Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men(2)

Invisible Women is a story about absence – and that sometimes makes it hard to write about. If there is a data gap for women overall (both because we don’t collect the data in the first place and because when we do we usually don’t separate it by sex), when it comes to women of colour, disabled women, working-class women, the data is practically non-existent. Not simply because it isn’t collected, but because it is not separated out from the male data – what is called ‘sex-disaggregated data’. In statistics on representation from academic jobs to film roles, data is given for ‘women’ and ‘ethnic minorities’, with data for female ethnic minorities lost within each larger group. Where they exist, I have given them – but they barely ever do.

The point of this book is not psychoanalysis. I do not have direct access to the innermost thoughts of those who perpetuate the gender data gap, which means that this book cannot provide ultimate proof for why the gender data gap exists. I can only present you with the data, and ask you as a reader to look at the evidence. But nor am I interested in whether or not the person who produced a male-biased tool was a secret sexist. Private motivations are, to a certain extent, irrelevant. What matters is the pattern. What matters is whether, given the weight of the data I will present, it is reasonable to conclude that the gender data gap is all just one big coincidence.

I will argue that it is not. I will argue that the gender data gap is both a cause and a consequence of the type of unthinking that conceives of humanity as almost exclusively male. I will show how often and how widely this bias crops up, and how it distorts the supposedly objective data that increasingly rules our lives. I will show that even in this super-rational world increasingly run by super-impartial supercomputers, women are still very much de Beauvoir’s Second Sex – and that the dangers of being relegated to, at best, a sub-type of men, are as real as they have ever been.





Introduction: The Default Male


Seeing men as the human default is fundamental to the structure of human society. It’s an old habit and it runs deep – as deep as theories of human evolution itself. In the fourth century BC Aristotle was already baldly articulating male default as unarguable fact: ‘The first departure from type is indeed that the offspring should become female instead of male’, he wrote in his biological treatise On the Generation of Animals. (He did allow that this aberration was, however, ‘a natural necessity’.)

Over two thousand years later, in 1966, the University of Chicago held a symposium on primitive hunter-gatherer societies. It was called ‘Man the Hunter’. Over seventy-five social anthropologists from around the world gathered to debate the centrality of hunting to human evolution and development. The consensus was that it is pretty central.1 ‘The biology, psychology, and customs that separate us from the apes – all these we owe to the hunters of time past’, claimed one of the papers published in the resulting book. Which is all very well, only, as feminists pointed out, this theory poses something of a problem for female evolution. Because, as the book made clear, hunting was a male activity. So if ‘our intellect, interests, emotions, and basic social life – all are evolutionary products of the success of hunting adaptation’, what does that mean for women’s humanity? If human evolution is driven by men, are women even human?

In her now classic 1975 essay, ‘Woman the Gatherer’, anthropologist Sally Slocum challenged the primacy of ‘Man the Hunter’.2 Anthropologists, she argued, ‘search for examples of the behaviour of males and assume that this is sufficient for explanation’. And so she asked a simple question to fill the silence: ‘what were the females doing while the males were out hunting?’ Answer: gathering, weaning, caring for children during ‘longer periods of infant dependency’, all of which would similarly have required cooperation. In the context of this knowledge, the ‘conclusion that the basic human adaptation was the desire of males to hunt and kill,’ objects Slocum, ‘gives too much importance to aggression, which is after all only one factor of human life.’

Slocum made her critique over forty years ago now, but the male bias in evolutionary theory persists. ‘Humans evolved to have an instinct for deadly violence, researchers find’, read a 2016 headline in the Independent.3 The article reported on an academic paper called ‘The phylogenetic roots of human lethal violence’, which claimed to reveal that humans have evolved to be six times more deadly to their own species than the average mammal.4

This is no doubt true of our species overall – but the reality of human-on-human lethal violence is that it is overwhelmingly a male occupation: a thirty-year analysis of murder in Sweden found that nine out of ten murders are committed by men.5 This holds with statistics from other countries, including Australia,6 the UK7 and the US.8 A 2013 UN homicide survey found that 96% 9 of homicide perpetrators worldwide are male. So is it humans who are murderous, or men? And if women aren’t on the whole murdering, what are we to think of female ‘phylogenetics’?

The male-unless-otherwise-indicated approach to research seems to have infected all sorts of ethnographic fields. Cave paintings, for example, are often of game animals and so researchers have assumed they were done by men – the hunters. But new analysis of handprints that appear alongside such paintings in cave sites in France and Spain has suggested that the majority were actually done by women.10