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

with this apparently gender-neutral approach, which is that it isn’t gender-neutral in effect: interrupting simply isn’t viewed the same way when women do it. In June 2017 US Senator Kamala Harris was asking an evasive Attorney General Jeff Sessions some tough questions. When he prevaricated once too often, she interrupted him and pressed him to answer. She was then in turn (on two separate occasions) interrupted and admonished by Senator John McCain for her questioning style.⁷⁶ He did not do the same to her colleague Senator Rob Wyden, who subjected Sessions to similarly dogged questioning, and it was only Harris who was later dubbed ‘hysterical’.⁷⁷

The problem isn’t that women are irrationally polite. It’s that they know – whether consciously or not – that ‘polite’ interrupting simply doesn’t exist for them. So telling women to behave more like men – as if male behaviour is a gender-neutral human default – is unhelpful, and in fact potentially damaging. What is instead called for is a political and work environment that accounts both for the fact that men interrupt more than women do, and that women are penalised if they behave in a similar way.

It has become fashionable for modern workplaces to relax what are often seen as outmoded relics of a less egalitarian age: out with stuffy hierarchies, in with flat organisational structures. But the problem with the absence of a formal hierarchy is that it doesn’t actually result in an absence of a hierarchy altogether. It just means that the unspoken, implicit, profoundly non-egalitarian structure reasserts itself, with white men at the top and the rest of us fighting for a piece of the small space left for everyone else. Group-discussion approaches like brainstorming, explains female leadership trainer Gayna Williams, are ‘well known to be loaded with challenges for diverse representation’, because already-dominant voices dominate.⁷⁸

But simple adjustments like monitoring interruptions⁷⁹ and more formally allocating a set amount of time for each person to speak have both been shown to attenuate male dominance of debates. This is in fact what Glen Mazarra, a showrunner at FX TV drama The Shield, did when he noticed that female writers weren’t speaking up in the writer’s room – or that when they did, they were interrupted and their ideas overtaken. He instituted a no-interruption policy while writers (male or female) were pitching. It worked – and, he says, ‘it made the entire team more effective’.⁸⁰

A more ambitious route would be changing the structure of governance altogether: away from majority-based, and towards unanimous decision-making. This has been shown to boost women’s speech participation and to mitigate against their minority position⁸¹ (a 2012 US study found that women only participate at an equal rate in discussions when they are in ‘a large majority’⁸² – interestingly while individual women speak less when they are in the minority, individual men speak the same amount no matter what the gender proportion of the group).

Some countries have attempted to legislate against the more extreme ways in which women’s voices are shut out from power. Since 2012, Bolivia has made political violence against a woman elected to or holding public office a criminal offence; in 2016 they also passed a law preventing anyone with a background of violence against women from running for political office.

But on the whole, most countries proceed as if female politicians do not operate at a systemic disadvantage. While most parliaments have codes of conduct, these are generally focused on maintaining a gender-neutral ‘decorum’. Most countries have no official procedure for settling sexual-harassment complaints, and it’s often up to whoever happens to be in charge (usually a man) to decide whether sexism is in fact indecorous and therefore against rules. Often they don’t. One female MP told the IPU that when she demanded a point of order following a sexist insult from a colleague, the Speaker had rejected her motion. ‘I cannot control what another member thinks of you,’ she was told.

The UK used to have a gender-specific code of conduct for local government, overseen by an independent body which had the power to suspend councillors. But this was discarded under the 2010 coalition government’s ‘Red Tape Challenge’. It is now up to each local authority to decide which standards to set and how to enforce them. The government’s recommendations for how this should be done included only one vague reference to promoting ‘high standards of conduct’ and did not mention non-discrimination at all.⁸³ There is no longer any clear mechanism by which councillors can be suspended for non-criminal misconduct.⁸⁴

It is unsurprising then that by 2017, when the Fawcett Society produced a report on local government, the women’s charity found ‘a harmful culture of sexism in parts of local government politics which would not be out of place in the 1970s’, where ‘sexism is tolerated, and viewed as part of political life’, and where almost four in ten women councillors have had sexist remarks directed at them by other councillors.⁸⁵ One female councillor described ‘a culture of demeaning younger women and dismissing the contribution that women make’. A women’s group was described as ‘the wives club’; a dinner with a senior national political speaker ‘was promoted as an opportunity for ‘the wives’ to dress up’. When she and a fellow female colleague challenged the behaviour they were described as ‘aggressive’, and ‘referred to by demeaning, sexist nicknames’. Her emailed questions have gone ignored; she has been excluded from meeting notifications; and she described her contributions to discussions as ‘tolerated rather than welcomed’. On social media her own party colleagues told her to ‘run away little girl and let the grown-ups do their job’.

There are two central points to take away from this section. The first is that when you exclude half the population from a role in governing itself, you create a gender data gap at the very top. We have to understand that when it comes to government the ‘best’ doesn’t have to mean ‘those who have the money, the time and the unearned confidence from going