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A review by danielleor
Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez
Did not finish book.
Review:
It's this book that I've seen quite a lot in science/lefty spaces and been meaning to pick up for a while. But around page 30/40, they quoted Sarah Ditum, whos name I recognized from her weird rants about housekeepers and trans women on Twitter, so I was like yikes. Then I decided to just flick to the index and find wherever they've mentioned trans people, because obviously in a book about exploring how gender biases in data can be very harmful, they'll obviously at least mention ONCE something about how the problems are compounded for trans people, and how trans people need to be taken into account too. But nope. Not one mention of trans people at all in the entire 300 page book. So that's where I got suspicious. Looked up the author on Twitter, and the first thing I see that she's retweeted is an article about a trans woman predator and how that proves that trans women are just predators and self-ID will just push up the crime statistics for women, bc all the predatory men will just ID as women, apparently. Then I search her name, and she's literally part of that cohort of British white women ""journalists"" who are massive fucking TERFs, and who "stand with" JK Rowling. So I've lost a lot of interest in reading this now. Like it's annoying, cause the data itself on gender bias is very interesting, but you're really missing out a whole other perspective of how the lived experience of trans people intersects with how gender is processed and analysed (or the lack thereof). And yeah, maybe I'd continue if it was just an oversight, tho I'd definitely give it a max of three stars, cause that's a massive oversight on the topic. But now I know the author behind it, it's obviously done with malicious intent, and I can't stand behind an author who's so massively an asshole. And now I'm sad bc I've wanted this book for a while, and I should have really assumed that it wouldn't be what I wanted it to be. Like I get the drawbacks of a whole book about analysing data based on gender, but I assumed it would include gender presentation, rather than just biological XX/XY sex. Not even any mention of intersex people, or people who have different variations of X and Y chromosomes, and how that in turn effects how data is analysed and understood. So now I'm just a lil annoyed at myself for not looking more into the author, as now I've wasted €13, and I've already wrote stuff in it, so I can't return it. Anyway. Wouldn't recommend.
It's this book that I've seen quite a lot in science/lefty spaces and been meaning to pick up for a while. But around page 30/40, they quoted Sarah Ditum, whos name I recognized from her weird rants about housekeepers and trans women on Twitter, so I was like yikes. Then I decided to just flick to the index and find wherever they've mentioned trans people, because obviously in a book about exploring how gender biases in data can be very harmful, they'll obviously at least mention ONCE something about how the problems are compounded for trans people, and how trans people need to be taken into account too. But nope. Not one mention of trans people at all in the entire 300 page book. So that's where I got suspicious. Looked up the author on Twitter, and the first thing I see that she's retweeted is an article about a trans woman predator and how that proves that trans women are just predators and self-ID will just push up the crime statistics for women, bc all the predatory men will just ID as women, apparently. Then I search her name, and she's literally part of that cohort of British white women ""journalists"" who are massive fucking TERFs, and who "stand with" JK Rowling. So I've lost a lot of interest in reading this now. Like it's annoying, cause the data itself on gender bias is very interesting, but you're really missing out a whole other perspective of how the lived experience of trans people intersects with how gender is processed and analysed (or the lack thereof). And yeah, maybe I'd continue if it was just an oversight, tho I'd definitely give it a max of three stars, cause that's a massive oversight on the topic. But now I know the author behind it, it's obviously done with malicious intent, and I can't stand behind an author who's so massively an asshole. And now I'm sad bc I've wanted this book for a while, and I should have really assumed that it wouldn't be what I wanted it to be. Like I get the drawbacks of a whole book about analysing data based on gender, but I assumed it would include gender presentation, rather than just biological XX/XY sex. Not even any mention of intersex people, or people who have different variations of X and Y chromosomes, and how that in turn effects how data is analysed and understood. So now I'm just a lil annoyed at myself for not looking more into the author, as now I've wasted €13, and I've already wrote stuff in it, so I can't return it. Anyway. Wouldn't recommend.