When we exclude half of humanity from the production of knowledge we lose out on potentially transformative insights. Would male mathematicians have come up with Taimina’s elegantly simple solution on their own? Unlikely, given how few men are keen crocheters. But in Taimina the traditionally feminine skill of crochet collided with the traditionally masculine sphere of maths. And it was this collision that led to the problem that many mathematicians had given up on as a lost cause finally being solved. Taimina provided the link the male mathematicians were missing.
All too often, however, we don’t allow women to provide that link. And so we continue to treat too many of the world’s problems as insoluble. Like Freud, we continue to ‘knock our heads’ against what seem like riddles. But what if, like representing the hyperbolic plane, these problems aren’t insoluble? What if, like the problems in broadcast science competitions, all they are missing is a female perspective? The data that we do have is unarguable: as we continue to build, plan and develop our world, we have to start taking account of women’s lives. In particular, we have to start accounting for the three themes that define women’s relationship with that world.
The first of these themes is the female body – or, to be precise – its invisibility. Routinely forgetting to accommodate the female body in design – whether medical, technological or architectural – has led to a world that is less hospitable and more dangerous for women to navigate. It leads to us injuring ourselves in jobs and cars that weren’t designed for our bodies. It leads to us dying from drugs that don’t work. It has led to the creation of a world where women just don’t fit very well.
There is an irony in how the female body is apparently invisible when it comes to collecting data, because when it comes to the second trend that defines women’s lives, the visibility of the female body is key. That trend is male sexual violence against women – how we don’t measure it, don’t design our world to account for it, and in so doing, allow it to limit women’s liberty. Female biology is not the reason women are raped. It is not the reason women are intimidated and violated as they navigate public spaces. This happens not because of sex, but because of gender: the social meanings we have imposed on male and female bodies. In order for gender to work, it must be obvious which bodies elicit which treatment. And, clearly, it is: as we’ve seen, ‘the mere sight of a woman’ is enough for the viewer to ‘immediately elicit a specific set of associated traits and attributions’.8 To immediately class her as someone to speak over. Someone to cat call. Someone to follow. Someone to rape.
Or maybe just someone to make the tea. Which is where we run into the third trend, which is perhaps the most significant in terms of its impact on women’s lives worldwide: unpaid care work. Women are doing far and away more than our fair share of this work – this necessary work without which our lives would all fall apart. And, as with male violence against women, female biology is not the reason women are the bum-wiping class. But recognising a child as female is the reason she will be brought up to expect and accept that as her role. Recognising a woman as female is the reason she will be seen as the appropriate person to clear up after everyone in the office. To write the Christmas and birthday cards to her husband’s family – and look after them when they get sick. To be paid less. To go part-time when they have kids.
Failing to collect data on women and their lives means that we continue to naturalise sex and gender discrimination – while at the same time somehow not seeing any of this discrimination. Or really, we don’t see it because we naturalise it – it is too obvious, too commonplace, too much just the way things are to bother commenting on. It’s the irony of being a woman: at once hyper-visible when it comes to being treated as the subservient sex class, and invisible when it counts – when it comes to being counted.
There is one more trend I kept coming across while writing this book: the excuses. Chief amongst these is that women are just too complicated to measure. Everyone was saying this, from transport planners, to medical researchers, to tech developers: they were all knocking their heads up against Freud’s riddle of femininity and coming away baffled and defeated. Female bodies are too unharmonious, too menstrual and too hormonal. Women’s travel patterns are too messy, their work schedules are too aberrant, their voices are too high. Even when, in the early twentieth century, influential Swiss architect Le Corbusier was devising a standard human model for use in architecture, the female body was ‘only belatedly considered and rejected as a source of proportional harmony’,9 with humanity instead represented by a six-foot man with his arm raised (to reach that top shelf I can never reach).
The consensus is clear: women are abnormal, atypical, just plain wrong. Why can’t a woman be more like a man? Well, apologies on behalf of the female sex for being so mysterious, but no, we aren’t and no we can’t. And that is a reality that scientists, politicians and tech bros just need to face up to. Yes, simple is easier. Simple is cheaper. But simple doesn’t reflect reality.
Back in 2008, Chris Anderson, then editor of tech magazine Wired, penned an article headlined ‘The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Model Obsolete’.10 We can
