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

by Caroline Criado Perez

  For women who try to escape from war and disaster, the gender-neutral nightmare often continues in the refugee camps of the world. ‘We have learned from so many mistakes in the past that women are at a greater risk for sexual assault and violence if they don’t have separate bathrooms,’ says Gauri van Gulik, Amnesty International’s deputy director for Europe and Central Asia.44 In fact international guidelines state that toilets in refugee camps should be sex-segregated, marked and lockable.45 But these requirements are often not enforced.

  A 2017 study by Muslim Women’s charity Global One found that 98% of female refugees in Lebanon did not have access to separate latrines.46 Research by the Women’s Refugee Commission has found that women and girls in accommodation centres in Germany and Sweden are vulnerable to rape, assault and other violence because of a failure to provide separate latrines, shower facilities or sleeping quarters. Mixed living and sleeping quarters can mean women develop skin rashes from having to keep their hijab on for weeks.

  Female refugees regularly47 complain that the remote location48 of many toilets is worsened by a lack of adequate lighting both on the routes to the latrines and in the facilities themselves. Large areas of the infamous Idomeni camp in Greece were described as ‘pitch-black’ at night. And although two studies have found that installing solar lighting or handing out individual solar lights to women in camps has had a dramatic impact on their sense of safety, it’s a solution that has not been widely adopted.49

  So most women find their own solutions. A year after the 2004 tsunami women and girls in Indian displacement camps were still walking in pairs to and from the community toilet and bathing facilities to ward off harassment from men.50 A group of Yezidi women who ended up in Nea Kavala camp in northern Greece after fleeing sexual slavery under ISIS formed protection circles so they could accompany each other to the toilet. Others (69% in one 2016 study51), including pregnant women who need frequent toilet trips, simply don’t go at night. Some women in reception centres in Germany have resorted to not eating and drinking, a solution also reported by female refugees in Idomeni, at the time Greece’s largest informal refugee camp.52 According to a 2018 Guardian report, some women have taken to wearing adult nappies.53

  Some of the failure to protect women from male violence in European camps can be put down to the speed with which authorities in, for example, Germany and Sweden (who to their credit have taken far more refugees than most), have had to respond to the crisis.54 But this is not the whole story, because women in detention centres around the world experience the same problems with male guards. Women at a US immigration facility in 2005 reported that guards used a camera phone to take pictures of them while they were sleeping, as well as when they came out of the showers and bathrooms.55 In 2008, a seventeen-year-old Somali refugee detained at a Kenyan police station was raped by two policemen when she left her cell to use the toilet.56 Yarl’s Wood Detention centre in the UK has been dogged for years by multiple cases of sexual abuse and assault.57

  Given the steady stream of abuse reports from around the world, perhaps it’s time to recognise that the assumption that male staff can work in female facilities as they do in male facilities is another example of where gender neutrality turns into gender discrimination. Perhaps sex-segregation needs to extend beyond sanitation facilities, and perhaps no male staff should be in positions of power over vulnerable women. Perhaps. But if this is going to happen, authorities would first have to countenance the idea that male officials might be exploiting the women they are meant to be variously helping, guarding or processing. And, currently, authorities are not countenancing this.

  In an email to humanitarian news agency IRIN a spokesperson for the Regional Office of Refugee Affairs in Berlin (LAF) wrote that ‘After countless conversations with shelter managers, I can assure you that there is no unusual occurrence [of sexualised violence] reported from emergency or community shelters.’58 Despite multiple accounts of sexual harassment and abuse they were, they said, ‘confident there is no significant problem’. Similarly, news website BuzzFeed reports that in Europe the possibility that male border guards might trade sex for entry is all but denied.59 And yet a 2017 Guardian report revealed that ‘Sexual violence and abuse was widespread and systematic at crossings and checkpoints. A third of the women and children interviewed said their assailants wore uniforms or appeared to be associated with the military.’60

  The LAF substantiated their claim of ‘no significant problem’ by pointing to the ‘very low numbers of police reports’, with only ten cases of ‘crimes against the sexual freedom of a person’ involving women living in refuge shelters registered by Berlin police in the whole of 2016.61 But are police statistics a reliable measure of the problem, or is this yet another gender data gap? When BuzzFeed reporters contacted the national police of the major European transit countries (Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia and Hungary) for any information they had about gender-based violence, many simply did not respond to ‘repeated requests for information’. The Hungarian national police did reply, but only to say that ‘it does not collect information related to asylum-seekers, including reports of rape or attempted sexual assault’. The Croatians said they ‘could not disaggregate crime reports by victim category’, although in any case they ‘had no reports of asylum-seekers experiencing gender-based violence’. This may of course be true, although not because it’s not happening. Several women’s organisations who work with refugees point out that although many of the women they work with have been groped and harassed at shelters, a mixture of cultural and language barriers mean that a ‘very, very high number of sexually motivated attacks go unreported’.62

  The data gap when it comes to sexual abuse is compounded in crisis settings by powerful men who blur the lines between aid and sexual assault, exploiting their position by forcing women to have sex with them in order to receive their food rations.63 The data gaps here are endemic, but the evidence we do have suggests that this is a common scenario in post-disaster environments,64 and one which has recently hit headlines worldwide, as first Oxfam and then various other international aid agencies were rocked by allegations of sexual abuse by their workers, and subsequent cover-ups.65

  The irony of ignoring the potential for male violence when it comes to designing systems for female refugees is that male violence is often the reason women are refugees in the first place.66 We tend to think of people being displaced because of war and disaster: this is usually why men flee. But this perception is another example of male-default thinking: while women do seek refuge on this basis, female homelessness is more usually driven by the violence women face from men. Women flee from ‘corrective’ rape (where men rape a lesbian to ‘turn her straight’), from institutionalised rape (as happened in Bosnia), from forced marriage, child marriage and domestic violence. Male violence is often why women flee their homes in low-income countries, and it’s why women flee their homes in the affluent West.

  Homelessness has historically been seen as a male phenomenon, but there is reason to doubt the official data on this issue. Joanne Bretherton, research fellow at the University of York’s Centre for Housing Policy, explains that women are actually ‘far more likely to experience homelessness than men’,67 while in Australia the ‘archetypal homeless person’ is now ‘a young women aged 25-34, often with a child, and, increasingly, escaping violence’.68 But this ‘serious social problem’69 has been grossly underestimated – and it’s a gender data gap that is in many ways a product of how researchers define and measure homelessness.70 According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) ‘much of the research on homelessness [. . .] lacks a comprehensive gender-based analysis’.71

  Homelessness is usually measured by counting those who use homeless services, but this approach only works if men and women are equally likely to use these services, and they aren’t. Women made homeless as a result of domestic violence are often likely to seek refuge in domestic-violence shelters rather than homeless
shelters. In the UK this means that they will not be counted as homeless.72 They are also likely to live in precarious arrangements with other people, ‘without their own front door, privacy and their own living space, and without access to any housing of their own to which they have a legal right’.73 Sometimes, as witnessed by the recent rise in ‘sex for rent’ agreements across the UK, they will, like women in refugee camps, be sexually exploited.74

  According to Canadian research, women fall into these precarious arrangements because they don’t feel safe in the official emergency accommodation, especially when it’s mixed sex.75 And these safety issues are not a product of women’s imaginations: the CCPA calls the levels of violence experienced by women in shelters ‘staggering’. Supposedly ‘gender-neutral’ services that are ‘presumed to be equally accessible for men and women’, concludes the CCPA, ‘actually put women at significant risk’.

  Female homelessness is therefore not simply a result of violence: it is a lead predictor of a woman experiencing violence.76 Women in the US are choosing to live rough rather than access shelters they perceive as dangerous.77 Katharine Sacks-Jones, director of women-at-risk charity Agenda, explains that in the UK homelessness services are ‘often set up with men in mind’, and that they ‘can be frightening places for vulnerable women who’ve experienced abuse and violence’.78

  Gender-sensitive provision is not just about safety, however, it’s also about health. In the UK, homeless shelters can (and do) request free condoms from the NHS,79 but they cannot request free menstrual products. As a result, shelters can only provide menstrual products for free if they happen to have spare funds (unlikely) or if they receive a donation. In 2015, a campaign group called The Homeless Period petitioned the UK government to fund the provision of menstrual products as they do condoms.80 Despite questions being raised in Parliament, government funding has not been forthcoming, although in March 2017 the campaign group announced a partnership with Bodyform to donate 200,000 packs of sanitary products by 2020.81 Campaigners in America have been more successful: in 2016 New York City became the first US city to provide free tampons and pads in public schools, homeless shelters and correctional facilities.82

  Female refugees have also not been spared the impact of the chronic global failure to account for the fact that women menstruate. Funding for this essential resource is often not forthcoming,83 and the result is that women and girls can go for years without access to menstrual products.84 Even where hygiene kits are distributed, they have traditionally been ‘designed for household-level distribution with no adjustment for the number of menstruating females in each household’.85 Distribution is also too often designed without regard for the cultural taboo around menstruation: expecting women to feel able to request menstrual products from male workers or in front of male family members;86 and not providing culturally sensitive products or disposal methods.87

  These gaps in provision affect women’s health and freedom. Reduced to resorting to unhygienic substitutes (‘old rags, pieces of moss, pieces of mattress88), one study found that over 50% of women had ‘suffered from urinary-tract infections which were often left untreated’.89 And ‘because of the stigma surrounding menstruation and the risk of leakages’, women are restricted in their movements, unable to ‘access food, get services, information, interact with other people’.

  Closing the gender data gap will not magically fix all the problems faced by women, whether or not they are displaced. That would require a wholesale restructuring of society and an end to male violence. But getting to grips with the reality that gender-neutral does not automatically mean gender-equal would be an important start. And the existence of sex-disaggregated data would certainly make it much harder to keep insisting, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, that women’s needs can safely be ignored in pursuit of a greater good.

  Afterword

  The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences, in every page; the men so good for nothing and hardly any women at all – it is very tiresome.

  Jane Austen

  It took about two hours for Daina Taimina to find the solution that had eluded mathematicians for over a century. It was 1997, and the Latvian mathematician was participating in a geometry workshop at Cornell University. David Henderson, the professor leading the workshop, was modelling a hyperbolic plane constructed out of thin, circular strips of paper taped together. ‘It was disgusting,’ laughed Taimina in an interview.1

  A hyperbolic plane is ‘the geometric opposite’ of a sphere, explains Henderson in an interview with arts and culture magazine Cabinet.2 ‘On a sphere, the surface curves in on itself and is closed. A hyperbolic plane is a surface in which the space curves away from itself at every point.’ It exists in nature in ruffled lettuce leaves, in coral leaf, in sea slugs, in cancer cells. Hyperbolic geometry is used by statisticians when they work with multidimensional data, by Pixar animators when they want to simulate realistic cloth, by auto-industry engineers to design aerodynamic cars, by acoustic engineers to design concert halls. It’s the foundation of the theory of relativity, and ‘thus the closest thing we have to an understanding of the shape of the universe’.3 In short, hyperbolic space is a pretty big deal.

  But for thousands of years, hyperbolic space didn’t exist. At least it didn’t according to mathematicians, who believed that there were only two types of space: Euclidean, or flat space, like a table, and spherical space, like a ball. In the nineteenth century, hyperbolic space was discovered – but only in principle. And although mathematicians tried for over a century to find a way to successfully represent this space physically, no one managed it – until Taimina attended that workshop at Cornell. Because as well as being a professor of mathematics, Taimina also liked to crochet.

  Taimina learnt to crochet as a schoolgirl. Growing up in Latvia, part of the former Soviet Union, ‘you fix your own car, you fix your own faucet – anything’, she explains.4 ‘When I was growing up, knitting or any other handiwork meant you could make a dress or a sweater different from everybody else’s.’ But while she had always seen patterns and algorithms in knitting and crochet, Taimina had never connected this traditional, domestic, feminine skill with her professional work in maths. Until that workshop in 1997. When she saw the battered paper approximation Henderson was using to explain hyperbolic space, she realised: I can make this out of crochet.

  And so that’s what she did. She spent her summer ‘crocheting a classroom set of hyperbolic forms’ by the swimming pool. ‘People walked by, and they asked me, “What are you doing?” And I answered, “Oh, I’m crocheting the hyperbolic plane.”’5 She has now created hundreds of models and explains that in the process of making them ‘you get a very concrete sense of the space expanding exponentially. The first rows take no time but the later rows can take literally hours, they have so many stitches. You get a visceral sense of what “hyperbolic” really means.’6 Just looking at her models did the same for others: in an interview with the New York Times Taimina recalled a professor who had taught hyperbolic space for years seeing one and saying, ‘Oh, so that’s how they look.’7 Now her creations are the standard model for explaining hyperbolic space.

  Taimina’s fundamental contribution to the study of the hyperbolic plane does not, of course, close a data gap that directly relates to women. What this story shows instead is that the case for closing the gender data gap extends beyond women’s rights. Closing the data gap, as we’ve seen from the impact women have in politics, in peace talks, in design and urban planning, is good for everyone. Even mathematicians.

  When we exclude half of humanity from the production of knowledge we lose out on potentially transformative insights. Would male mathematicians have come up with Taimina’s elegantly simple solution on their own? Unlikely, given how few men are keen crocheters. But in Taimina the traditionally feminine skill of crochet collided with the traditionally masculine sphere of maths. And it was this collision that led to the problem that many mathematicia
ns had given up on as a lost cause finally being solved. Taimina provided the link the male mathematicians were missing.

  All too often, however, we don’t allow women to provide that link. And so we continue to treat too many of the world’s problems as insoluble. Like Freud, we continue to ‘knock our heads’ against what seem like riddles. But what if, like representing the hyperbolic plane, these problems aren’t insoluble? What if, like the problems in broadcast science competitions, all they are missing is a female perspective? The data that we do have is unarguable: as we continue to build, plan and develop our world, we have to start taking account of women’s lives. In particular, we have to start accounting for the three themes that define women’s relationship with that world.

  The first of these themes is the female body – or, to be precise – its invisibility. Routinely forgetting to accommodate the female body in design – whether medical, technological or architectural – has led to a world that is less hospitable and more dangerous for women to navigate. It leads to us injuring ourselves in jobs and cars that weren’t designed for our bodies. It leads to us dying from drugs that don’t work. It has led to the creation of a world where women just don’t fit very well.

  There is an irony in how the female body is apparently invisible when it comes to collecting data, because when it comes to the second trend that defines women’s lives, the visibility of the female body is key. That trend is male sexual violence against women – how we don’t measure it, don’t design our world to account for it, and in so doing, allow it to limit women’s liberty. Female biology is not the reason women are raped. It is not the reason women are intimidated and violated as they navigate public spaces. This happens not because of sex, but because of gender: the social meanings we have imposed on male and female bodies. In order for gender to work, it must be obvious which bodies elicit which treatment. And, clearly, it is: as we’ve seen, ‘the mere sight of a woman’ is enough for the viewer to ‘immediately elicit a specific set of associated traits and attributions’.8 To immediately class her as someone to speak over. Someone to cat call. Someone to follow. Someone to rape.