Reporter | Forest people
Edit the | Yellow Moon
Ironically, Invisible Women is a man. According to author Caroline Criado Perez, the world works around "default males," who represent "humanity" themselves, so much so that while more than half of the world's 7.9 billion people today are women, their presence is not matched by number, and in many aspects of their lives, they are even "invisible."
"Huge data gaps have taken up much of human history since records began. Starting with the 'Man the Hunter' theory, chroniclers leave little room for the role of women in human evolution, whether culturally or biologically. Instead, the life of men is used to represent the life of all human beings. And when it comes to the other half of human life, there is usually only silence. This silence is everywhere and throughout our culture: film, journalism, literature, science, urban planning, economics. ”
In the book, Perez uses detailed facts and figures to show readers how gender data gaps are systematically integrated into the fabric of human society - design, urban planning, workplace rules, medical measures, power systems that do not meet women's needs and may even create obstacles to women's survival and development...
Some of its consequences for women may just be annoying: for example, although men's and women's public toilets are the same size, there are often long queues in women's toilets; The size of mobile phones is getting bigger and bigger, making it increasingly difficult for female users to master it with one hand; The standard temperature in the office is set based on the average male resting metabolic rate, so that female employees will always feel that the office is too cold. Others are serious enough to be fatal, such as because medical research does not take into account gender differences, women are more likely to die from heart disease due to misdiagnosis, and cars designed to benchmark against standard men are 47% more likely to cause serious injuries in car accidents and 17% more likely to die.
About a year after the publication of "Invisible Women", the new crown pneumonia pandemic swept the world. This "black swan event" of the current era echoes in an unexpected way and underscores what Perez reminds us in his book: "It is ironic to silence women's voices when problems arise, because it is in extreme cases that old prejudices are most unjustified, and women are particularly affected by conflict, pandemics and natural disasters." ”
Invisible Women was published in the United States in 2021, and Perez wrote a new afterword to the book, highlighting the plight of women exposed by the coronavirus pandemic. For example, although most of the health care workers are women, the protective clothing they receive is designed for a standard male body, which exposes them to more virus risks. "After this crisis subsides, we will have to see how many countries will learn the lessons of the pandemic – it reminds us that women's unpaid care is playing a vital role in our economic development and recovery plans," Perez said in an interview with Interface Culture (ID: Booksandfun." ”
She admits that she had misconceptions about feminism when she was younger, and a feminist linguistic theory book in college made her realize that all her incomprehension and impatience with the label of "feminist" stemmed from the omnipresent "standard male", "We always thought we were discussing issues in a gender-neutral manner, but in fact we were discussing problems through the eyes of men." In Perez's view, this default premise is as natural as the air people breathe, and it makes it difficult for people to change their thinking and make real changes.
Aware of this, Perez became a doer: in 2013, the Bank of England announced that it would remove the female historical figure on the back of the pound in 2016, the 19th-century social reformer Elizabeth Fry. Perez launched a petition among the British public to keep a female historical figure on the back of British banknotes. Thanks to her efforts, in 2017, the image of Jane Austen appeared on the new £10 note. In 2018, suffragette Millicent Fawcett, a suffragette who won the right to vote for British women a century earlier, became the first female statue to appear in Parliament Square in London, also at Perez's initiative.
Perez feels that her path into feminism has taught her an important lesson: change in thought and action is possible, though it can be a long process. To this end, she hopes that all those who believe in equality and justice and are willing to contribute to building a better world will start by confronting and challenging the existence of the "standard male", "the best strategy to eliminate the ideology of 'male supremacy' is to point out that it does exist." ”
01 The Invisible Woman is a 21st-century interpretation of Beauvoir's Second Sex
Interface Culture: What inspired you to write Invisible Women? What does the label "feminist" mean to you?
Caroline Perez: It's a long story. I wasn't a feminist since I was a child, and at a younger age, I was even anti-feminist. I find feminism embarrassing, as if to say that women are just weak, like full of anti-male complaints. Around the age of 25, I was already a mature college student who needed to read some feminist literature carefully, and my mentality finally changed. As a student in the English language and literature department, I read Feminism and Linguistic Theory for a paper about how men are the default norm in language ("he" can refer to both "he" and "she", and "man" can refer to "human").
Like many others, I've heard about this before, but disagree – everyone knows that these words are neutral, let's discuss some real issues okay! But the book cites a number of studies that surprised me that when people read or hear these words, they have a man in mind. I realized for the first time that when I heard these words, I naturally thought of men as well, and I couldn't believe I had never realized it before.
This path into feminism made me realize that the ubiquity of the "default is male" phenomenon, which is a systemic problem and creates a series of problems for women. The magnitude of these problems goes far beyond "hearing a neutral word but imagining it is a man".
After graduating, I studied behavioural economics and feminist economics at the London School of Economics and found that there are large gaps in gender data when we quantify economic outcomes, such as the fact that GDP calculations omit many women's productive contributions, but we thought it was an objective, gender-neutral data and formulated policies accordingly. I was involved with a female refugee charity and found that even a document like the United Nations Refugee Convention, developed after World War II and with absolutely no intention of discriminating against refugee women, makes it harder for women than men to seek asylum because it is designed around the experiences of persecuted men and ignores women's situations, such as women having a harder time travelling alone than men.
I unconsciously collect these cases in my life and work, see a certain pattern, and feel that no one has noticed this, it's crazy! We always thought we were discussing issues in a gender-neutral manner, but in fact we were discussing issues through a male perspective.
The "last straw" that made me a feminist came from my experience writing my first book. When I gathered the data, I found a problem with the medical data: Not only did women not necessarily experience the classic heart disease symptoms that had been stereotyped in traditional experience and popular culture—chest pain and pain under the left arm—but doctors were also not trained to recognize typical symptoms of women, such as feelings of indigestion, nausea and tiredness. For this reason, women are more likely than men to die from heart disease. I also found that many medical studies do not take sex differences into account, because female bodies, whether human or animal, were excluded from the study on the grounds of "hormonal abnormalities." I recognize that this is just the tip of the iceberg of women's underrepresentation in school curricula, media and politics, and we have been turning a blind eye to it.
That's why I think it's my duty to write this book. I hope people can see this pattern, see that it is a matter of life and death, and it needs to be taken seriously. I feel that my path into feminism also made me firmly believe in the possibility of change: just by reading a book, I went from being an anti-feminist to a feminist. I hope my book will change more people.
Interface Culture: The book caused a strong response in the West. What interesting reader feedback have you seen?
Caroline Perez: I find the most interesting and heartbreaking comments come from some female readers who told me that after reading this book, they finally understood the world and finally stopped blaming themselves for some of the unsatisfactory things in their lives. It's so easy for women to think they have problems (because society thinks we have problems so often), and it's a relief to find their bodies blameless, and what is really problematic is a world that pretends that 50% of the global population doesn't have a body.
Interface Culture: This book draws on numerous studies to show how gender data gaps are systematically integrated into the fabric of human society. When you were writing this book, what was the most shocking discovery to you?
Caroline Perez: Everything was shocking! The central premise of the book – that men are gender-neutral representatives of humanity, so we don't need to collect data on women – is shocking! Perhaps most telling is car safety: For many years, automakers only used male dummies for crash tests, and today it is still very common to use dummies designed against mid-level men. But for women at the intermediate level, it was too high and too heavy, and did not take into account gender differences such as muscle mass ratio or pelvis. As a result, women were 47 percent more likely than men to be seriously injured and 17 percent more likely to die when they were involved in car accidents.
Interface culture: For years (in fact, millennia), we have been insensitive to the depth and breadth of the gender data gap. Why should we wait until the 21st century to finally start talking about this?
Caroline Perez: Actually, my book is just a 21st-century interpretation of Beauvoir's Second Sex, published in 1949. Beauvoir was the first to propose the ontological status of men and the secondary status of women vis-à-vis men. What I've done is use this important insight to analyze all kinds of data and build on that data for everyday life. Of course, a large part of the problem is that this bias is too common to detect. We don't question it, we don't notice it until it's clearly pointed out. Through this book, I hope to draw attention to the fact that the gender-neutral representation of men is that 50% of the global population is ignored and that we can finally begin to address the consequences, sometimes fatal, of gender data gaps.
Interface Culture: You give strong evidence of how the gender data gap makes half of the world's population "invisible," but you don't seem to explain much about its causes. Can we say that this is due to cultural inertia?
Caroline Perez: Part of the reason is true. We resist change. But it's also because we don't even realize we're resisting change. We are so accustomed to treating men as standard human beings that most of the time we behave as if the female population does not exist.
02 When we talk about women, we are talking about everything
Interface culture: The success of any social change requires uniting as many people as possible. A major obstacle to the cause of gender equality is that many men either ignore the issue or see it as a zero-sum game. In your opinion, how can we build a better and fairer world for both sexes?
Caroline Perez: Andrew Dworkin famously said that women are the only group of the weak who sleep with their oppressors. What she means by this is that women's lives are too interconnected with men's lives (as their mothers, sisters, daughters), making it difficult for them to be emancipated, to form effectively as an interest group, and we hope that the men in our lives will do better. But I think the reverse applies to men – their lives are also closely related to women's lives, they are our brothers, fathers, sons. They don't want us to die in a car accident because of a flaw in the design of our car, or they don't want us to die of heart disease because doctors fail to diagnose the symptoms of a disease. The bond between men and women should draw men into the struggle for gender equality.
Interface Culture: One of the big challenges feminists face today is that they are addicted to "identity politics," paying too much attention to gender and ignoring other important issues such as class and race to effectively achieve the goal of advancing the overall well-being of society. What do you think about this?
Caroline Perez: As I write in the book, everyone has an identity. The problem is that we act as if only women have identities and men don't, and the problem exists in both class and ethnic dimensions. As a result, women are accused of getting caught up in "identity politics" for talking about women (don't forget that they make up 50% of the population), but when men talk about men – the focus of most political debates – we act as if this is the universal issue. The problem is that because men occupy the gender-neutral high ground, this advantage makes it difficult to see what's really going on. And let's not forget that women make up 50 percent of the working class and 50 percent of minorities, and when we talk about women, we are talking about all of these issues.
Interface Culture: Do you have any advice for young girls and boys who consciously see the world through a feminist lens?
Caroline Perez: The best advice I can give to parents and teachers – don't let the standard male image be overwhelming. The vast majority of children's TV shows, books, and toys are filled with male characters, as if 90% of the world's population is male. Point this out to our children, understand their thoughts, and ask them how they see the world unfolding. The best strategy for eliminating the ideology of "male supremacy" is to point out that it does exist.
03 Too much is expected of female leaders because there are so few of them
Interface Culture: In one of the chapters of the book, first published in 2019, you talk about how war, natural disasters, and pandemics can make women more vulnerable. For many, COVID may be the first pandemic experience. In China, at least, many people are aware of the problem you mentioned in your book: women's work and contributions in the public health crisis are not being recognized and rewarded, and the needs of women workers on the front lines of the epidemic, such as sanitary napkins and accurate personal protective equipment, are difficult to meet. If you were to add COVID-related content to the new edition of Invisible Women, what would you write?
Caroline Perez: I did write a new afterword to the Invisible Women American paperback, which was published in the United States in 2021. I wrote about how COVID — officially declared a pandemic about a year after it was first published — echoed the ideas I made in the book in a way I hadn't anticipated.
One of the most serious problems is that medical workers around the world receive personal protective equipment designed based on the average size of white Caucasian men. As a result, many in this female-dominated group struggle to be adequately protected, saving our lives while exposing themselves to risk. It is also very frustrating that only a few countries systematically collect gender data on prevalence, let alone so many treatment studies that do not take gender into account at all.
After the crisis subsides, we will have to see how many countries will learn the lessons of the pandemic – a reminder that women's unpaid care is playing a vital role in our economic development and recovery plans. For now, the outlook is not promising.
Interface culture: Since 2019, the political environment in the UK has changed a lot, Elizabeth Truss has become the third female prime minister in British history, and the media said she may become the next "Iron Lady". We all know that women in high positions are still difficult, do you think Truss has the potential to push the boundaries of female politicians or women in public life as a whole?
Caroline Perez: Indeed, British politics has changed dramatically even since you asked this question! Truss may not have been our prime minister at the time of publication (reporter's note: Truss resigned as prime minister on October 21 and has been in office for only 45 days).
Let me answer this question more broadly. The evidence clearly shows that women leaders matter. First, women experience the world differently, not only because of the peculiarities of women's bodies, but also because of the way we are treated and the way we perceive the world. Women leaders therefore consider different priorities than male leaders. Decades of research in OECD countries have found that the proportion of women parliamentarians greatly influences policy discussions and national budget-making strategies.
Another example I like is Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In, where she got the company to use a parking space for pregnant women while working at Google. She went straight to the Google boss to ask for it, and he immediately agreed, finding that she had never thought about it before. This case tells us a key problem: many times it is not that men are not good leaders and women are good leaders, but that men experience the world differently from women, and there are some problems that they cannot think of and understand, but women leaders can be aware of those problems.
Let me conclude by saying that we expect too much from female leaders, simply because there are so few of them. We felt they needed to be role models for all women, and they needed to prove that women are capable of doing great things, even things that men can't. A man can represent only himself, but if a woman becomes a failed leader, it makes people think that women as a whole are not good — a situation that only changes when mediocre female leaders are as commonplace as mediocre male leaders.