Book review: Caroline Criado Perez's Invisible Women

Book review
Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
By Caroline Criado Perez

Caroline Criado Perez's Invisible Women delivers a data-packed wake-up call about the gender gaps embedded throughout our society. For anyone who solves problems for people, which includes every project manager, this book should be essential reading.

The data driven expose reveals the world has been constructed around one basic assumption, men are the typical and therefore the default whereas women are the 'other' or the 'atypical'. This oversight has led to the ever-growing gaps in health, design, public policies and systemic issues which entirely exclude, ignore and hence endanger women.

The book provides riveting examples backed by hard data citing research or surveys. Criado Perez reveals crash test dummies completely exclude women's bodies and are based entirely on the average man making women 73% more likely to suffer serious injuries in car accidents. Heart attack symptoms taught in med schools are based on male representations whereas women's symptoms are ignored entirely or misdiagnosed. Public transport systems are designed around commuter routes dominated by male workers which end up overlooking women’s significantly more complex travel patterns as they manage caregiving and household responsibilities. Additionally, poorly lit, isolated bus stops compound this design flaw and create antisocial environments which disproportionately impact women’s safety and restrict their mobility, especially after dark. These examples reflect everyday occurrences of ignorance which are extremely familiar to women and should make us feel uncomfortable. As project managers, these should make us think and question, who is being ignored while we default to the typical user.

I found these statistics incredibly disheartening. Each data point represents real harm, accidents which could have been prevented, heart attacks misdiagnosed as anxiety, daily frustrations dismissed as complaints. As a woman, seeing the extent of the damage from this systemic oversight quantified by numbers made the invisible painfully visible. Nothing felt like a minor inconvenience; it made me face how the world I live in is structurally designed against half its population.

Organised in six sections covering daily life, workplace dynamics, design, healthcare, public life and crises, the book showcases how each facet of life has been plagued by these biases. Criado Perez effectively shows how the issues are global and not just local but also presents that they vary between the global north and south. Western women endure office temperatures calibrated for male bodies, while in developing nations, disaster relief planning fails to account for women's different movement patterns and safety needs. Women are not treated as having a uniform monolithic experience which plays a big part in the success of this book. What struck me most was recognising my own privilege built within these systems of bias. While I struggle with poorly designed workspaces, elsewhere women are facing life-threatening gaps in emergency response. The book forced me to confront not just gender bias but acknowledge how it intersects with every form of marginalisation.

For those of us in the Built Environment sector, this book raises critical questions about our industry’s practices. How many of our user personas default to male perspectives? Does stakeholder analysis seek women's voices? The recent Fawcett Society report revealed women make up only 31% of ARB-registered architects – similar gender imbalances exist among surveyors and project managers. This is not a pipeline problem; this is a manufactured design problem. Site PPE and boots sized only for men create safety hazards that signal women do not belong on site. Criado emphasises how even in data collection, women of colour are actively lumped in with people of colour in data collection activities and are therefore completely overshadowed. Her call for sex-disaggregated data collection is essential if we are to create truly inclusive outcomes – from safer construction sites to buildings that serve all users, not the historical default.

Invisible Women is both heartbreaking and essential. While Criado Perez’s examples may seem repetitive, I found them necessary – each one a brutal reminder of how absurd these oversights are. As a woman in project management, this book provided a backbone to all the frustrations I have felt but wasn’t able to articulate or identify before. It’s a compelling reminder that the most dangerous bias is the one you don't know you have and as project managers, we have the responsibility and the power to be aware of the existing biases and become the first ripple of change. This book doesn’t just ask us to do better; it provides a definitive starting point. Whether we are planning transport networks, designing public spaces, or conducting research – we must consistently ask: who are we making invisible and what harm is this invisibility causing?

Frances Palmer
APM Built Environment Interest Network volunteer