(by Caroline Criado Perez)<\/p>\n
As Criado Perez notes in her Preface, far too often there is an assumption that when we talk about people, we’re talking about men. As she puts it: “men go without saying, and women don’t get said at all.” And in a world where everything is increasingly data-driven, this is increasingly problematic: as she puts it, “when your big data is corrupted by big silences, the truths you get are half-truths, at best.” This book is an exploration of “the gender data gap” and the problems it causes in various areas of life, from how everything from cars to PPE are designed for men’s bodies to how women’s health issues are often misdiagnosed or ignored. (I knew some of this, like how women’s reports of pain aren’t taken as seriously as men’s reports of pain—I think about that whenever I remember my experience of feeling very dismissed when I went to the ER after I dislocated my elbow, and very validated after my excellent sports medicine doctor sent me for an MRI and explained the results to me. But I definitely learned things from this book—like how women are underdiagnosed with TB, in part because some screening tests work better for men.) <\/p>\n
Some chapters of this book were definitely more engaging to me than others—the part about GDP and the part about female politicians were a bit of a slog for me—but I am glad that nonfiction book club prompted me to finally read this, after having vaguely intended to for years. The “Daily Life” part of the book was definitely my favorite: there were so many interesting things in it about urban planning, e.g. about how some places are consciously trying to design recreational spaces so that girls will use them, or about how transit planning that assumes a morning commute and an evening commute fails to account for the shorter “chained trips” that people with childcare or eldercare responsibilities (who are more likely to be women) are more likely to take (and how not having free transfers e.g. from one bus line to another then disproportionately impacts women). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(by Caroline Criado Perez) As Criado Perez notes in her Preface, far too often there is an assumption that when we talk about people, we’re talking about men. As she puts it: “men go without saying, and women don’t get said at all.” And in a world where everything is increasingly data-driven, this is increasingly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14529"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14537,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14529\/revisions\/14537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}