When the Big Data Is Missing Half of the Population

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When the Big Data Is Missing Half of the Population 

“Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.”by Simone de Beauvoir

Caroline Criado Perez, 2019, Invisible Women Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, New York: Abrams Press.

Sources:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0276146719875186?journalCode=jmka

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/23/gender-data-gap-wins-royal-society-science-book-prize-caroline-criado-perez-invisible-women

There is gender disparity across the globe. What is perhaps less obvious is a widespread lack of gender disaggregated data, a gap that has far-reaching consequences across around the world. Setting out to tackle this important and often overlooked gap, journalist, activist, and writer Caroline Criado Perez wrote Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. Caroline Criado Perez is a British writer and feminist campaigner,who successfully pushed for Jane Austen to be featured on the UK’s £10 note, called her £25,000 win on Monday night a huge relief.  Caroline Criado Perez’s exposé of the gender data gap that has created a world biased against women has won her the Royal Society science book prize. 

In this book, Criado Perez carefully amassed and synthesized hundreds of examples from a wide range of sources, describing at length the existence of systemic discrimination against women. This discrimination, she argues, contributes to and is based on biased or missing data, which results in significant impact for women and society. The impact, she contends, can be minor (e.g., women feeling cold in offices set at the average male temperature norm) or deadly (e.g., women dying in cars designed for the average male or dying from heart attacks as women’s typical symptoms are viewed as ‘atypical’ as compared to men’s symptoms). Worldwide, indoor air pollution is the single largest environmental risk factor for female mortality and the leading killer of children under the age of five. And that toxic fumes from stoves are one of the main contributors.

Criado Perez argues in the first sentence of her book that “most of recorded human history is one big data gap”, where women have been largely left out. She is careful to note that this oversight is likely not malicious or deliberate, but is rather a result of implicit continuations of societal norms where “men go without saying, and women don’t get said at all”, and where sex-based data is not collected, disaggregated, or used. Instead, she contends that men – especially the so-called ‘average man’ – are the world’s de facto default and forgotten women are rendered invisible across large swathes of life. As a result, women suffer from a world not designed around their needs, facing subpar services, products, and experiences across many areas of their lives.

Invisible Women consists of six parts, from product design and urban planning that affect daily life, to medical research and drug experiments, working environment, to more macro-level social security and tax construction, and post-disaster reconstruction initiatives are designed for men as a default, which reveals that in a world built by men, gender gaps, biases and blind spots are everywhere in data and algorithms.

Invisible Women shows us how, in a world largely built for and by men, we are systematically ignoring half the population. It exposes the gender data gap – a gap in our knowledge that is at the root of perpetual, systemic discrimination against women, and that has created a pervasive but invisible bias with a profound effect on women’s lives.

Gender culture and gender data gap

Simone de Beauvoir made it most famously when in 1949 she wrote, ‘humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself, but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.’Gender power relations determine that men are set as the "default mode" of human beings, and the female perspective of everything is missing. Starting with the theory of Man the Hunter, the chroniclers of the past have left little space for women’s role in the evolution of humanity, whether cultural or biological. Instead, the lives of men have been taken to represent those of humans overall. When it comes to the lives of the other half of humanity, there is often nothing but silence. And these silences are everywhere. Our entire culture is riddled with them. Films, news, literature, science, city planning, economics. The stories we tell ourselves about our past, present and future. They are all marked – disfigured– by a female-shaped ‘absent presence’. This is the gender data gap.

In this gender culture, as humans became more and more dependent on data and algorithms, the world naturally evolved into a world based on male data.One of the most important things to say about the gender data gap is that it is not generally malicious, or even deliberate. Quite the opposite. It is simply the product of a way of thinking that has been around for millennia and is therefore a kind of not thinking. But this unreflective way of thinking distorts the supposedly objective data that govern production and life, thus affecting every aspect of women's lives.

There are many examples of sexism in data: 71% of women wear protective work clothing that isn't designed for women's bodies. British men enjoy 5 hours more leisure time per week than women. Husbands create an exter 7 hours of housework a week for women. The average smartphone is 5.5 inches too big for The average women's hand. Current offices are on average 5 degrees too cold for women.But not life-threatening. Not like crashing in a car whose safety measures don’t account for women’s measurements. Not like having your heart attack go undiagnosed because your symptoms are deemed ‘atypical’. For these women, the consequences of living in a world built around male data can be deadly.

In a rational world increasingly run by supercomputers, Caroline uses data to tell the reader that women are still what Simone de Beauvoir calls "the other," "the second sex."

Gender data gap in daily life

Officials in Karlskoga, Sweden, adjusted the order of snow removal, a change that actually reduced the number of women's emergency departments.The original order of snow removal was the priority of main roads, followed by local roads and sidewalks. Obviously, this arrangement was only to meet the needs of men.Men are most likely to have a fairly simple travel pattern: a twice-daily commute in and out of town. But women’s travel patterns tend to be more complicated. Women do 75% of the world’s unpaid care work and this affects their travel needs. A typical female travel pattern involves, for example, dropping children off at school before going to work; taking an elderly relative to the doctor and doing the grocery shopping on the way home.This travelling patterns increases the risk of fractures in women pushing carts in the snow. The initial snow removal arrangement benefited mainly men who commuted normally. If the town noticed this gender travel difference from the beginning, they could save a lot of medical expenses.

A third of the world’s population lack adequate toilet provision at all. According to the UN, one in three women lack access to safe toilets, and WaterAid reports that girls and women collectively spend 97 billion hours a year finding a safe place to relieve themselves. The lack of adequate toilet provision is a public health problem for both sexes (for example, in India, where 60% of the population does not have access to a toilet, 90% of surface water is contaminated), but the problem is particularly acute for women, in no small part because of the attitude that men can ‘go anywhere’,while for women to be seen urinating is shameful. Women get up before dawn and then wait for hours until dusk to go out again in search of a relatively private place to urinate or defecate.In poor countries, inadequate sanitation facilities increase women's risk of sexual assault and urinary tract infections. A 2015 study by Yale University showed that when a town in South Africa increased the number of toilets from 5,600 to 11,300, the number of sexual assault cases decreased by 30%.Even in developed countries, there are often long lines in front of women's toilets in shopping malls, which is related to the failure to consider the needs of women in the arrangement of toilets.On the face of it, it may seem fair and equitable to accord male and female,public toilets the same amount of floor space – and historically, this is the way it has been done. 50/50 division of floor space has even been formalised in plumbing codes. However, if a male toilet has both cubicles and urinals, the number of people who can relieve themselves at once is far higher per square foot of floor space in the male bathroom than in the female bathroom.Suddenly equal floor space isn’t so equal.

But even if male and female toilets had an equal number of stalls, the issue wouldn’t be resolved, because women take up to 2.3 times as long as men to use the toilet. 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.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.

Inadequate sanitation is just one of many gender-insensitive designs in daily life. Gender bias is embedded in all areas of social life, such as the design of bus stations and the division of public fitness areas. They are not friendly to women.

Gender data gap in technology

Technology is generally assumed to be absolutely objective and neutral, but the field of technology is also full of "invisible women" cases. Voice recognition software has a lower recognition rate for female voices than male voices, which may cause certain risks, such as when the car's voice command system cannot understand the language of the female driver; or in the software, the instructions given by the female medical staff to the patient cannot be interpreted Accurately identifying and recording these can cause security risks. The translation software translates female doctors and doctors into males by default; Apple's mobile phone's health application can track the body's copper intake, but it cannot be used to track women's menstrual periods. Women are more prone to motion sickness when using VR. These are just a few examples of the "men's default" technology that is inconvenient for women's lives.

In medical and medical research, males are also used to represent humans, but more and more cases have found that female symptoms and drug responses need to be measured separately. In the case of heart disease, young women are twice as likely to die from a heart attack in hospitals than men.The reason is whose symptoms are different from the "typical symptoms", that is, the symptoms of men, which the doctor did not detect in time. Similarly, some preventative drugs, such as aspirin, are effective for men, but they are not effective for women. The current medical case data and the algorithms based on this are based on men, so the code written and the diagnostic tools used may make women's health care services worse.

On the one hand, gender bias in technology is due to gender bias in the data and algorithms that support the development of science and technology. The databases used in various fields are based on men and lack data on women. On the other hand, this is the impact of male-led technology research and development. The technology developed by white males is inevitably biased towards males, and people in other parts of the world, especially women, are neglected or wrongly "represented".

Gender data gap in product design

Most of the technology and products aimed at women have simply shrunk and turned pink, without really addressing women's needs.

Women have a unique and complex biological structure, but we lack all kinds of data on the female body and physiology. In the case of women's menstrual periods, menstruation is one of the most important physical signs of the female body, as important as heart rate, body temperature, respiration, etc., but it is unspeakable, and there is still a lack of available data when designing apps to track menstruation. Poor pelvic-floor health in women was ‘a massively hidden epidemic’: 37% of women suffer from pelvic-floor issues; 10% of women will need to have an operation at some point because of prolapse (where your organs start dropping through your vagina). Fifty percent of the population have a vagina,but when we were trying to design a product which fits in the vagina, there just was no data at all. Entrepreneurs who develop new technologies and products for women have difficulty obtaining high-quality data, and they cannot rely on experienced venture capitalists (93% of venture capitalists are men). Therefore, women's products are difficult to satisfy. You can feel this by looking at how many breast pump products are currently on the market.

when a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured than a man, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured, even when researchers control for factors such as height, weight, seat-belt usage, and crash intensity. She is also 17% more likely to die. And it’s all to do with how the car is designed – and for whom. This gap is hardly unexpected though: car design has a long and ignominious history of ignoring women. In the 1950s, dummies were introduced into car crash testing, and they were made using an average male design. So car seat belts and driver seats are designed for the "average man", not taking into account women's lighter weight and the fact that they tend to sit closer to the wheel. Only in the past few years do car regulators seem to have recognized the existence of women, and since then have introduced "crash test female dummies", which are only miniature men, But which can`t represent women. They have different muscle mass, different vertebrae spacing, lower bone density and different body balance, so cars are still not designed for women. Men are the indestructible "default choice". From welfare to science and technology product design, to the health care and other fields, Caroline will often hear "a woman's life is too trivial" of "a woman's body is too complex, researchers prefer to ignore the half the world's population, the female as" small size of men ", is not willing to participate in the research of complex.

Bridging the gender data gap

As Foucault has pointed out, power is not a static entity or simply an instrument possessed by those in power to oppress the powerless. Power is a social relation developed in everyday social interaction, in which the powerless as well as those in power abide by taken for granted social regulations.When a social rule is shaped by male data, women's needs become hidden and invisible.

How to solve the problem of gender bias in the field of production and life? Caroline gives the answer: Hire more women and improve their leadership to ensure that the product design team is truly diverse and representative. We need to realize that diversity is not just a simple option for the user to check, but the key to designing products that really suit him and her. From the beginning, we should collect data of different genders.

The solution to the sex and gender data gap is clear: we have to close the female representation gap. When women are involved in decision-making, in research, in knowledge production, women do not get forgotten.

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