"It just means that what may seem objective can actually be highly male-biased: in this case, the historically widespread practice of attributing women's work to men made it much harder for a woman to fulfill the Bank's requirements. The fact is that worth is a matter of opinion, and opinion is informed by culture. And if that culture is as male-biased as ours is, it can't help but be biased against women. By default."
"When I pointed out that this was true for him too (he identified as a libertarian) he demurred. No. That was just objective, common sense - de Beauvoir's 'absolute truth'. For him, the way he saw the world was universal, while feminism - seeing the world from a female perspective - was niche. Ideological."
"Incidentally, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the coal mining industry, which during the 2016 election became the shibboleth for (implicitly male) working-class jobs, provides 53,420 jobs in total, at a median annual wage of $59,380. Compare this to the majority female 924,640-strong cleaning and housekeeping workforce, whose median annual income is $21,820. So who's the real working class?
"A UK Department of Transport study highlighted the stark difference between male and female perception of danger, finding that 62% of women are scared walking in multistorey car parks, 60% are scared waiting on train platforms, 49% are scared waiting at the bus stop, and 59% are scared walking home from a bus stop or station. The figures for men are 31%, 25%, 20%, and 25%, respectively. Fear of crime is particularly high among low-income women, partly because they tend to live in areas with higher crime rates, but also because they are likely to be working odd hours and often come home from work in the dark. Ethnic-minority women tend to experience more fear for the same reasons, as well as having the added danger of (often gendered) racialized violence to contend with."
"'Large-scale data for the prevalence of sexual harassment is lacking', explains a 2017 paper, not only because of under-reporting, but also because it is 'often not included in crime statistics'."
"The apparent mismatch between women's fear and the level of violence the official statistics say they experience is not just about the general stew of menace women are navigating. Women also aren't reporting the more serious offenses. A 2016 study of sexual harassment in Washington DC metro found that 77% of those who were harassed never reported, which is around the same level found by Inmujeres, a Mexican government agency that campaigns on violence against women."
"And research conducted by Loukaitou-Sideris in Los Angeles found that there were specific bus stops that were hotspots for gender-based crime, suggesting that costs could be kept further in check by focusing on problem areas. All each transport authority would need is its own data - and the will to collect it. But that will is lacking. In the US, Loukaitou-Sideris tells me, 'there is no federal incentive' for transit authorities to collect data. 'They aren't legally obligated to collect it and so they don't.'"
"Female professors are penalised if they aren't deemed sufficiently warm and accessible. But if they are warm and accessible they can be penalised for not appearing authoritative and professional. On the other hand, appearing authoritative and knowledgeable as a woman can result in student disapproval, because this violates gendered expectations. Meanwhile men are rewarded if they are accessible at a level that is simply expected in women and therefore only noticed if it's absent."
"Thankfully for frustrated women around the world, Rom Schalk, the vice president of voice technology at car navigation system supplier ATX, has come up with a novel solution to fix the 'many issues with women's voices'. What women need, he said, was 'lengthy training' - if only women 'were willing' to submit to it... Just like the women wilful women buying the wrong stoves in Bangladesh, women buying cars are unreasonably expecting voice-recognition software developers to design a product that works for them when it's obvious that the problem needing fixing is the women themselves. Why can't a woman be more like a man?"
"Designing passive tracking apps as if women have pockets big enough to hold their phones is a perennial problem with an easy solution: include proper pockets in women's clothing (she types furiously, having just had her phone fall out of her pocket and smash on the floor for the hundredth time). In the meantime, however, women use other solutions, and if tech developers don't realise women are being forced into workabouts, they may fail their development."
"There is one EU regulatory test that requires what is called a fifth-percentile female dummy, which is meant to represent the female population. Only 5% of women will be shorter than this dummy. But there are a number of data gaps. For a start, this dummy is only tested in the passenger seat, so we have no data at all for how a female driver would be affected - something of an issue you would think, given women's 'out of position' driving position. And secondly, this female dummy is not really female. It is just a scaled-down male dummy."
"The result is that TB kills more women globally than any other single infectious disease. More women die annually of TB than of all causes of maternal mortality combined. But TB is nevertheless often considered to be a 'male disease', and as a result women are less likely to be screened for it."
"Then the Second World War came along, and it was during this period, explains Coyle, that the frame [for GDP] we use now was established. It was designed to suit the needs of the war economy, she tells me. 'The main aim was to understand how much output could be produced and what consumption needed to be sacrificed to make sure there was enough available to support the war effort.' To do this they counted everything produced by government and businesses and so 'what governments do and what businesses do came to be seen as the definition of the economy'. But there was one major aspect of production that was excluded from what came to be the 'international convention about how you think about and measure the economy', and that was the contribution of unpaid household work, like cooking, cleaning and childcare. 'Everyone acknowledges that there is economic value in that work, it's just not part of 'the economy',' says Coyle."
"The failure to measure unpaid household services is perhaps the greatest gender data gap of all. Estimates suggest that unpaid care work could account for up to 50% of GDP in high-income countries, and as much as 80% of GDP in low-income countries."
"The upshot of failing to capture all this data is that women's unpaid work tends to be seen as 'a costless resource to exploit', writes economics professor Sue Himmelweit. And so when countries try to rein in their spending it is often women who end up paying the price."
"The problem is, these cuts are not so much savings as a shifting of costs from the public sector onto women, because the work still needs to be done. By 2017 the Women's Budget Group estimated that approximately one in ten people over the age of fifty in England (1.86 million) had unmet care needs as a result of public spending cuts. Those needs have become, on the whole, the responsibility of women."
"In fact, the best job-creation programme could simply be the introduction of universal childcare in every country in the world."
"We like to think that the unpaid work women do is just about individual women caring for their individual family members to their own individual benefit. It isn't. Women's unpaid work is work that society depends on, and it is work from which society as a whole benefits. When the government cuts public services that we all pay for with our taxes, demand for those services don't suddenly cease. The work is simply transferred onto women, with all the attendant negative impacts on female paid labour-participation rates, and GDP."
"And so the unpaid work that women do isn't simply a matter of 'choice'. It is built into the system we have created - and it could just as easily be built out of it. We just need the will to start collecting the data, and then designing our economy around reality rather than a male-biased confection."
"In short, the current US tax system for married couples in effect penalises women in paid employment, and in fact several studies have shown that joint filing disincentivises married women from paid work altogether (which, as we have also seen, is bad for GDP)."
"Essentially, people tend to assume that our own way of thinking about or doing things is typical. That it's just normal. For white men this bias is surely magnified by a culture that reflects their experience back to them, thereby making it seem even more typical. Projection bias is amplified by a form of confirmation bias, if you like. Which goes some way towards explaining why it is so common to find male bias masquerading as gender neutrality. If the majority of people in power are men - and they are - the majority of people in power just don't see it. Male bias just looks like common sense to them. But 'common sense' is in fact a product of the gender data gap."
"Worldwide, the countries with the highest levels of female political representation tend to use proportional representation... perhaps the UK's Women and Equalities Committee shouldn't have called for quotas in the first place. If they really wanted to see female representation increase in Parliament, perhaps their first demand should be full electoral reform."
"The data accrued from a lifetime of being a woman matters. And this data belongs at the very heart of government."
"Closing the gender data gap will not magically fix all the problems faced by women, whether or not they are displaced. That would require a wholesale restructuring of society and an end to male violence. But getting to grips with the reality that gender-neutral does not automatically mean gender-equal would be an important start."
