Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

by Caroline Criado Perez

  For some women in Britain, no maternity leave at all is already a reality, because the Pregnant Workers Directive doesn’t cover female politicians. Women in the national Parliament have access to maternity leave, but there is no provision for them to vote without turning up in person. Technically, women on maternity leave can make use of a system called ‘pairing’, where one MP is matched up with an MP who would vote in the opposite direction, and neither vote. However, in July 2018 we saw just how inadequate this solution is, when the Conservative MP Brandon Lewis, who was paired with the Lib Dem MP Jo Swinson, mysteriously ‘forgot’ he was paired when it came to two crucial Brexit votes that the government won by an extremely narrow margin.

  But bad as this is, it’s even worse in local government. Under Section 85 of the Local Government Act 1972, ‘if a councillor does not attend council for six months, they lose their position unless the authority has approved their absence’. You might hope that an approved absence would include maternity leave, but a report commissioned by women’s charity the Fawcett Society found that only twelve councils (4%) in England have a formal maternity leave policy, and although some have informal arrangements, three-quarters offer nothing at all.74 And so, as a result of policies which forget that half the population can and often do give birth, women lose their jobs.

  In 2015, councillor Charlene McLean had to stay in hospital for months after she gave birth prematurely. Despite having remained in contact with the council, and having been informed she had normal workers’ rights, when she returned to work she was told she would have to stand for re-election because she had been off for six months. Even after what happened to McLean, Newham Council did not change its rules to account for women’s bodily realities, instead simply opting to ensure that all expectant mothers received the right information about their lack of rights.75 The following year Brigid Jones, a Birmingham City councillor, was told that she would have to step down from her role as cabinet member for children’s services if she became pregnant.

  Things are worse for women in the US, which is one of only four countries in the world that doesn’t guarantee at least some paid maternity leave.76 The Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees twelve weeks of unpaid leave – but, amongst other restrictions you are eligible only if you have worked for a business with at least 50 other employees for the past twelve months.77 As a result, even unpaid leave is only available to 60% of the workforce.78 There is nothing to prevent the remaining 40% of US women being fired. And of course the number of women who can afford to take unpaid leave is lower: one in four American mothers return to work within two weeks of giving birth.

  For some US women the gaps are filled in at a state or industry level. In January 2016, President Barack Obama gave federal workers six weeks of paid care leave,79 while four states (California, Rhode Island, New York and New Jersey, along with Washington DC) now offer paid family leave, funded through employee social insurance.80 Some women are lucky enough to work at companies that offer maternity leave. But even with these gaps plugged, around 85% of US women have no form of paid leave.81

  There have been various failed attempts to address this through legislation, a recent one being Trump’s proposal in the 2018 federal budget to pay new mothers six weeks of unemployment benefit.82 This did not pass, but even if it had, the length allowed and the amount paid would not be sufficient to impact on women’s participation in the paid labour force. And this is something that the US badly needs, as, in contrast to other industrialised nations, US women’s paid labour force participation is actually decreasing – with a 2013 study finding that the lack of family-friendly policies accounts for nearly a third of the discrepancy.83

  And so the US government continues to attempt to find ways to fix this apparently intractable problem. The latest wheeze, however, provides little more than another example of how gender-blind policy can unwittingly discriminate against women.84 As I write in 2018, Republicans in Congress are getting excited about the idea of letting people collect social security benefits early to pay for maternity leave – and then delaying their retirement payments to offset the costs. It’s easy to see why the idea is attractive: it comes without a cost, at least to the government. But it is far from cost-free to women. The gender pay gap and the time women take off to care for children already results in lower social security benefits for women, a problem this policy will exacerbate.85 And given women live longer and spend more of their later years in ill health they arguably need more money for retirement, not less.86 As a result, the main impact of this policy would be to compound the problem of feminised old-age poverty.

  US universities provide another example of how gender-blind leave policies can end up discriminating against women. US academics in the tenure-track system have seven years to receive tenure after getting their first academic job or they’re fired. This system is biased against women – especially women who want to have children, in part because the years between completing a PhD and receiving tenure (thirty to forty) coincide with the years these women are most likely to try for a baby.87 The result? Married mothers with young children are 35% less likely than married fathers of young children to get tenure-track jobs,88 and among tenured faculty 70% of men are married with children compared to 44% of women.89

  Universities have done little to address this – and even those that have tried, have often done so in gender-blind ways that may end up exacerbating the problem they were trying to solve.90 In the 1990s and early 2000s, a number of US universities adopted what was intended as a family-friendly policy: parents would receive an extra year per child to earn tenure. But it isn’t gender-neutral ‘parents’ who need this extra year. It is specifically mothers. As the University of Michigan’s Alison Davis-Blake drily noted in the New York Times, ‘giving birth is not a gender-neutral event’.91 While women may be (variously) throwing up, going to the toilet every five minutes, changing nappies or plugged into their breast pump during this extra year, men get to dedicate more time to their research. So instead of giving a leg up to parents, this policy gave a leg up to men, and at women’s expense: an analysis of assistant professors hired at the top fifty US economics departments between 1985 and 2004 found that the policies ultimately led to a 22% decline in women’s chances of gaining tenure at their first job. Meanwhile men’s chances increased by 19%.92

  The analysis came in a working paper and the totality of its findings have been challenged93 – but given what we already know about the disparity between mothers and fathers gaining tenure, and given what the data tells us about who actually does the care work (not to mention the gestating-and-giving-birth-and-breast feeding work) there seems little reason not to make such policies dependent on who is actually carrying the child, and/or who the main carer is. To date, this has not happened.

  This is not to say that paternity leave is not important. It certainly is. Beyond the simple matter of fairness (fathers should have the right to be involved in their children’s lives), the data we have shows that properly paid paternity leave has a positive impact on female employment. At close to 80% by 2016, Sweden has the highest female employment figures in the EU.94 It also has one of the highest levels of paternity-leave uptake in the world, with nine out of ten fathers taking an average of three to four months’ leave.95 This compares with a more typical OECD level of one in five fathers taking any parental leave at all – falling to one in fifty in Australia, the Czech Republic and Poland.96

  This disparity is unsurprising: Sweden has one of the most generous (and, when it was introduced, innovative) paternity-leave policies in the world. Since 1995, Sweden has reserved a month of parental leave (paid at 90% of earnings) exclusively for fathers. This month cannot be transferred to the mother: the father must use this leave or the couple lose it from their overall leave allowance. In 2002, this increased to two months and in 2016 it was further increased to three months.97

  Prior to the introduction of the ‘use it or lose it’ leave for fathers, only about
6% of men in Sweden took paternity leave, despite the fact that it had been available for them since 1974. In other words, men didn’t take the leave on offer until forced to by the government. This pattern has been repeated in Iceland, where the introduction of a ‘daddy quota’ doubled the amount of leave taken by men, and in South Korea, where the number of men taking leave rose more than threefold following the introduction in 2007 of a father-specific entitlement.98 Proving, however, that no good data goes unignored, in 2015 the UK government saw fit to introduce a shared parental leave policy with no allowance reserved exclusively for men. Predictably, the take-up has been ‘woefully low’, with just one in a hundred men requesting leave in the twelve months after it was introduced.99

  The introduction of a daddy quota has not been a marked success in Japan, but this is in no small part due to a design that doesn’t account for either the gender pay gap or women’s bodily reality. While fathers have two months reserved for them out of a possible fourteen months of shared leave, after the first six months of leave, pay decreases from two-thirds of the parent’s salary to just half. Given that women need to recover from pregnancy and giving birth, and may be breastfeeding, they are most likely to take leave first, leaving the higher earner (Japanese men earn on average 27% more than Japanese women) to take the biggest salary hit.100 It is unsurprising, therefore, that only 2% of Japanese men take the months they are entitled to.101 Japan’s extreme work culture likely also plays a part here – in a country where even holidays are frowned on, fathers report being shamed and penalised at work for taking parental leave.

  It is worth persevering, however, because the benefits of policies that enshrine in law equal parental responsibility for a child that, after all, two people have created, are long-lasting. Men who take paternity leave tend to be more involved in childcare in the future102 – perhaps explaining why a 2010 Swedish study found that a mother’s future earnings increase by an average of 7% for every month of leave taken by the father.103

  Evidence-based parental-leave policies won’t fix everything, of course, because women’s unpaid workload doesn’t begin and end with newborn babies, and the traditional workplace is tailored to the life of a mythical unencumbered worker. He – and it implicitly is a he – doesn’t need to concern himself with taking care of children and elderly relatives, of cooking, of cleaning, of doctor’s appointments, and grocery shopping, and grazed knees, and bullies, and homework, and bath-time and bedtime, and starting it all again tomorrow. His life is simply and easily divided into two parts: work and leisure. But a workplace predicated on the assumption that a worker can come into work every day, at times and locations that are wholly unrelated to the location or opening hours of schools, childcare centres, doctors and grocery stores, simply doesn’t work for women. It hasn’t been designed to.

  Some companies do try to account for the hidden male bias in the traditional workplace and work day. Campbell Soup offers on-site after-school classes and summer programmes for employees’ children.104 Google offers a stipend for takeout meals in the first three months after a baby is born, subsidised childcare, and has included conveniences like dry cleaners on its campus, so employees can do their errands during the workday.105 Sony Ericsson and Evernote go further, paying for their employees to have their houses cleaned.106 Workplaces in the US increasingly provide dedicated spaces for new mothers to breast-pump.107 American Express will even pay for women to ship their breastmilk home if they have to travel for work while they are breastfeeding.108

  But companies that remember to account for women are exceptions. When Apple announced its US HQ in 2017 as the ‘best office building in the world’, this state-of-the-art office was slated to include medical and dental treatment, luxury wellness spas – but not a child daycare centre.109 Best office in the world for men, then?

  The truth is that around the world, women continue to be disadvantaged by a working culture that is based on the ideological belief that male needs are universal. The vast majority of American homemakers (97% of whom are women) in a recent poll110 indicated that they would go back to work if they could work from home (76%) or if the job offered flexible hours (74%) – rather suggesting that while the majority of US companies claim to offer flexible working,111 the reality is somewhat different. In fact the number of flexible workers in the US fell between 2015 and 2016 and several major US companies are rescinding their remote work policies.112 In the UK half of employees would like to work flexibly, but only 9.8% of job ads offer flexible working113 – and women in particular who request it report being penalised.

  Companies also still seem to conflate long hours in the office with job effectiveness, routinely and disproportionately rewarding employees who work long hours.114 This constitutes a bonus for men. Statistician Nate Silver found that in the US, the hourly wage for those working fifty hours or more – 70% of whom are men – has risen twice as fast since 1984 as hourly pay for those working a more typical thirty-five to forty-nine hours per week.115 And this invisible male bias is exacerbated in certain countries by tax systems that exempt overtime hours from tax116 – a bonus for being unencumbered117 that contrasts sharply with the tax relief on domestic services being trialled in Sweden.118

  The long-hours bias is particularly acute in Japan where it is not unusual for employees to stay in the office past midnight. This is in part because promotion tends to be based on hours worked, as well as the length of time an employee has spent at a company.119 It also doesn’t hurt to take part in ‘nomunication’, a play on the Japanese word for drinking (nomu), and the English word communication.120 Technically of course women can do all these things, but it’s much more difficult for them. Japanese women spend an average of five hours a day on unpaid labour compared to men who spend about an hour: it’s clear who will be free to impress the boss by staying in the office till late, followed by back-slapping drinks at a local strip club.121

  Women’s unpaid workload is compounded in Japan by the two-track career options available in most big Japanese firms: career-track and non-career-track. The non-career-track option is mainly administrative, offers few opportunities for advancement, and is known informally as the ‘mommy’ track – because ‘mommies’ don’t fit into the kind of work-culture that is required for someone on the career-track.122 Combined with the impact having children has on a woman’s chances of promotion (dependent on her ability to demonstrate loyalty through consecutive years worked at a single company), it is unsurprising that 70% of Japanese women stop working for a decade or more after they have their first child, compared to 30% of American women, with many remaining out of the workforce forever.123 It is also unsurprising that Japan has the sixth-largest gender gap in employment and the third-largest gender pay gap in the OECD.124

  Long-hours culture is also a problem in academia – and it is exacerbated by career-progression systems designed around typically male life patterns. An EU report on universities in Europe pointed out that age bars on fellowships discriminate against women: women are more likely125 to have had career breaks meaning that their ‘chronological age is older than their “academic” age’.125 In an article for the Atlantic, Nicholas Wolfinger, co-author of Do Babies Matter: Gender & Family in the Ivory Tower, suggested that universities should offer part-time tenure track positions.126 Primary carers can go part-time, while remaining on the tenure track (in effect doubling their probationary period), with the option of going back to full-time when they can. But while some universities do offer this option, it is still rare and comes with all the poverty problems associated with care-induced part-time work elsewhere.

  Some women have taken matters into their own hands. In Germany, Nobel Prize-winning developmental biologist Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard set up a foundation when she realised how disadvantaged her female PhD students with children were compared to their male counterparts.127 These women were ‘committed researchers’, and their children were in full-time care during the day. But this wasn’t enough to level
a field so in thrall to long-hours culture: when childcare ended for the day these women were once again encumbered. Meanwhile, their male and childless female colleagues were ‘squeezing in extra reading or research’. And so these women, committed researchers though they were, were dropping out.

  Nüsslein-Volhard’s foundation aims to put a stop to this leaky pipeline. Honourees receive a month stipend that they can spend on ‘anything that alleviates their domestic load: house-cleaning services, time-saving appliances like dishwashers or electric dryers, babysitters for nights and weekends when the daycare center is closed or unavailable’. Recipients must be pursuing graduate or postdoctoral work at German universities. And crucially, and unlike the gender-neutral tenure extension for US academics who take parental leave, they must be women.

  Ideological male bias doesn’t simply arise at a workplace level: it is woven into the laws that govern how employment works. For example: what counts as a work expense. This is not as objective or as gender neutral a decision as you might think. The expenses that a company will allow its employees to claim back will generally correspond to what that country’s government has decided counts as a work expense. And this in turn generally corresponds to the kinds of things men will need to claim. Uniforms and tools are in; emergency day care is out.128

  In the US, what is an allowable work expense is decided by the IRS, which explains that ‘Generally you cannot deduct personal, living, or family expenses.’129 But what counts as a personal expense is debatable – which is where Dawn Bovasso comes in. Bovasso is one of the few female creative directors in US advertising. She is also a single mother. So when her firm announced that it was hosting a directors’ dinner, Bovasso had a decision to make: was this dinner worth the $200 it would cost her for a sitter and travel?130 Bovasso’s male colleagues on the whole had to do no such mental accounting: yes, men can be single parents, but they are a rare beast. In the UK, 90% of single parents are women.131 In the US the figure is over 80%.132 In Bovasso’s case, her male colleagues were able to just check their calendar and accept or decline. And most of them accepted. In fact not only did they accept, they also booked the hotel next to the restaurant, so they could drink. And unlike her sitter, this cost was claimable on company expenses.