by Florence Boyle

Most feminists pick their fights. My pet peeve is the use of ‘human’ and terms (attention liturgists), but more often than not I bite my lip. It happens less often than it used to, I know it’s not a deliberate slight and frankly some things are much more important. Caroline Criado-Perez argues that the desire to not ‘make a fuss’ has rendered women invisible in swathes of daily life where accounting for female differences really matters.

Criado-Perez demonstrates through evidence and data why, although women are less likely to be involved in car crashes, when they do, they are more likely to be injured or killed and that it is almost entirely explained by the design of cars (based on a male standard for height and weight) and the use of male standard crash dummies. Women are less likely to have heart attacks but more likely to die of one because women present with quite different symptoms from males and consequently, female heart attacks are often misdiagnosed. Even when they are correctly diagnosed, they are prescribed treatments designed for male heart attacks that have been exclusively tested on males (even the lab rats).

Some of this analysis has been covered elsewhere but some of the examples are jaw dropping: who knew that snow clearing could be gender biased? Criado-Perez makes great connections between pieces of data and builds a narrative which makes this a genuine page turner rather than a dry analysis of data.

Feminists may re-evaluate how often they bite their lip, but more importantly the eye-rollers who get frustrated at any reference to sexism may find food for thought and re-examine whether decisions that seem rational, evidence based and objective really are.