back on their notes in the form of Jane Austen in 2017 and who started the campaign to get the first statue of a woman erected in Parliament Square last year. Suffragette Millicent Fawcett now stands alongside Churchill, Ghandi and Mandela. She also set up the Women’s Room website to challenge gender imbalance in the media and wrote her first book, 2016’s Do It Like A Woman, highlighting pioneering women.
Now she’s on a mission to fix the gender data gap and her latest book, Invisible Women has got everyone talking, feminist or not, about the missing information on women and its often lethal effects. Her Edinburgh International Book Festival event is already sold out.
You’ve probably heard the line about crash test dummies being based on men, so if you’re a woman you’re 47 per cent more likely to be seriously injured in a crash, discovered that women’s heart attack symptoms are completely different to men’s, or even wondered why mobile phones or house bricks are too big for women’s hands to hold.
Criado Perez hones in on data to skewer the hidden systematic discrimination women face every day, with new research and stories highlighting the blanks in information that created unseen, often unintentional bias against women everywhere from public policy to technology, business and the media. Why, she asks, do we rely on data from studies done on men, usually Caucasian men aged 25 to 30 who weigh 70kg, or what Criado Perez calls ‘Reference Man’, who are used to represent humanity as a whole?
The beauty of Criado Perez’s approach is that it focuses on data, numbers and facts that affect us all, sidestepping abstruse debates about the nature of modern feminism.
“I thought this was a really good way of explaining feminism to people who didn’t previously understand it,” she says. “Especially if you’re a man, to understand what women are saying about how we feel when we are navigating a world that is hostile to us, when we’re catcalled, spoken over, patronised, groped, harassed. It’s hard to put yourself in that position if you haven’t been living in that culture, haven’t had your personality and the way you move around the world and what you think you can and can’t do shaped by that. They can try and empathise, and a lot of fantastic men do, but they haven’t experienced it. But they can understand things like if a woman is in a car crash she’s 17 per cent more likely to die.”
Invisible Women can be a sobering read, especially for women, but for the endlessly upbeat Criado Perez, the realisation of how bad things are is a catalyst for change, and hope.
“That is the positivity, that people are noticing it, that was why I wrote the book,” she says.
She goes on to explain her route into feminism, around the age of 25, when she read a book called Feminism and Linguistic Theory that pointed out that every time we use ‘he’ to mean he or she, or ‘man’ to mean humankind, women picture a man.
“I realised I was picturing men all the time when I was picturing just a random person and I thought how have I never noticed this? It was incredibly shocking and that realisation completely changed my life.