Who is the reigning Olympic 100m champion? I suspect that readers will know the answer immediately, even instinctively. There is, though, a second correct answer to this question – Elaine Thompson. This is more than just a snarky bit of pedantry. A question as simple as the one I posed above should obviously scream ‘two answers’ – we know, of course, that there is a separate women’s 100m event. But somehow, for whatever reason, it is even more obvious to our subconscious that the answer I was after is the male one.
This is a textbook, and trivial, case of ‘default male’. Anatomy textbooks, generic plural French nouns, pre-2011 NIV Bible translations, and a raft of other contexts inbuild the assumption that something of unspecified gender is male. Perhaps even the following list conjures up unwitting images of men in your mind as you read it: police officer, pianist, software engineer, headteacher, bartender…
Caroline Criado Perez is not, of course, the first to point out this phenomenon, in her book Invisible Women (Chatto and Windus, 2019) – it begins with a salute to the classic study of female ‘otherness’, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. She may, however, be the first to present the thesis with such a wide and convincing array of data. In a diverse array of examples, she highlights the ‘gender data gap’ across phenomena from snow clearing to medical diagnosis to the contents of aid packages. Some of the cases she documents arise from the lack of female representation – lack of appropriate parking for pregnant women, forgetting to build kitchens in disaster relief housing (yes, really), designing transport systems for commuters rather than the diverse array of commuters, carers, and errand runners that they are supposed to serve – and some from decade-long convention that treats female bodies, lifestyles, consumption choices, and so on as ‘atypical’ compared with the corresponding male cases – heart attack diagnoses, poorly fitting PPE, cars designed to protect only men from crashes (of which more later). If this sounds like a loose stereotype, that’s not how Perez comes across: her analysis of the generally higher load of caring responsibilities on women, the consequences of lower average bone density and height, and all sorts of other generalised differences between men and women, painstakingly avoids the construction of ‘ideal’ subjects of each sex. This is not a book about how women are weak, or better at caring, or more inclined to domestic labour, or anything like that. It is, instead, an examination of the consequences of our world being designed with an ideal male subject in mind. As such, Perez doesn’t come across as consumed or distorted by any agenda other than tracing out the implications of the ‘gender data gap’ which is her central analytical unit, and then challenging the legitimacy of the gap.
Particularly striking is her analysis of car crash testing dummies (hence the brilliantly witty title of this post). EU regulations require 5 kinds of tests to be performed on cars to make them safe for passengers – all are carried out on dummies with ‘male’ characteristics (being of average male height, weight, bone density, etc). It does not take a genius to work out the practical implication of this. Cars are designed to protect their drivers and passengers in accidents – provided that their bodies conform to the pattern of the male-inspired dummy. Data suggests they do not. Having lent out my copy as soon as I finished it, I don’t have the numbers immediately to hand, but, unsurprisingly considering the above, serious injury and death rates in car accidents are much higher among female drivers. Perez speculates that this is not just due to the physical characteristics of the dummies, but also the ‘atypical’ driving position assumed by many women in order comfortably to reach the pedals and wheel.
The driving force of Invisible Women is its use of data. More than 300 pages of examples across countless fields can only leave readers with the impression that the book’s conclusions are inescapable. Perhaps this makes IW sound dry or inaccessible; on the contrary, statistics are woven into a pacy and readable prose with a lack of statistical hand-waving. But IW is not for the faint-hearted – readers will surely come away with a furious zeal. You will finish this book unable to leave your home without noticing default male everywhere.
Yikeiatry 