Invisible women

One of our favorite podcasts in casa di Ziggy, is 99% Invisible and last week they did not disappoint. What IS disappointing (and frankly enraging), is 50% of the population being systematically excluded from all planning, data and design because ‘male’ is the implicitely assumed default.

In the linked episide, Caroline Criado Perez, author of “Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men”, explains the various areas where this is still happening and the impact it has on daily life. It’s baffling how far this reaches. For example, the bit about heart attack symptoms & medicine made me think about a video of Medlife Crisis about the same subject. Here, a cardiologist and researcher (a man) mentions how women are dangerously underrepresented in medical trials, which skews the data.

I’m coming across more and more articles talking about these biases. So much so that you could build a whole site dedicated to it. Or a category/thread in this blog. One of these days I’ll have to write a bit about female painters, for example, in impressionism. Years ago I saw some powerful work in an exhibition in Frankfurt and it was shocking that I’d never even heard of these artists. Especially since I studied at an actual art academy. And the work was better than half the shit I’d seen there.