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

by Caroline Criado Perez

  They could also collect and analyse data on their hiring procedures to see whether these are as gender neutral as they think. MIT did this, and their analysis of over thirty years of data found that women were disadvantaged by ‘usual departmental hiring processes’, and that ‘exceptional women candidates might very well not be found by conventional departmental search committee methods’.72 Unless search committees specifically asked department heads for names of outstanding female candidates, they may not put women forward. Many women who were eventually hired when special efforts were made to specifically find female candidates would not have applied for the job without encouragement. In line with the LSE findings, the paper also found that standards were not lowered during periods when special effort was made to hire women: in fact, if anything, the women that were hired ‘are somewhat more successful than their male peers’.

  The good news is that when organisations do look at the data and attempt to act on it, the results can be dramatic. When a European company advertised for a technical position using a stock photo of a man alongside copy that emphasised ‘aggressiveness and competitiveness’ only 5% of the applicants were women. When they changed the ad to a stock photo of a woman and focused the text on enthusiasm and innovation, the number of women applying shot up to 40%.73 Digital design company Made by Many found a similar shift when they changed the wording of their ad for a senior design role to focus more on teamwork and user experience and less on bombastic single-minded egotism.74 The role was the same, but the framing was different – and the number of female applicants more than doubled.

  These are just two anecdotes, but there is plenty of evidence that the wording of an ad can impact on women’s likelihood to apply for a job. A study of 4,000 job ads found that women were put off from applying for jobs that used wording associated with masculine stereotypes such as ‘aggressive’, ‘ambitious’ or ‘persistent’.75 Significantly, women didn’t consciously note the language or realise it was having this impact on them. They rationalised the lack of appeal, putting it down to personal reasons – which goes to show that you don’t have to realise you’re being discriminated against to in fact be discriminated against.

  Several tech start-ups have also taken a leaf out of the New York Philharmonic’s book and developed blind recruitment systems.76 GapJumpers gives job applicants mini assignments designed for a specific post, and the top-performing applicants are sent to hiring managers without any identifying information. The result? Around 60% of those selected end up coming from under-represented backgrounds. Tech recruiter Speak with a Geek found a similarly dramatic result when they presented the same 5,000 candidates to the same group of employers on two different occasions. The first time, details like names, experience and background were provided; 5% selected for interviews were women. The second time, those details were suppressed. The proportion of women selected for interview was 54%.

  While blind recruitment might work for the initial hiring process, it is less easy to see how it could be incorporated into promotions. But there is a solution here too: accountability and transparency. One tech company made managers truly accountable for their decisions on salary increases by collecting data on all their decisions and, crucially, appointing a committee to monitor this data.77 Five years after adopting this system, the pay gap had all but disappeared.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Henry Higgins Effect

  When Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg got pregnant for the first time she was working at Google. ‘My pregnancy was not easy,’ she wrote in her bestselling book Lean In. She had morning sickness for the whole nine months. She didn’t just develop a bump, her whole body was swollen. Her feet went up two sizes ‘turning into odd-shaped lumps I could see only when they were propped up on a coffee table’.

  It was 2014, and Google was already a huge company, with a huge car park – one that Sandberg found increasingly difficult to walk across in her swollen state. After months of struggling she finally went to one of Google’s founders, Sergey Brin, and ‘announced that we needed pregnancy parking [at the front of the building], preferably sooner rather than later’. Brin agreed immediately, ‘noting that he had never thought about it before’. Sandberg herself was ‘embarrassed’ she hadn’t realised ‘that pregnant women needed reserved parking until I experienced my own aching feet’.

  What Google had suffered from until Sandberg became pregnant was a data gap: neither Google’s male founders nor Sandberg had ever been pregnant before. As soon as one of them did get pregnant, that data gap was filled. And all the women who got pregnant at the company after that would benefit from it.

  It shouldn’t have taken a senior woman getting pregnant for Google to fill this data gap: there had been pregnant women working at the company before. Google could – and should – have been proactive in searching that data out. But the reality is that it usually does take a senior woman for problems like this to be fixed. And so, because business leadership is still so dominated by men, modern workplaces are riddled with these kind of gaps, from doors that are too heavy for the average woman to open with ease, to glass stairs and lobby floors that mean anyone below can see up your skirt, to paving that’s exactly the right size to catch your heels. Small, niggling issues that aren’t the end of the world, granted, but that nevertheless irritate.

  Then there’s the standard office temperature. The formula to determine standard office temperature was developed in the 1960s around the metabolic resting rate of the average forty-year-old, 70 kg man.1 But a recent study found that ‘the metabolic rate of young adult females performing light office work is significantly lower’ than the standard values for men doing the same type of activity. In fact, the formula may overestimate female metabolic rate by as much as 35%, meaning that current offices are on average five degrees too cold for women. Which leads to the odd sight of female office workers wrapped up in blankets in the New York summer while their male colleagues wander around in summer clothes.2

  These data gaps are all inequitable, not to mention being bad business sense – an uncomfortable workforce is an unproductive workforce. But workplace data gaps lead to a lot worse than simple discomfort and consequent inefficiency. Sometimes they lead to chronic illness. Sometimes, they mean women die.

  Over the past hundred years workplaces have, on the whole, got considerably safer. In the early 1900s around 4,400 people in the UK died at work every year.3 By 2016, that figure had fallen to 137.4 In the US, around 23,000 people (out of a workforce of 38 million) died at work in 1913.5 In 2016, 5,190 people died out of a workforce of 163 million.6 This significant decrease in fatal accidents has largely been the result of unions pressuring employers and governments to improve safety standards; since the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act, workplace fatalities in the UK have dropped by 85%. But there is a caveat to this good news story. While serious injuries at work have been decreasing for men, there is evidence that they have been increasing among women.7

  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?

  Beatrice Boulanger didn’t get any training.8 As a home helper for older people, she ‘learned everything on the job’. But her duties included a lot of lifting, often of overweight people. One day, as she was helping a woman out of the bath, her shoulder gave way. ‘Everything around the joint was crumbling,’ she told occupational health magazine Hazards. ‘The doctors had to cut off the head of my humerus.’ Boulanger eventually needed a full shoulder replacement. And she can no longer do her job.

  Boulanger is not a one-off. Women working as carers and cleaners can lift more in a shift than a construct
ion worker or a miner.9 ‘We only got a sink upstairs three years ago,’ a cleaner at a cultural centre in France told the Equal Times.10 ‘Before that, we had to carry buckets of water upstairs, and down again when the water was dirty. Nobody realised.’ And unlike the construction workers and miners, these women often don’t go home to rest, but instead go home to a second unpaid shift where there is more lifting, more lugging, more crouching and scrubbing.

  In her 2018 retrospective of a lifetime spent researching women’s occupational health, Karen Messing, a geneticist and professor of biological sciences at Montreal University, writes that ‘there has still been no biomechanics research on the effects of breast size on lifting techniques associated with back pain’11 despite that fact that engineer Angela Tate of Memorial University alerted scientists to male bias in biomechanical studies back in the 1990s. Messing also points to women’s reports of work-related musculoskeletal pain still being treated with scepticism despite accumulating reports that pain systems function differently among women and men.12 Meanwhile, we’ve only just noticed that nearly all pain studies have been done exclusively in male mice.

  The gender data gap in occupational health is sometimes attributed to the fact that men are more likely than women to die on the job. But while it is true that the most dramatic accidents are still dominated by male workers this isn’t the full story, because an accident at work is by no means the only way your job can kill you. In fact, it’s not even the most common way your job can kill you – not by a long shot.

  Every year, 8,000 people die from work-related cancers.13 And although most research in this area has been done on men,14 it’s far from clear that men are the most affected.15 Over the past fifty years, breast-cancer rates in the industrialised world have risen significantly16 – but a failure to research female bodies, occupations and environments means that the data for exactly what is behind this rise is lacking.17 ‘We know everything about dust disease in miners,’ Rory O’Neill, professor of occupational and environmental policy research at the University of Stirling, tells me. ‘You can’t say the same for exposures, physical or chemical, in ‘women’s’ work.’

  This is partly a historical problem. ‘For many long-latency diseases, like cancer,’ explains O’Neill, ‘it can be decades before the pile of bodies gets big enough to reach a conclusion.’ We’ve been counting the bodies in traditional men’s jobs – mining, construction – for several generations. Specifically, we’ve been counting male bodies: when women did work in those industries, or had similar exposures, ‘they were often discounted from studies as “confounding factors”.’ Meanwhile, in most female-dominated industries, the studies simply weren’t done at all. So even if we started the studies now, says O’Neill, it would take a working generation before we had any usable data.

  But we aren’t starting the studies now. Instead, we continue to rely on data from studies done on men as if they apply to women. Specifically, Caucasian men aged twenty-five to thirty, who weigh 70 kg. This is ‘Reference Man’ and his superpower is being able to represent humanity as a whole. Of course, he does not.

  Men and women have different immune systems and different hormones, which can play a role in how chemicals are absorbed.18 Women tend to be smaller than men and have thinner skin, both of which can lower the level of toxins they can be safely exposed to. This lower tolerance threshold is compounded by women’s higher percentage of body fat, in which some chemicals can accumulate.

  The result is that levels of radiation that are safe for Reference Man turn out to be anything but for women.19 Ditto for a whole range of commonly used chemicals.20 And yet the male-default one-level-to-rule-them-all approach persists.21 This is made worse by the way chemicals are tested. To start with, chemicals are still usually tested in isolation, and on the basis of a single exposure. But this is not how women tend to encounter them, either at home (in cleaning products and cosmetics), or in the workplace.

  In nail salons, where the workforce is almost exclusively female (and often migrant), workers will be exposed on a daily basis to a huge range of chemicals that are ‘routinely found in the polishes, removers, gels, shellacs, disinfectants and adhesives that are staples of their work’.22 Many of these chemicals have been linked to cancer, miscarriages and lung diseases. Some may alter the body’s normal hormonal functions. After a shift of paid work many of these women will then go home and begin a second unpaid shift, where they will be exposed to different chemicals that are ubiquitous in common cleaning products.23 The effects of these chemicals mixing together are largely unknown,24 although research does indicate that exposure to a mixture of chemicals can be much more toxic than exposure to chemicals on an individual basis.25

  Most of the research on chemicals has focused on their absorption through the skin.26 Leaving aside the problem that absorption through thicker male skin may not be the same as for women, skin is by no means the only way women working in nail salons will be absorbing these chemicals. Many of them are extremely volatile, which means that they evaporate into the air at room temperature and can be inhaled – along with the considerable amounts of dust produced when acrylic nails are filed. The research on how this may impact on workers is virtually non-existent.

  But the data, although full of gaps, is mounting. Anne Rochon Ford, a women’s health researcher, tells me about how they started to realise there might be a problem in Canada. ‘One of the central Toronto community health centres that is very close to Chinatown was seeing a lot of women coming into their clinic who had a particular cluster of conditions that are traditionally associated with chemical exposure,’ she explains. It turned out they were all nail-salon workers. Several studies of air quality in nail salons have shown that they rarely exceed occupational exposure limits, but these limits are based on data that doesn’t account for the impact of chronic, long-term exposure. And this is particularly an issue when it comes to endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) because, unlike most toxins, they can be harmful even at very low concentrations and they are found in a wide range of plastics, cosmetics and cleaners.27

  EDCs mimic – and therefore can disrupt – reproductive hormones, ‘triggering changes in how cells and organs function, with an impact on a diverse array of metabolic, growth, and reproductive processes in the body’.28 The data on EDCs and their impact on women is limited.29 But what we do know is enough to give us pause, and should certainly be enough to trigger a full-scale data-collection programme.

  EDCs are known to be linked to breast cancer, and several studies have found that cosmetologists are at a particularly elevated risk of Hodgkin’s disease, multiple myeloma and ovarian cancer.30 When occupational health researchers Jim and Margaret Brophy investigated the chemicals used in automotive plastics workplaces (where plastic parts for motorised vehicles are produced) ‘we could not find any substances that they were using that weren’t suspected’ to be either a mammary carcinogen, and/or an endocrine disruptor. ‘If you’re camping or around a campfire and somebody throws in a plastic bottle or a styrofoam cup people run away,’ Brophy points out. ‘The smell is enough to tell you it’s toxic. Well that’s what these women are doing on a daily basis. They’re working on moulding machines which heat up these plastic pellets which are full of all kinds of EDCs.’

  After ten years working in a job where she is exposed either to mammary carcinogens or an EDC, a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer increases by 42%. But the Brophys found that after working for ten years in the auto-plastics industry a woman’s likelihood of developing breast cancer trebles. ‘And if you were under the age of fifty, so premenopausal breast cancer, it was a fivefold excess.’ Even a single year of working in this sector was estimated to increase the odds of developing breast cancer by 9%.31

  The World Health Organization, the European Union and the Endocrine Society have all issued major reports on the dangers of EDCs, with the Endocrine Society in particular linking their use to the significant increase in breast-cancer rates in in
dustrialised countries.32 And yet in many countries, regulation of EDCs is spotty at best. Phthalates, some of which have demonstrated endocrine-disrupting properties, are chemicals used to make plastics softer. They are found in ‘a wide range of products – from children’s toys to shower curtains. They are also used in nail polish, perfumes, and skin moisturizers, and can also be found in the outer coating on medicines and in the tubing used in medical devices’.

  In Canada, they ‘are explicitly regulated only in soft vinyl articles for children; their use in the Canadian cosmetics industry is largely unregulated’. In the EU, as of 2015 EDCs can’t be produced unless authorised for a specific purpose – but they are allowed in products imported from abroad. In the US, there are no federal laws that require companies to list ingredients in their cleaning products (in the US women do 70% of household cleaning and make up 89% of home and hotel cleaners – most of whom are ethnic minorities), and a recent report found that even supposedly ‘green’ cleaning products contain EDCs.33 When Always menstrual pads were tested in 2014 they were found to include ‘a number of chemicals – including styrene, chloroform and acetone – that have been identified as either carcinogens or reproductive and developmental toxins’.34

  It’s clear that we need more and better data about women’s exposure to chemicals. We need data that is separated and analysed by sex, and which includes reproductive status.35 And physical effects need to be measured for women themselves, rather than being restricted to foetuses and newborns, as is all too often currently the case.36 We need researchers to understand that because of their unpaid workload women often drop in and out of the workforce and work more than one job at a time (which can lead to, in Rory O’Neill’s words, ‘a cocktail of exposures’), and that this means that research which tracks only a single, current employment is likely to be sporting a significant gender data gap.37