Book Review: “Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men” by Caroline Criado Perez

I first became aware of Caroline Criado Perez through her campaign to keep a woman on the reverse of UK bank notes, after Elizabeth Fry was replaced by Churchill on the five pound note. This campaign was memorable firstly due to her success – Jane Austen now appears on the reverse of the £10 note – and secondly, from the deluge of threats, hate mail and acrimony she attracted through Twitter as a result. At the time, Twitter did almost nothing about this – the situation is (only) slightly better today due the changes they have made to the way abuse is reported.

Undeterred, Criado Perez published “Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men” in 2019. Her book is rather neatly summed up by the quote from Simone de Beauvoir she includes in the frontispiece:

“Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.”

The gender data gap

Criado Perez’s aim is to flag up the huge data gap that exists about the lives of half of humanity. She dubs this the ‘gender data gap’ and it crops up again in again in almost any context you can think of – medicine, product design, protective equipment, town planning, governance. The silence of women’s voices in these areas leads not just to irritations, such as too-cold offices or phones that don’t fit your hand but also to life threatening situations. From stab vests that don’t fit female police officers’ bodies, to cars that are 47% more likely to seriously injure women drivers, to medicines that do not work for women, or actively make them sicker, the assumption that the average male represents the average human is causing unnecessary harm.

Female-specific concerns that men (mostly) fail to factor in crop up repeatedly in the many areas that Criado Perez examines, but fit into three themes: the female body, women’s unpaid care burden and male violence against women. Males of course do experience violence, lots of it, but as Criado Perez says, “…it manifests itself in a different way to the violence faced by women.” Facilities such as suburban housing centres, travel networks, homeless shelters and refugee camps are usually planned by men, and do not take into account the types of activities women need to engage in, nor do they keep them safe while they do them.

There are multiple examples in the book of how women are missing from our data. Data is not only not collected about women, when it is collected it is then not disaggregated by sex. For example, few medical studies or trials specify the sex of the participants. When they do, participants are usually overwhelmingly male. If the sex of the participants is revealed, the results are not always then separated by sex. Even tests on animals or single cells are not often carried out on male and female animals or cells, even though research shows the results are likely be different between sexes. The most common adverse drug reaction in women is that the drug simply doesn’t work, putting their health and sometimes their life at risk as a result. It is likely that many drugs only make it to market because they are effective in men in early trials – anything that might have been a good treatment candidate for women alone is screened out at an early stage because it is not effective in men. And that is before you even address the woeful lack of research into conditions that principally affect women, such as period pain or endometriosis.

A scarily prescient section in the book describes how a lack of sex-segregated data can impact during a pandemic. We know from previous coronavirus epidemics, such as SARS, that symptoms can be more severe in pregnant women. During the last SARS outbreak in 2002-2004 in China, pregnant women’s outcomes were not consistently tracked. “Another gender gap that could so easily have been avoided, and information that will be lacking for when the next pandemic hits,” writes Criado Perez. Here we are, in the middle of the worst pandemic most of us can remember, still without this information. Is data being collected now on outcomes for pregnant women, or will we remain in the dark for the next one, and the one after that?

Gender blind is not always gender neutral

Another gender data gap exists where supposedly ‘gender blind’ neutral policies have an unintentionally discriminating effect against women. For example, US academics in the tenure track system have 7 years to achieve tenure. The years between completing your PhD and receiving tenure, ages 30 to 40, are when most women are likely to have their children. The result is that mothers with young children are 35% less likely than fathers to get tenure track jobs. A ‘gender blind’ policy to give all US parents an additional year to achieve tenure actually decreased mothers’ likelihood of being successful compared to fathers. The extra time gave fathers an advantage over their male peers, while the bulk of childcare and recovery from birth fell to mothers and comparatively decreased their chances.

We are seeing the same phenomenon appearing during the COVID-19 crisis – while everyone attempts to work from home and take on home education, according to Nature, women seem to be publishing far less compared to their male peers. The crisis seems to be gifting additional time to male academics to write up their research and submit grant applications, while at the same time robbing female academics of their chances, as they spend extra time caring for families, home-schooling and prioritising their students ahead of their own research interests.

The burden of unpaid care work

Academia is just one area where women do far and away the greater share of unpaid care work, to the detriment of their careers and to national productivity (GDP). A study of working patterns during the COVID-19 lockdown by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and University College London in the UK shows that due to the disproportionate childcare and housework burden, in households with home-working mothers and fathers, men have three times the uninterrupted work time that women do. 

Even in normal times, the world cannot function without this care work – looking after children, elderly relatives, the vulnerable and disadvantaged. The vast majority of this work is unpaid and is carried out by women on top of their hours of paid work. They fit in multiple extra, short trips every day to support this unpaid work, dropping off children, doing shopping, seeing relatives. These journeys are poorly supported by the radial transport networks designed, largely by men, to serve the traditional daily commute from home to office. As we ‘clap for carers’ every Thursday to express our sincere and heartfelt gratitude for what care means during an international crisis, we shouldn’t forget that the caring burden is a daily reality for most women. For the moment, many of our commuter transport systems are empty. Post COVID-19, should we really go back to investing more and more money in systems that whisk us from home to office, but leave local neighbourhoods under-funded and under-served?

Building bias into the system

While we might be able to understand the presence of bias in humans, it can be tempting to rely on machines to fix the problem. Surely computers are neutral, with their artificial intelligence and gender blindness? Unfortunately, Criado Perez explains why this is not the case, because a large gender gap exists here as well. She describes how women are hugely under-presented in image and speech datasets. Speech recognition technology in smart speakers, phones, medical devices and cars are trained on male voices and struggle to respond accurately to women’s voices. Not only that, the images and text databases that AI systems train on are just as biased as humans, which is not surprising as they are generated by humans. So not only are datasets lacking in data from half the human race, the information that is in those datasets is biased towards gender stereotypes in the same way that humans are unconsciously biased. I encountered more research on this area at the Gender Summit in 2019. This has a real impact on outcomes for women when CV selection systems and even medical diagnostics are becoming increasingly automated using AI.

An individual perspective

If I have a criticism of Criado Perez’s book, it would be that the experiences of one person are sometimes used to make a point about the invisibility of women in general. Anecdotal evidence is still evidence, but does that person represent many? On the other hand, the whole point is that bulk data is lacking in many areas for all the reasons outlined above, so perhaps it’s understandable.

I found reading this book an eye-opening but ultimately rather sobering experience. Getting into a car to drive, will I feel as safe having read it? I certainly won’t stop feeling absurdly irritated by the smart speaker at home that responds instantly to my husband’s voice but stubbornly ignores mine until the third or fourth attempt. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve nearly dropped my new phone trying to use it to take a photo one handed. As a materials science student at university, the protective equipment we used for welding or casting metals practically drowned me – it seems unlikely it made me safer if I could hardly move without tripping over it. Who knows how many times my CV didn’t make the cut for a science job due to skewed AI algorithms? I need to work flexibly and part-time to fit round my roles as mother of a special needs child, school governor and fundraiser for the National Autistic Society .Realistically, this limits my career options. Minor points on their own perhaps, but over a lifetime they add up, they really do.

Read this book – it will certainly make you think.

And the BioBeat goes on: Disrupting Biodata Healthcare at the Wellcome Genome Campus

On 15 November, an exciting event made a welcome return to the Wellcome Genome Campus. Last hosted here in 2015, this year BioBeat18 explored opportunities for healthcare to take a leap forward from the point where data and biology converge. Featuring leaders from industry, investment and academia, the event delved into disrupting the healthcare industry to build sustainable business models based on biodata.

Natalie Banner is the ‘Understanding Patient Data’ lead at the Wellcome Trust, where she ensures that trustworthy systems use patient data ethically and responsibly. She also develops communications for patients that demystify how their data will be used.

“Medical data can be hugely beneficial,” she pointed out. “Patients are aware of this but are concerned about the security of their data and how private companies will use it. Even when data is anonymised, they are still keen to know that it will be used for socially responsible purposes.” The level of concern a potential breach of trust can cause was demonstrated by the recent move of DeepMind health, which uses NHS data to monitor patients for kidney injury, into the main arm of Google. Some see this move as breaking promises about keeping patient data completely separate from commercial products and services and serves as a timely warning for other businesses.

Elisa Petris, a partner at investment company Sycona, outlined the company’s interest in financing science and creating companies relating to health. She sees opportunities to disrupt healthcare through the revolutions biodata can bring about in diagnostics. “Diagnostics have a shorter approval process than drug development,” she explained. “But it can take longer to make money.” For her, the key requirements are that any new diagnostic technique must be fundamentally useful and fit easily into existing pathways. For a new diagnostic to be successful, the results generated should be clearly actionable and should not disrupt income coming from other routes. “It’s important to understand your stakeholders, the market and their behaviours,” she said. “Biodata is hugely enabling and exciting but the pathway to generating income is very challenging and varies every time.”

Liberty Foreman, CEO of BeamLine Diagnostics, co-founded the company in 2015 with Katherine Willetts, while still in the final stages of her PhD. Their aim is to bring lab research to the hospital clinic, to provide simple point of care solutions for diseases such as cancer. They are developing a biopsy triaging system that quickly identifies healthy and benign tissue specimens, so that they can be removed from the diagnosis pathway early on. “This technique is not going to unseat pathologists… for now,” she assured us. “But more than 90% of pathology samples are in fact healthy. We can scan these in 15 seconds and take them out of the pathway. This reduces pathologists’ workload by 50% and ultimately could speed up the time to diagnosis.”

So what hints and tips do these experienced disrupters of healthcare have to offer us? Jo Pisani at PwC led a Q&A with the audience. Her first question was to ask what the panellists would tell their younger selves. The general consensus was that interdisciplinary work is a great place to start. “I have made a career out of bringing different disciplines together!” said Banner.

Petris advised us not to worry about having a full career path mapped out when you leave university. “Having a direction of travel is good enough!” she said. For Foreman, the key piece of advice is to trust your gut. “I spent a long time trying to balance loads of conflicting advice. Most of all, don’t rely on good faith. Get the contract!” she warned.

So what do the panellists feel it takes to make a success out of biodata-based businesses?

Fiona Nielsen, CEO and Founder of Repositive, which provides a global exchange for data for drug research, described the challenges of finding the right market. “We needed to find investors who knew about both the life sciences and the business-to-business market. This turned out be a very small number!” For her, this was similar to the early days of building internet businesses. “You need a tech savvy customer base to become established before you can get off the ground.” Petris agreed. “Investors can become pretty silo-ed. If your business straddles more than one, you can struggle. You could see this as a failure of the market. Or perhaps you are just not meeting the utility bar to improve on what’s already available!”

For Foreman, it’s about finding the right story to tell about your product, to make it fit with the investor’s priorities and show how it will benefit them. This can help to offset any lack of investors that are already familiar with the market you are trying to break into.

And what about the team that makes it all happen? Is there something special about the staff in a small start-up business?

Foreman believes it’s better to hire people who work together well rather than focus on recruiting high achievers. “I have found that approach to be more successful than just hiring a bunch of supersmart people,” she admitted. Also, the speed the company grows is important. “In the US, there can be a rush to market, triggered by high funding levels. Sometimes the product, as well as the team dynamic, really benefits from a more organic growth process,” said Foreman.

BeamLine Diagnostics has tackled the hiring challenge by offering great work-life balance options for their teams, and responding positively to new working practices. “We have designers who are working 100% flexibly and remotely,” revealed Foreman. “The improved work-life balance attracts people, even if the salary we can offer is slightly lower and the long term career pathways might not be there yet.” This fits with the statistics that show that a higher percentage of disabled people work for SMEs rather than large businesses, perhaps due to the increased flexibility they can offer compared to large companies.

Petris in her turn put out a plea for more bioinformaticians and immunologists.  “They are like gold dust!” she said. Great news for new biosciences graduates, who can sometimes get the message that jobs in this area are similarly rare and can be put off right at the start of their careers.

And how does the panel see the future?

In short – bright! Biodata is a growth area and has huge potential to change the way we access healthcare and receive diagnosis and treatment. There are important issues to address along the way, however. It is tempting to think that because younger people share more online, they will be less concerned about their data. Banner pointed out that in fact, research shows that younger people want to be asked permission more than older generations when it comes to using their data.

Trust, collaboration and communication are central for moving forwards positively, so that patients feel that they are part of the journey, not an exploited resource. BioBeat18 shows how events such as this can help to realise the full potential that biodata has to offer.

Confessions and Cyberbullying: Day two at the STEMM Equality Event, Amsterdam

The second day of the STEMM Equality Event in Amsterdam started with a confession. Not about overindulgence on the stroopwafels or jeneva the day before, but from Prof Curt Rice of Norway’s Committee on Gender Balance and Diversity and Research (KIF) with his talk: ‘Confessions of a sexist man – a review of research and evidence based arguments’.

“Evidence shows that we are incapable of ignoring the perceived sex of the person in front of us for interview,” said Rice. “Without research into what appears to be ‘best practice’, we don’t know why it works or doesn’t. We need evidence to build policy from practice.”

We can build evidence by analysing real life data or by doing simulations, for example the Hays study in 2015. Hays sent out identical mock CVs to hiring managers at real companies, but the CVs with male names were judged to be more technically competent than the identical CVs with a female name at the top. “Evidence also shows that quotas can raise the quality of hires,” asserted Rice. The 2012 study by Balafoutas and Sutter showed that affirmative action attracts high quality women applicants. “Quotas change the quality of the application pool for both women and men,” explained Rice. “You’re not hiring someone who wouldn’t otherwise have got the job, you are hiring someone who wouldn’t have applied in the first place. Mediocre men are less likely to apply if there are stated quotas.”

With the recent announcement of the first female winner of the Nobel Physics Prize for 55 years, Rice also mentioned the gender skew in academic prizes. “Committees often search for nominees among previous prize winners. Once the under-representation of women in the prize lists starts, it snowballs right up to the Nobels.” He feels that younger researchers may be less engaged in gender equality because they want to be judged purely on their merits. “Unfortunately, the system is still biased,” he states wryly. Women sometimes feel that they cannot accept women-only prizes – but the prize money attached comes with prestige and universities should recognise that. Any prize may lead to recognition in the future, because that’s how the system currently works.

Bias against women doesn’t just lead to missed prize opportunities of course. Saniye Gulser Corat, Director of the Division for Gender Equality at UNESCO explained that 250 million fewer women are online worldwide, with only 1 in 7 women in low or medium income countries having internet access. “This is the third most serious issue for women after poverty and violence,” she warned. “Women are denied access to knowledge and knowledge is power.” For her, the problems with under-representation of women go beyond how the technology is used, to include the development of the technology itself. With technology increasingly shaping the world around us, women are alarmingly absent from this process. For example, some of the female voices used for AI devices perpetuate myths of servile, tolerant women who don’t answer back, even to sexual or abusive comments from AI users. “We need more women in tech developing AI,” urged Gulser Corat. “Stereotypes are so important – 97% of girls don’t think computing is for them. Cyber violence is pervasive across social media, including threats, bullying and incitement to suicide. Impunity and anonymity encourage violence and it spreads as fast as the technology itself spreads.”

So how do we move forwards to continue to reduce the under-representation of women in STEMM careers? Andrew Woodward of Edith Cowan University updated us on the impact that Athena SWAN is having in Australia, encouraging universities to face up to their challenges. “We need white males to be part of the solution, because they benefit substantially from inequality, directly or indirectly. Privilege is taken for granted,” said Woodward.

He explained that some colleagues are afraid to speak out because of what other colleagues may say. He argues that finding good male advocates is less about whether they are in favour or not of addressing bias, because even men with positive attitudes are less likely to participate in gender equality initiatives than women. His suggested solution is to actively invite men to participate and communicate how it affects them, to get over the self perception that they are not qualified to speak on this issue. “At the end of the day, gender equality is a business issue, not a women’s issue. You need to actually make changes and educate on leading that change,” he asserts. The Diversity Council of Australia published a list of 10 principles for effectively engaging men on gender equality. In practice, you need to engage with men at all levels, not just at the top. Get males to talk to males on why gender equality is important to them, to the community and to the organisation. “It’s true that men and women get different responses when they speak up for inequality – men can be seen as heroic, while women may be seen as nagging or disruptive.”

Claudine Hermann from the European Platform of Women Scientists (EPWS) looked at the impact of culture on women scientists across Europe. There can be huge variations between European countries in the cultural expectations of women when it comes to balancing family and the workplace. The availability of creches and kindergardens can fluctuate from country to country, as do the expectations of researchers to move after their PhD. “Not every European country actually expects a new PhD to move abroad as a matter of course,” said Hermann. There is no fixed point in the career path where intervention would be completely effective at fixing the ‘leaky pipeline’. Improvements are needed for female scientists at every career stage. The focus of EC funding programmes designed to deliver these necessary improvements has changed over the years – from raising awareness of gender inequality, to ‘fixing’ the women, to the current focus on ‘fixing’ the system.

One such EC-funded project is EQUAL-IST. Maria Sangiuliano explained that ICT is not so much a leaky pipeline when it comes to gender balance, but a dry pipeline. “There are no scissor diagrams for ICT, we just have 2 parallel lines with women stuck at the bottom!” she said. In the best traditions of ICT, EQUAL-IST decided to crowdsource some ideas, which you can find at crowdequality.eu, as well as a toolkit at www.equalist.dais.unive.it. “The big weak point for ICT is that the gender dimension in research is rarely addressed – ICT is traditionally seen as ‘gender neutral’,” opined Sangiuliano. And yet, as we heard from Saniye Gulser Corat, the absence of women from tech teams can lead to consequences ranging from the ridiculous (voice activated garage doors that only respond to the male voice) to the tragic, with cyber bullying and violence rife and the effective exclusion of women from online spaces.

Food for thought indeed.

Women in the tech sector: education, company culture and business benefits

The Glaziers Hall nestles in the heart of Dickensian London, in the shadow of London Bridge and the ‘Nancy Steps’ of Oliver Twist fame. It is also home to the Worshipful Company of Launderers, whose arms bear the unusual but striking image of two women standing either side of a mangle. This somewhat retro setting was the scene for a thoroughly modern event on 9 May 2017 exploring the education, company culture and business benefits of women in tech.

Dr Jan Peters of Katalytik welcomed a well-packed hall of predominantly female delegates and set the scene. In tech, the numbers of women are starting to approach the ‘critical mass’ figure of 25-30% but over half of employers struggle to fill digital job vacancies. According to Hema Marshal of Cisco UK, we will need a million new recruits into the tech workforce by 2023. Many people who end up in tech say they ‘fell into it’ as a career. Marshall proposes that we improve this random walk into tech by reaching out to women who are not in education, working or training, the so-called ‘NEETS’.

The business case for gender equality

Susan Bowen, Vice President EMEA at CogecoPeer1 told us that “Facts and data set you free.” She made a strong commercial case for gender equality with what she called “some cold hard facts.” Moving to an office evenly split along gender lines could increase revenue by 41%; PLCs with male-only executive directors missed out on £430bn of investment and companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 15% more likely to have financial returns above industry medians. Chilling stats indeed.

It’s clear that there is a strong business (and moral) case to bring more women into tech. However, at a time when 300,000 more women than men are in higher education and are 35% more likely to go to university, only 4% of software engineers are women. Not great news as we move to an increasingly digital society.

Tech savvy doesn’t just mean coding at midnight in your pyjamas (any more!). The digital economy needs expertise in all areas – law, HR, marketing, fashion and many more. As Bowen says, “We need to embrace everyone, from geek to sass!”

Tackling the image problem

Anyone who has watched the IT Crowd will understand why the tech industry has a chronic image problem. CHILDWISE has conducted research on how to make working in tech more appealing to young women. Setting up resource portals for teachers to engage different age groups can help, as well as ambassador programmes, using real life applications, visits and career mentoring. You can’t just attack the problem in one easy hit either – girls need to hear about tech and STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Medicine) as viable career options throughout their time in education.

Sheridan Ash of PwC told us that only 3% of female students in the UK today cite tech as their first choice of career. This presents a huge risk that women will simply not be sitting round the table to develop our tech future. (In fact only 15% of male students cite tech as their first option either, so tech’s image problem is a worryingly ubiquitous issue). The top three reasons for women to go into a career are to make a positive impact, achieve a good work-life balance and oh, change the world. No-one in the room saw any conflict between these aims and a career in tech – so what can companies do to draw more women in and support them once they are on board?

The perfect power of imperfect role models

Strong role models emerged as one of the key factors in tempting women into tech. In all, 88% of graduates in a PwC survey couldn’t name any female tech role models, but could name several men – you can’t be what you can’t see. Next Tech Girl’s ‘wall of inspiration’ is an excellent example of the power of role models, as is dunnhumby’s Your Life. Mivy James, Head of Consulting and Enterprise Architect at BAE Systems, a role model if ever there was one, spoke about gender stereotypes at work and the high drop-out rate in women’s early STEM careers. This can be due to sideways steps into related but non-technical roles. She puts some of this down to ‘benevolent sexism’ – for example, “You’re better at communication, why not organise this event? Maybe I won’t offer to send you on this travel when I know that you have family at home”, and so on. Women get sidelined from technical roles at exactly the point where they should be nurtured. Women can also suffer disproportionately from ‘imposter syndrome’ and are reluctant to step forward as role models. Being an imperfect role model has its own power of course – if you got to where you are, despite taking a roundabout route, why not me?

What can employers do?

The discussion moved on to some practical solutions for making the tech workplace more welcoming to women. Cisco offer five ‘giving back’ days, on top of holiday entitlement, to staff who want to engage in outreach as ambassadors and bring more talented youngsters into the industry. Tech companies are starting to offer returnship programmes for those coming back to the workplace after long term maternity breaks or parental leave (which increasingly includes men).

Zara Farrar of Government Digital Service described their recent public commitment to improving the gender balance at tech events. They have announced that they will not send their staff to an event that does not demonstrate commitment to gender balance, for example by including at least one woman (who is not the chair) in every panel. They have promised to send as many women as men to speak at events where possible and have asked their senior men to step back in favour of women in their team. This has increased their percentage of female speakers from 25% to 42%.

Training is also key according to Farrar, with all recruitment panels being trained in unconscious bias. They have put in place reverse mentoring – matching junior staff with senior staff so they understand what it’s like to work in the organisation. They are actively working to tackle incidences of micro aggression and sexism towards women.

Many in the room agreed that more can still be done by employers, educators, careers advisors and industry to bring greater numbers of girls and women into tech and support them at the various stages of their careers. With an ever-tightening squeeze on the tech talent pool, making sure that no-one is left behind has never been more important.