Invisible Women

Male-unless-otherwise-indicated

Numerous studies in a variety of languages over the past forty years have consistently found that what is called the ‘generic masculine’ (using words like ‘he’ in a gender-neutral way) is not in fact read generically.20 It is read overwhelmingly as male.

Countries with gender-inflected languages, which have strong ideas of masculine and feminine present in almost every utterance, are the most unequal in terms of gender.

In 2016, Unicode decided to do something about this. Abandoning their previously ‘neutral’ gender stance, they decided to explicitly gender all emojis that depicted people.

The reality is that even if they had somehow managed to design an image of a ‘gender neutral’ runner, most of us would still have read that runner as male, because we read most things as male unless they are specifically marked as female.

The result of this deeply male-dominated culture is that the male experience, the male perspective, has come to be seen as universal, while the female experience – that of half the global population, after all – is seen as, well, niche.

It is why a 2015 study of multiple language Wikipedias found that articles about women include words like ‘woman’, ‘female’ or ‘lady’, but articles about men don’t contain words like ‘man’, ‘masculine’ or ‘gentleman’ (because the male sex goes without saying).60

Whiteness and maleness are silent precisely because they do not need to be vocalised. Whiteness and maleness are implicit. They are unquestioned. They are the default.

Because this perspective is not articulated as white and male (because it doesn’t need to be), because it is the norm, it is presumed not to be subjective. It is presumed to be objective. Universal, even.

But the data we do have makes it clear that women are invariably more likely than men to walk and take public transport.

Given women generally walk further and for longer than men (in part because of their care-giving responsibilities; in part because women tend to be poorer), this marginalisation of non-motorised travel inevitably affects them more.

Around the world women have less access to household finances than men, while the global gender pay gap currently stands at 37.8% (it varies hugely from country to country, being 18.1% in the UK; 23% in Australia; and 59.6% in Angola).

Because women take up to 2.3 times as long as men to use the toilet.3 Women make up the majority of the elderly and disabled, two groups that will tend to need more time in the toilet. Women are also more likely to be accompanied by children, as well as disabled and older people.4 Then there’s the 20–25% of women of childbearing age who may be on their period at any one time, and therefore needing to change a tampon or a sanitary pad.

Women are often scared in public spaces. In fact, they are around twice as likely to be scared as men.

What they found was revealing. It turned out that single large open spaces were the problem, because these forced girls to compete with the boys for space. And girls didn’t have the confidence to compete with the boys (that’s social conditioning for you) so they tended to just let the boys have the space.

Or, if they couldn’t afford to pay, girls didn’t do sports at all. Most readers will be unsurprised by the report’s conclusion that the failure to invest in girls’ sport contributed to poorer mental health in girls.

When planners fail to account for gender, public spaces become male spaces by default.

When Ryan Gosling thanked his partner Eva Mendes at the 2017 Golden Globes for her unpaid work, acknowledging that without it he would not be on stage accepting an award, he marked himself out as a rare man.

The payments a pensioner receives are directly based on their past contributions and the number of years during which the person is expected to collect benefits. This means women are penalised for the following: having to take time out for unpaid care work; early retirement (still a legal requirement in certain countries and professions); and for living longer.

There is a caveat, however: not all maternity-leave policies are made equal. The length of time and the amount of money on offer matter. If women aren’t given enough time off, there is a risk they will leave the paid labour force entirely,64 or transition to part-time work.65 When Google noticed that they were losing women who had just given birth at twice the rate of other employees, they increased their maternity leave from three months at partial pay to five months at full pay. The attrition rate dropped 50%.

A recent Australian analysis found that the optimum length of paid maternity leave for ensuring women’s continued participation in paid labour was between seven months to a year,68 and there is no country in the world that offers properly paid leave for that length of time.

Things are worse for women in the US, which is one of only four countries in the world that doesn’t guarantee at least some paid maternity leave.76 The Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees twelve weeks of unpaid leave – but, amongst other restrictions you are eligible only if you have worked for a business with at least 50 other employees for the past twelve months.

One in four American mothers return to work within two weeks of giving birth.

Google offers a stipend for takeout meals in the first three months after a baby is born, subsidised childcare, and has included conveniences like dry cleaners on its campus, so employees can do their errands during the workday.105 Sony Ericsson and Evernote go further, paying for their employees to have their houses cleaned.106 Workplaces in the US increasingly provide dedicated spaces for new mothers to breast-pump.107 American Express will even pay for women to ship their breastmilk home if they have to travel for work while they are breastfeeding.108 But companies that remember to account for women are exceptions. When Apple announced its US HQ in 2017 as the ‘best office building in the world’, this state-of-the-art office was slated to include medical and dental treatment, luxury wellness spas – but not a child daycare centre.109 Best office in the world for men, then?

Ideological male bias doesn’t simply arise at a workplace level: it is woven into the laws that govern how employment works. For example: what counts as a work expense. This is not as objective or as gender neutral a decision as you might think. The expenses that a company will allow its employees to claim back will generally correspond to what that country’s government has decided counts as a work expense. And this in turn generally corresponds to the kinds of things men will need to claim. Uniforms and tools are in; emergency day care is out.

So when her firm announced that it was hosting a directors’ dinner, Bovasso had a decision to make: was this dinner worth the $200 it would cost her for a sitter and travel?

Expense codes are based on the assumption that the employee has a wife at home taking care of the home and the kids. This work doesn’t need paying for, because it’s women’s work, and women don’t get paid for it.

Studies have shown that a belief in your own personal objectivity, or a belief that you are not sexist, makes you less objective and more likely to behave in a sexist way.

The power of the male default: in the same way that men picture a man 80% of the time they think of a ‘person’,

The mode of thinking that sees male as universal and female as niche.

When students have an emotional problem, it is their female professors, not their male professors they turn to.39 Students are also more likely to request extensions, grade boosts, and rule-bending of female academics.31 In isolation, a request of this kind isn’t likely to take up much time or mental energy – but they add up, and they constitute a cost on female academics’ time that male academics mostly aren’t even aware of, and that universities don’t account for.

Schools are also teaching brilliance bias to boys. As we saw in the introduction, following decades of ‘draw a scientist’ studies where children overwhelmingly drew men, a recent ‘draw a scientist’ meta-analysis was celebrated across the media as showing that finally we were becoming less sexist.44 Where in the 1960s only 1% of children drew female scientists, 28% do now.

Studies show that female academics are more likely than men to challenge male-default analysis in their work.53 This means that the more women who are publishing, the faster the gender data gap in research will close.

Given the evidence that children learn brilliance bias at school, it should be fairly easy to stop teaching them this. And in fact a recent study found that female students perform better in science when the images in their textbooks include female scientists.54 So to stop teaching girls that brilliance doesn’t belong to them, we just need to stop misrepresenting women. Easy.

In fact, women were the original ‘computers’, doing complex maths problems by hand for the military before the machine that took their name replaced them.56 Even after they were replaced by a machine, it took years before they were replaced by men. ENIAC, the world’s first fully functional digital computer, was unveiled in 1946, having been programmed by six women.57 During the 1940s and 50s, women remained the dominant sex in programming,

Women, who as we have seen do 75% of the world’s unpaid care work, may not have the spare leisure time to spend hours chatting about manga online.

Gild undoubtedly did not intend to create an algorithm that discriminated against women. They were intending to remove human biases. But if you aren’t aware of how those biases operate, if you aren’t collecting data and taking a little time to produce evidence-based processes, you will continue to blindly perpetuate old injustices. And so by not considering the ways in which women’s lives differ from men’s, both on and offline, Gild’s coders inadvertently created an algorithm with a hidden bias against women.

Recent research has emerged showing that while women tend to assess their intelligence accurately, men of average intelligence think they are more intelligent than two-thirds of people.

(the average man’s stride is 9–10% longer than the average woman’s).

To do to comply with this legal requirement is to buy smaller sizes.55 A 2009 survey by the Women’s Engineering Society found 74% of PPE was designed for men.