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

five female parliamentarians surveyed by the IPU had been ‘subjected to one or more acts of sexual violence’, while a third had witnessed sexual violence being committed against a female colleague. During the 2010 elections in Afghanistan, nearly all of the female candidates received threatening phone calls,⁵³ and some female MPs in the country require round-the-clock protection.⁵⁴ ‘Almost every day I fear for my life,’ Afghan MP Fawzia Koofi told the Guardian in 2014;⁵⁵ a year later one of her female colleagues died in a car bomb – the second deadly attack on a female politician in Afghanistan in the space of three months.⁵⁶

The aggression seems to increase along with the proportion of female politicians. Research from around the world (including saintly Scandinavia) has shown that as female representation increases, so does hostility against female politicians.⁵⁷ Especially from their male colleagues. Studies⁵⁸ in the US and New Zealand have shown that men ‘become more verbally aggressive and controlling of both committee hearings and parliamentary debates following an expansion in the proportion of women in the legislature’. Another study found that as the proportion of women in US Congress increases (bear in mind Congress is only 19.4% female⁵⁹), women are less likely to achieve leadership positions within their parties.⁶⁰ Further research⁶¹ from the US and Argentina has shown that having large numbers of female legislators is ‘tied to both women’s diminished success in passing legislation and reduced chances of being appointed to “masculine” and “powerful” Committees’.⁶² In a similar vein, US analysis has found that framing human rights issues as women’s rights issues makes male politicians less likely to support legislation, and if a rights bill is mainly sponsored by women, it ends up being watered down and states are less likely to invest resources.⁶³ It seems that democracy – in so far as it pertains to women – is broken.

Working in the context of such extreme psychological warfare inevitably affects women’s ability to do their jobs. Many women told the IPU that they had restricted their travel, made sure they went home before nightfall, or only travelled when accompanied.⁶⁴ Others self-censor, particularly when it comes to speaking up about women’s issues⁶⁵ (which tend to generate the most aggression⁶⁶), some going as far as dispensing with social media altogether, and in this way deprive themselves ‘of a forum in which to disseminate and debate their ideas’.

Others simply stand down. Violence against female politicians in Asia and Latin America has been shown to make them less likely to stand for re-election and more likely to leave after fewer terms compared to male politicians.⁶⁷ ‘I don’t know if I will be a candidate in the next elections,’ one Asian MP told the IPU, ‘because I need to think about not causing too much harm to my family.’⁶⁸ Meanwhile one in three female politicians in Swedish local politics ‘reportedly considered giving up their positions as a result of threatening incidents’.⁶⁹

The abuse faced by female politicians also makes women more reluctant to stand in the first place. More than 75% of British women on a programme for aspiring female leaders said that sexist abuse of female politicians online ‘was a point of concern when considering whether to pursue a role in public life’.⁷⁰ In Australia, 60% of women aged eighteen to twenty-one and 80% of women over thirty-one said the way female politicians were treated by the media made them less likely to run for office.⁷¹ Nigeria experienced a ‘marked decline’ in the number of female politicians elected to the country’s congress between 2011 and 2015; a study by the US NGO the National Democratic Institute found that this could be ‘attributed to the violence and harassment that women in office face’.⁷² And, as we have seen, this decline in female representation will give rise to a gender data gap that in turn will result in the passing of less legislation that addresses women’s needs.

The evidence is clear: politics as it is practised today is not a female-friendly environment. This means that while technically the playing field is level, in reality women operate at a disadvantage compared to men. This is what comes of devising systems without accounting for gender.

Sheryl Sandberg’s approach for navigating hostile work environments, outlined in her book Lean In, is for women to buckle up and push through. And of course that is part of the solution. I am not a female politician, but as a woman with a public profile I get my own share of threats and abuse. And, unpopular as this opinion may be, I believe that the onus is on those of us who feel able to weather the storm, to do so. The threats come from a place of fear. In fact, a gender-data-gap-driven fear: certain men, who have grown up in a culture saturated by male voices and male faces, fear what they see as women taking away power and public space that is rightfully theirs. This fear will not dissipate until we fill in that cultural gender data gap, and, as a consequence, men no longer grow up seeing the public sphere as their rightful domain. So, to a certain extent, it is an ordeal that our generation of women needs to go through in order that the women who come after us don’t.

This is not to say that there are no structural solutions. Take the issue of women being interrupted. An analysis of fifteen years of Supreme Court oral arguments found that ‘men interrupt more than women, and they particularly interrupt women more than they interrupt other men’.⁷³ This goes for male lawyers (female lawyers weren’t found to interrupt at all) as well as judges, even though lawyers are meant to stop speaking when a justice starts speaking. And, as in the political sphere, the problem seems to have got worse as female representation on the bench has increased.

An individualist solution might be to tell women to interrupt right back⁷⁴ – perhaps working on their ‘polite interrupting’⁷⁵ skills. But there’s a problem