Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

reluctance to back female-led companies is partly a result of the ‘stereotype that men like great design and great tech and women don’t’. But is this stereotype based in reality, or is it possible that the problem isn’t tech-blind women so much as woman-blind tech, created by a woman-blind tech industry and funded by woman-blind investors?

A substantial chunk of tech start-ups are backed by venture capitalists (VCs) because they can take risks where banks can’t.⁷ The problem is that 93% of VCs are men,⁸ and, ‘men back men’, explains Debbie Woskow, co-founder of AllBright, a members’ club, academy, and fund that backs female-led business. ‘We need to have more women writing cheques. And men need to recognise that backing women is a great investment.’ Woskow tells me that when she was in the process of setting up AllBright with her friend Anna Jones, the former CEO of Hearst, ‘men who should know better, to be honest’ would ‘frequently’ tell them, ‘That’s lovely, it’s great that you and Anna have set up a charity.’ Woskow bristles at this. ‘We’re not a charity. We’re doing this because women deliver great economic returns.’

The data suggests she’s not wrong. Research published in 2018 by Boston Consulting Group found that although on average female business owners receive less than half the level of investment their male counterparts get, they produce more than twice the revenue.⁹ For every dollar of funding, female-owned start-ups generate seventy-eight cents, compared to male-owned start-ups which generate thirty-one cents. They also perform better over time, ‘generating 10% more in cumulative revenue over a five-year period’.

This may be partly because women are ‘better suited for leadership than men’.¹⁰ That was the conclusion of a study conducted by BI Norwegian Business School, which identified the five key traits (emotional stability, extraversion, openness to new experiences, agreeableness and conscientiousness) of a successful leader. Women scored higher than men in four out of the five. But it may also be because the women who do manage to make it through are filling a gender data gap: studies have repeatedly found that the more diverse a company’s leadership is, the more innovative they are.¹¹ This could be because women are just innately more innovative – but more likely is that the presence of diverse perspectives makes businesses better informed about their customers. Certainly, innovation is strongly linked to financial performance.

And when it comes to consumer electronics for women, Boler says, innovation has been sorely lacking. ‘There’s never been much innovation in consumer electronics for women,’ she says. ‘It’s always focused on a very superficial aesthetic level: turn something pink, or turn something into a piece of jewellery, rather than taking account of the fact that technology can solve real problems for women.’ The result has been a chronic lack of investment, meaning that ‘the actual technology that’s used in medical devices for women is sort of a kickback from the 1980s’.

When I interview her early in 2018 Tania Boler is about to launch her own breast pump, and she is scathing about what is currently available on the market. ‘It’s just horrible,’ she says, bluntly. ‘It’s painful, it’s loud, it’s difficult to use. It’s quite humiliating.’ I think of trying to hold a conversation with my sister-in-law as she sits on the sofa with her top off, her breasts wired up to a machine. ‘It’s not even that complicated to get it right,’ Boler adds. The notion that ‘it would be nice to pump while you’re able to do something else, rather than having to spend hours a day sitting there chained to this noisy machine’ should, she says be ‘a basic requirement’. But somehow, it hasn’t been. When I ask her why she thinks this is, Boler muses that perhaps it’s different for her because she’s a woman. So ‘I just go in with: “As a woman what do I want from this?”’

But if the data gap of what women actually want is fairly easily fixed by, well, asking women, there’s another more chronic gap: data on the female body itself. Boler developed her first product – Elvie, a smart pelvic-floor trainer – after realising that 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). This rises to 50% of women over fifty.

‘There’s a sense of injustice,’ says Boler. ‘It’s a big issue for women and it should be a normal part of how women look after their bodies. But you need to have information and data in order to do that.’ And when Boler was first researching the issue, that data simply didn’t exist. ‘We were trying to design a product which fits in the vagina, and so we needed to answer simple questions like, what size, how does it vary by age, by race, after children – all the usual questions. And there just was no data there at all. [. . .] Fifty per cent of the population have a vagina,’ she continues, ‘and yet there’s hardly any journal articles about this part of anatomy. Three years ago I found about four articles done decades ago.’ One of them was ‘literally by a guy who basically made a kind of plaster cast, like a mould inside the vagina, and concluded that there were four shapes: a mushroom and a cone and a heart . . .’ she trails off laughing.

Problems with pelvic-floor health are often preventable, and the evidence base for pelvic-floor training is ‘very strong’, Boler tells me. ‘It’s the number-one line of defence and it’s recommended under the NICE [National Institute for Health and Case Excellence] guidelines in the UK.’ But when she started looking at the technology in hospitals, ‘there had been no investment. It was so outdated, it was very unreliable and not even very valid.’ The current treatment for prolapse (to insert a mesh into the vagina) is the subject