Source of book: Borrowed from the
library
This book is in many ways really
depressing. And it is particularly difficult to read in our current time, when
the misogynist class controls our government, and is actively working to roll
back human and civil rights for women, erase them from positions of power and
influence, and reverse the progress that has been made in the collection of
useful data necessary to better their lives. The fact that I - and my children
- have to live through this stupid, evil time, is infuriating.
And I am a white cishet male. I
can’t imagine how horrifying this is for women. The best I can do is to try to
be a better male human than we males have all too often been and continue to
be.
Anyway, the book focuses on the
issue of data. In order to make informed decisions about a great many things,
we need good data.
The problem is, we have, for most
of the scientific era, treated males as the default human. Which means that we
work off of data about males, ignoring the often very different effects on
women. This book works through a number of particular areas that this applies,
from bathroom planning to workplace issues, to the design of everything from
protective equipment to vehicles to bus routes, to medicine and drugs, to how
we calculate GDP, to disaster response. And a bunch more.
Of necessity, the book looks a lot
at sexism generally and violence against women, because these are tied up with
the general problem of seeing males as the human default, and women as
"aberrant" humans, a departure from the norm.
A truly just - and indeed a better
world for all - requires that we not view half of the human population as
“aberrant” and instead involve women fully in the decisions made in all areas
of life.
To try to get into all of the
details is beyond the scope of this post. What I will note is that the book is
well supported by evidence - and by the lack of evidence - the lack of data -
that is a significant hindrance to doing better. There are a number of passages
that are worth highlighting, with the understanding that the entire context is
needed in many cases to understand the full scope of the problem and the needed
solutions.
I will start with the Simone
de Beauvoir quote that the author uses as the introduction.
“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 preface to the book highlights
some of the themes of the book.
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.
As the author notes, men do not
have female bodies, do a fraction of the unpaid work women do, and do not
generally experience the same kind of gendered violence women do. Thus, it is
easy to forget and ignore.
The author also notes that the
issue isn’t so much sex - but gender.
But although I talk about both sex and gender throughout, I
use gender gap as an overarching term because sex is not the reason
women are excluded from data. Gender is. In naming the phenomenon that is
causing so much damage to so many women’s lives, I want to be clear about the
root cause and, contrary to many claims you will read in these pages, the
female body is not the problem. The problem is the social meaning that we
ascribe to that body, and a socially determined failure to account for
it.
It is truly bizarre how much the
male is considered the “default” human. In one relatively mundane example,
women use emojis at higher rates than men, specific emojis for activities and
occupations have almost exclusively been male in presentation unless designated
female. This (finally!) changed in 2016, when Unicode chose to append gender
markers to all emojis that depicted humans. The code is now for “male” and
“female” people, not “human” as male.
The thing is, most of us tend to
do this subconsciously. The book spends a good bit of time looking at the
research that most people - women included - tend to gender things, and to
default to male.
A couple of other examples of the
bias: sports reporters regularly saying a man had accomplished some feat “for
the first time,” failing to remember that a woman had done it already more than
once. (Same for women’s teams - the USWNT has won a whole bunch of World Cup
titles, while the men’s team hasn’t.)
Second, the fact that it took
until the 13th incarnation before Doctor Who became a woman. (For what it’s
worth, I love Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor - she captures the essence of the
character.) And, naturally, a bunch of people lost their shit about it.
The book also mentions the way
that male children tend to prefer male protagonists and be uninterested in
female ones, while female children enjoy protagonists of either gender. There
is certainly enough evidence of this, but I will note that I, for one, enjoyed
and continue to enjoy female protagonists. From Nancy Drew to Anne of Green
Gables, to Harriet the Spy, I actually was drawn to strong female characters,
and sought out books about them. Perhaps that was a foreshadowing of my adult
reading and blogging habits.
Perhaps most socially damaging,
however, is the way that male identity politics (like white identity politics)
aren’t recognized and correctly described.
Because this perspective is not articulated as white and male
(because it doesn’t need to be), because it is the norm, it is presumed not to
be subjective. It is presumed to be objective. Universal even. This presumption
is unsound. The truth is that white and male is just as much an identity as
black and female.
And yes, white male identity
politics is what got Trump elected, and we need to be clear about that.
I found the chapter on
infrastructure to be fascinating. For a variety of reasons, my own marriage has
been far more egalitarian than most - as of right now, my wife out-earns me,
and works longer hours, so I have had to take more of a role in child transport
and other unpaid labor than most men ever experience.
Thus, the idea of trip-linking, of
the question of trips that are not just home-to-work and back, is quite
familiar.
The book talks about a case in
Sweden, where the snow-clearing schedule was unconsciously biased toward men.
Routes to and from work were cleared first, and pedestrian and public transit
were given last priority.
However, when the city of Karlskoga decided to prioritize the
kinds of travel women did - and get the snow and ice off of pedestrian routes
and public transit - they found something curious. Not only did it not cost
more, it ended up saving significant money. Why? Because injuries to
pedestrians - a majority of whom were women - went down dramatically, thus
saving hospital costs.
The book is full of stuff like
this - there are significant cost savings, and also potential opportunities for
profit that are left on the table simply because women are ignored.
Things like infrastructure and
design seem like low-hanging fruit, and something that we really should be
smart enough to fix. But the issue of design when it comes to sexual assault is
a lot more depressing. It is frustrating that we even have to do this. But we
do.
Urban planning that fails to account for women’s risk of
being sexually assaulted is a clear violation of women’s equal right to public
spaces - and inadequate sanitary provision is only one of the many ways
planners exclude women with this kind of gender-insensitive design.
One of the most interesting
stories in the book is of Iceland’s gender strike in 1975. A full 90 percent of
the female population took place, and it resulted in wholesale legal change in
that country - the year I was born! The US, unfortunately, remains hidebound
and retrogressive.
In any case, Iceland has been
since then, one of the the best - even the best - country in which to be a
“working woman.” But even this term is problematic.
There is no such thing as a woman who doesn’t work. There is
only a woman who isn’t paid for her work.
(This is only mostly true, of
course: the women married to billionaires do not work. Most rich women do not
work. Women who enslaved black people mostly did not work either. But for the
overwhelming majority of women, they do in fact work, whether or not they are
paid.)
[H]usbands create an extra seven hours of housework a week
for women. An Australian study similarly found that housework time is most
equal by gender for single men and women; when women start to cohabit, ‘their
housework time goes up while men’s goes down, regardless of their employment
status.’
This assumption that women will
take care of the household goes along with another assumption.
The implicit bias is clear: expense codes are based on the
assumption that the employee has a wife at home taking care of the home and the
kids. This work doesn’t need paying for, because it’s women’s work, and women
don’t get paid for it. Bovasso sums it up: ‘You can get $30 for takeout if you
work late (because your wife isn’t there to cook you dinner) or $30 for Scotch
if you want to drink your face off, but you can’t get $30 for a sitter (because
your wife is at home with the kids).’
Of course, this isn’t just an
unconscious bias. In the case of my parents, they were clear that they would
babysit if we wanted to go to something like a marriage retreat, but NEVER for
something that enabled my wife to work.
The chapter on the myth of
meritocracy is also excellent.
The fact that meritocracy is a myth is not a popular one.
Around the industrialized world, people believe that not only is meritocracy
the way things should work, it’s the way things do work. Despite
evidence suggesting that, if anything, the US is less meritocratic than
other industrialized countries, Americans in particular hold on to meritocracy
as an article of faith, and employment and promotion strategies over the past
few decades have been designed as if meritocracy is a reality.
In the context of this book, it is
quite evident that this belief leads to discrimination against women. (And also
minorities, although that isn’t specifically addressed in the book.)
As a musician, I am gratified that
the author mentions the use of blind auditions, and the revolutionary effect
this has had on the composition of orchestras. This is one area of progress,
but in many other industries, there is no equivalent of a blind audition.
Even in education, the belief in
the superiority of males persists. I won’t reproduce the entire discussion of
how children draw scientists when asked to - whether that person is male or
female - but there is a significant gender gap.
Between 1985-2016, the average percentage of female
scientists drawn by girls rose from 33% to 58%. The respective figures for boys
were 2.4% and 13%. This discrepancy may shed some light on the finding of a
2016 study which found that while female students ranked their peers according
to actual ability, male biology students consistently ranked their fellow male
students as more intelligent than better-performing female students. Brilliancy
bias is a hell of a drug.
Furthermore, the proposed “cure”
for gender bias is all too often to demand that women become more like
men.
It’s not clear whether Google didn’t have or didn’t care
about the data on the cultural expectations that are imposed on women, but
either way, their solution was not to fix the male-biased system: it was to fix
the women.
In general, workplace issues
continue to be biased in favor of men, including workplace safety.
While serious injuries at work have been decreasing for men,
there is evidence that they have been increasing among women. The rise in
serious injuries among female workers is linked to the gender data gap: with
occupational research traditionally having been focused on male-dominated
industries, our knowledge of how to prevent injuries in women is patchy to say
the least. We know all about heavy lifting in construction - what the weight
limits should be, how it can be done safely. But when it comes to heavy lifting
in care work, well, that’s just women’s work, and who needs training for
that?
And again, the “solution” to
differences in bodies seems always to be “why can’t a woman be more like a
man?”
It’s a common complaint - and one
for which the common solution is to fix the women. This is unsurprising in a
world where what is male is seen as universal and what is female is seen as
‘atypical’.
In another chapter, the book looks
at agriculture and gender. There is a case where the question of what made a
particular variety of crop “improved” was decided by males. Which led to the
decision that increased crop yields were the most important goal. And yet, the
new seeds were a failure - households didn’t adopt them.
The decision to talk only to the men was bizarre. For all the
gaps in our data we can at least say that women do a fair amount of farming:
79% of economically active women in the least developed countries, and 48% of
economically active women in the world, report agriculture as their primary
economic activity. And the female farmers in this area didn’t see yields as the
most important thing. They cared about other factors like how much land
preparation and weeding these crops required, because these are female jobs.
And they cared about how long, ultimately, the crops would take to cook
(another female job). The new, high-yield varieties increased the time the
women had to spend on these other tasks, and so, unsurprisingly, they did not
adopt these crops.
Again, the problem isn’t women -
it is the system.
Here is another one: efficient
cookstoves. A serious problem in the third world is indoor air pollution from
wood-fired stoves. Replacing them with less polluting alternatives has proven
difficult. Why? Because the new stoves require longer cooking times, and also
require constant monitoring rather than multitasking.
But the recommendation wasn’t to
address these shortcomings. Instead, the repeated recommendation was to fix the
women, not the stoves. Sigh.
There is an entire chapter on
“one-size-fits-all.” This one too was fascinating to me. I am a short guy, and
I have small hands. As in, a majority of the women in the string section of our
orchestra have larger hands. This has meant some challenges in my career as a
violinist and violist, and some differences in how I approach technical
challenges.
But this is a far larger problem
than string instruments, which are designed mostly around acoustics rather than
ergonomics. In fact, pretty much everything in our world is designed around the
male body.
Another story from this chapter:
speech recognition.
It is well known that speech
recognition technology is lousy and deciphering female speech. (And again, the
“solution” is to fix the women - teach them how to talk to the machine.) But
the problem isn’t women - it is the software. In reality, studies have shown
that women, on average, have significantly higher speech intelligibility. At
least when speaking with humans. They are more precise, more accurate, more
understandable. The problem is that the machines have been trained on men, not
women.
The chapters on medicine are
excellent. My wife is a nurse, and throughout her career, she has been a part
of the collection of data on outcomes, and she has talked to me a lot about the
gaps, particularly when it comes to pregnant women.
As the author puts it, we should
be routinely and systematically tracking, recording, and collating pregnant
women’s outcomes.
And indeed, we should be tracking
outcomes by gender for all things medical. Female bodies do not react exactly
the same way as male bodies, and we need to be able to adjust treatments based
on actual results.
I’ll briefly mention the chapter
on unpaid household work. This too is something I have come to be a lot more
aware of since having children. My wife and I have always had a non-traditional
split when it comes to unpaid labor - I have cooked since I was a child, and
have always done my own laundry and ironing, as well as a portion of household
labor. We split childcare for many years - these days, with most of them
adults, they take care of themselves.
It is rather stupid that we do not
count unpaid labor as part of GDP. Just because money doesn’t change hands
doesn’t mean it is worthless. Quite the contrary. The unpaid labor - cooking,
cleaning, childcare - is actually the most important part of the
economy, and everything else rests on it.
Changing our counting to account
for this would - and should - lead to significant changes to priorities for
government spending.
A more dramatic government intervention than the introduction
of paid parental leave would be to invest in social infrastructure. The term
infrastructure is generally understood to mean the physical structures that
underpin the functioning of a modern society: roads, railways, water pipes,
power supplies. It doesn’t tend to include the public services that similarly
underpin the functioning of a modern society like child and elder care.
And also this:
We like to think that the unpaid work women do is just about
individual women caring for their individual family members to their own
individual benefit. It isn’t. Women’s unpaid work is work that society depends
on, and it is work from which society as a whole benefits. When the government
cuts public services that we all pay for with our taxes, demand for those
services doesn’t suddenly cease. The work is simply transferred onto women,
with all the attendant negative impacts on female paid labour-participation
rates, and GDP. And so the unpaid work that women do isn’t simply a matter of
‘choice’. It is built into the system we have created - and could just as
easily be built out of it. We just need the will to start collecting the data,
and then designing our economy around reality rather than a male-biased
confection.
The chapter on measuring poverty
is also interesting. Those of us who grew up in a household where money was
treated as belonging to both spouses tend to have blind spots. I was disabused
of this notion early in my legal career, as I saw first-hand how money was
often used as a means of control. Here again, our statistics are
problematic.
Gendered poverty is currently determined by assessing the
relative poverty of households where a man controls the resources (male-headed
household) versus households where a woman controls the resources
(female-headed household). There are two assumptions being made here. First,
that household resources are shared equally between household members, with all
household members enjoying the same standard of living. And second, that there
is no difference between the sexes when it comes to how they allocate resources
within their households. Both assumptions are shaky to say the least.
Since both my parents were and are
frugal and generous with each other, the assumptions held true in my family.
But not so much in many other households.
In this chapter, I will note one
significant flaw in the reasoning. When it comes to the discussion of United
States tax policy, I think the author gets it wrong. (She is British, so her
analysis of other countries may be fine.) Here in the US, withholding is
complicated, and has everything to do with what box people check. It isn’t
automatic that the lower earner is withheld at the higher marginal rate. In
fact, for a lot of people in my experience, the opposite is true. There are a
lot of things wrong with US tax policy - I could write dozens of posts about
that - but this isn’t what she claims it is.
On the other hand, she nails it
when it comes to supply-side economics, and the shift in tax policy since the
early 1980s.
The tax system’s woman problem extends beyond the zombie
assumption that household resources are allocated equally between the sexes: it
encompasses the theory of taxation itself - at least in its current form. Since
the 1980s, governments around the world have been less interested in taxes as a
means to redistribute resources, seeing tax more as a potential retardant to
growth that must be contained. The result has been lower taxes on capital,
corporations, and high-income earners, and an increase in loopholes and
incentives so that multinational corporations and the super-rich can avoid and
evade tax.
We need to return to the idea of
taxation not as a hindrance, but as a means to accomplish necessary social
goals: the funding of infrastructure, and redistribution of the ill-gotten
gains of the billionaire class at the expense of the rest of us.
There are a few chapters on the
issue of equality in society, and this resonates a lot for me. Here is one
fascinating insight:
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 organizational structures. But the problem with the
absence of a formal hierarchy is that it doesn’t actually result in an absence
of 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.
I also want to mention one passage
from the chapter on disaster response. In all too many cases, disaster relief
defaults to the male perspective, often ignoring female needs altogether.
In what has to be the most
ludicrous example, in a rebuilding of a region of India after a catastrophic
earthquake, homes were provided….but without kitchens. I mean, seriously? This
is what you get when you have highly gendered labor division, and make decisions
without even consulting one gender.
I’ll end with a thought from the
afterword:
When we exclude half of humanity from the production of
knowledge, we lose out on potentially transformative insights.
This is where the vicious sexism
of MAGA and right-wing political movements around the world turn out to be
counterproductive. When women are excluded, everyone suffers. When women are
fully included, everyone benefits.
This book is depressing at times,
but it also highlights a vision for a more positive future, if we should choose
to make it come to pass. Women are half the world, and the more we do to make
the world better for them, the better it will be for all of us.
