Invisible Women | Book review | Ruffer

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18 May 2022

Why are women in the United Kingdom 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed after a heart attack? Or 47% more likely to be seriously injured in road traffic accidents?¹

By answering these questions, Caroline Criado-Perez reveals we live in a world designed for men – where data bias is the blueprint.

Criado-Perez urges us to consider how data is used or ignored and raises questions about the ubiquity of confirmation bias. For investors, understanding confirmation bias is especially important.

Confirmation bias can be broken down into six forms:

Search	to only search for confirming evidence
Preference	to prefer evidence that supports our beliefs
Interpretation	to interpret evidence in a way that supports our beliefs
Framing	to use mistaken beliefs to misunderstand what is happening in a situation
Testing	to ignore opportunities to test our beliefs
Discarding	to explain away data that doesn't fit with our beliefs

EVER SINCE THE GREEKS

There is no accusation of conspiracy. Rather, this is an account of embedded thinking. The author references Aristotle, to illustrate that it has always been this way. Aristotle’s approach to ethics was observational, and the world around him was one of manual labour and subjugation of women. Hysteria is from the Greek root hystera, meaning uterus, and only women could become hysterical. This book is not a recycled or superficial condemnation of etymology; it sets out to foster an appreciation of how easily bias slips into our thoughts and assumptions.

Objective reasoning is challenged by unconscious and subjective perceptions. Problem solving for new products, therefore, can often overlook women. Many of the examples in the book are down to people simply not having thought of something.

We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness. Daniel Kahneman

Pause for thought

There are three core themes: the female body, women’s unpaid care burden and the terrifying topic of male violence against women. The book is divided into six main situations: daily life, the workplace, design, medical care, public life and how these issues are magnified during war and natural disasters. The pandemic helps focus the mind.

The reader is challenged to think about the consequences of failing to collect data about women and, indeed, failing to aggregate the data we already have by gender. Conclusions are not thrust upon us – we are instead invited to stop and think about what else might be going on. This pause for thought is an essential modus operandi for investors.

Even the enlightened can fail to see. Council officials from Karlskoga in Sweden were asked to conduct a comprehensive assessment of gender equality across their duties. One official joked that snow-clearing practices were at least one area the ‘gender people’ would keep their noses out of.

Not so. The audit of road clearing revealed a major flaw. It was based on the use of a car for commuting and thereby excluded data on women who walked to public transport.
By changing the council’s approach to account for this, the number of women admitted to hospital decreased significantly. The ‘gender people’ were right to put their noses in, after all.

The danger of Data-led decisions

Invisible Women was published in 2019 and was followed by Alex Cobham’s The Uncounted, which argued that even when data exists, it is often unreliable.

Exposing poor data quality is harder than exposing missing data. And algorithms tend to perpetuate the status quo. As companies increasingly use data to make evidence-based decisions, we must think carefully about the integrity of the data itself. Criado-Perez argues that having women present at the problem identification and design stages of decision-making ensures better questions are asked.

So why, with all this data, has more not been done to fix the problem?

Several components are required to bring about meaningful change: we need pressure to change, a shared vision, a realistic plan of action and the means to measure it. But ultimately the engine of change is knowledge and willingness. After reading Criado-Perez you will have more knowledge of invisible women. The willingness to eradicate bias, however, depends on us.

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Book review – Invisible Women