Читать онлайн «Invisible Women»
Автор Caroline Criado Perez
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Copyright © 2019 Caroline Criado Perez
Jacket © 2019 Abrams
Published in 2019 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS.
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018936302
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2907-2
eISBN: 978-1-68335-314-0
Abrams Press® is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
ABRAMS The Art of Books
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New York, NY 10007
Contents
Part I: Daily Life
Chapter 1: Can Snow-Clearing be Sexist?
Chapter 2: Gender Neutral With Urinals
Part II: The Workplace
Chapter 3: The Long Friday
Chapter 4: The Myth of Meritocracy
Chapter 5: The Henry Higgins Effect
Chapter 6: Being Worth Less Than a Shoe
Part III: Design
Chapter 7: The Plough Hypothesis
Chapter 8: One-Size-Fits-Men
Chapter 9: A Sea of Dudes
Part IV: Going to the Doctor
Chapter 10: The Drugs Don’t Work
Chapter 11: Yentl Syndrome
Part V: Public Life
Chapter 12: A Costless Resource to Exploit
Chapter 13: From Purse to Wallet
Chapter 14: Women’s Rights are Human Rights
Part VI: When it Goes Wrong
Chapter 15: Who Will Rebuild?
Chapter 16: It’s Not the Disaster that Kills You
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
Preface
Most of recorded human history is one big data gap. Starting with the theory of Man the Hunter, the chroniclers of the past have left little space for women’s role in the evolution of humanity, whether cultural or biological. Instead, the lives of men have been taken to represent those of humans overall. When it comes to the lives of the other half of humanity, there is often nothing but silence.
And these silences are everywhere. Our entire culture is riddled with them. Films, news, literature, science, city planning, economics. The stories we tell ourselves about our past, present and future. They are all marked – disfigured – by a female-shaped ‘absent presence’.
This is the gender data gap.The gender data gap isn’t just about silence. These silences, these gaps, have consequences. They impact on women’s lives every day. The impact can be relatively minor. Shivering in offices set to a male temperature norm, for example, or struggling to reach a top shelf set at a male height norm. Irritating, certainly. Unjust, undoubtedly.
But not life-threatening. Not like crashing in a car whose safety measures don’t account for women’s measurements. Not like having your heart attack go undiagnosed because your symptoms are deemed ‘atypical’. For these women, the consequences of living in a world built around male data can be deadly.
