Caroline Criado Perez

The female-specific concerns that men fail to factor in cover a wide variety of areas, but as you read you will notice that three themes crop up again and again: the female body, women’s unpaid care burden, and male violence against women.

Caroline Criado Perez in Invisible Women

It has become fashionable for modern workplaces to relax what are often seen as outmoded relics of a less egalitarian age: out with stuffy hierarchies, in with flat organisational structures. But the problem with the absence of a formal hierarchy is that it doesn’t actually result in an absence of a hierarchy altogether. It just means that the unspoken, implicit, profoundly non-egalitarian structure reasserts itself, with white men at the top and the rest of us fighting for a piece of the small space left for everyone else. Group-discussion approaches like brainstorming, explains female leadership trainer Gayna Williams, are ‘well known to be loaded with challenges for diverse representation’, because already-dominant voices dominate.78 But simple adjustments like monitoring interruptions79 and more formally allocating a set amount of time for each person to speak have both been shown to attenuate male dominance of debates. This is in fact what Glen Mazarra, a showrunner at FX TV drama The Shield, did when he noticed that female writers weren’t speaking up in the writer’s room – or that when they did, they were interrupted and their ideas overtaken. He instituted a no-interruption policy while writers (male or female) were pitching. It worked – and, he says, ‘it made the entire team more effective’.80

Caroline Criado Perez in Invisible Women

When author and gamer Jordan Belamire tried the VR game QuiVr in multiplayer mode, she was sexually assaulted by another user called BigBro4 42.40 ‘Virtual’ makes it sound like it isn’t real – but it felt real to Belamire. And no wonder. VR is meant to feel real, and it can be so successful at tricking your brain that it is being explored as a treatment for PTSD, phobias, even phantom-limb syndrome.41 To be fair to the male designers of QuiVr, they had an excellent and proactive response to Belamire’s blog.42 They immediately redesigned their ‘Personal Bubble’ setting (in which other player’s hands disappear if they come close to your face) to cover the entire body and so make such groping impossible. But as they themselves noted, while they had thought ‘of the possibility of some silly person trying to block your view with their hands and ruining the game’, they hadn’t thought of extending the fading function to the rest of the body. How, they asked, ‘could we have overlooked something so obvious?’ Fairly simply, to be honest. Henry Jackson and Jonathan Schenker are clearly well-meaning men who don’t intend to shut women out. But it’s Sergey Brin and the pregnancy parking all over again: even the best of men can’t know what it’s like to go through the world as a person with a body which some other people treat as an access-all-areas amusement arcade. This just isn’t something that Jackson and Schenker have to face on a regular basis, and therefore it really isn’t all that surprising that they missed ‘something so obvious’.

Caroline Criado Perez in Invisible Women

The finding that engaging in ‘diversity-valuing behavior’ reminds people that a woman is in fact a woman perhaps explains how Sanders came to think that all Clinton said was ‘vote for me, I’m a woman’ – because the data shows that she certainly didn’t. A word-frequency analysis of her speeches by Vox journalist David Roberts revealed that Clinton ‘mostly talked about workers, jobs, education and the economy, exactly the things she was berated for neglecting. She mentioned jobs almost 600 times, racism, women’s rights and abortion a few dozen times each.’ But, pointed out US writer Rebecca Solnit in her London Review of Books piece on the election, ‘she was assumed to be talking about her gender all the time, though it was everyone else who couldn’t shut up about it’.

Caroline Criado Perez in Invisible Women

When planners fail to account for gender, public spaces become male spaces by default.

Caroline Criado Perez in Invisible Women