#caroline criado perez

[pillarsalt]

Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women (2019)

[haggishlyhagging]

It took about two hours for Daina Taimina to find the solution that had eluded mathematicians for over a century. It was 1997, and the Latvian mathematician was participating in a geometry workshop at Cornell University. David Henderson, the professor leading the workshop, was modelling a hyperbolic plane constructed out of thin, circular strips of paper taped together. 'It was disgusting,' laughed Taimina in an interview.

A hyperbolic plane is 'the geometric opposite' of a sphere, explains Henderson in an interview with arts and culture magazine Cabinet. 'On a sphere, the surface curves in on itself and is closed. A hyperbolic plane is a surface in which the space curves away from itself at every point.' It exists in nature in ruffled lettuce leaves, in coral leaf, in sea slugs, in cancer cells. Hyperbolic geometry is used by statisticians when they work with multidimensional data, by Pixar animators when they want to simulate realistic cloth, by auto-industry engineers to design aerodynamic cars, by acoustic engineers to design concert halls. It's the foundation of the theory of relativity, and thus the closest thing we have to an understanding of the shape of the universe. In short, hyperbolic space is a pretty big deal.

But for thousands of years, hyperbolic space didn't exist. At least it didn't according to mathematicians, who believed that there were only two types of space: Euclidean, or flat space, like a table, and spherical space, like a ball. In the nineteenth century, hyperbolic space was discovered - but only in principle. And although mathematicians tried for over a century to find a way to successfully represent this space physically, no one managed it - until Taimina attended that workshop at Cornell. Because as well as being a professor of mathematics, Taimina also liked to crochet.

Taimina learnt to crochet as a schoolgirl. Growing up in Latvia, part of the former Soviet Union, 'you fix your own car, you fix your own faucet - anything', she explains. 'When I was growing up, knitting or any other handiwork meant you could make a dress or a sweater different from everybody else's.' But while she had always seen patterns and algorithms in knitting and crochet, Taimina had never connected this traditional, domestic, feminine skill with her professional work in maths. Until that workshop in 1997. When she saw the battered paper approximation Henderson was using to explain hyperbolic space, she realised: I can make this out of crochet.

And so that's what she did. She spent her summer 'crocheting a classroom set of hyperbolic forms' by the swimming pool. 'People walked by, and they asked me, "What are you doing?" And I answered, "Oh, I'm crocheting the hyperbolic plane."' She has now created hundreds of models and explains that in the process of making them 'you get a very concrete sense of the space expanding exponentially. The first rows take no time but the later rows can take literally hours, they have so many stitches. You get a visceral sense of what "hyperbolic" really means.' Just looking at her models did the same for others: in an interview with the New York Times Taimina recalled a professor who had taught hyperbolic space for years seeing one and saying, 'Oh, so that's how they look.' Now her creations are the standard model for explaining hyperbolic space.

-Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women

Photo credit

[woman-for-women]

[itellmyselfsecrets]

“Men are more likely than women to be involved in a car crash, which means they dominate the numbers of those seriously injured in car accidents. But when a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured than a man, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured, even when researchers control for factors such as height, weight, seat-belt usage, and crash intensity…She is also 17% more likely to die and it all has to do with how the car is designed - and for whom…When men and women are in a car together, the man is most likely to be driving. So not collecting data on passengers more or less translates as not collecting data on women. The infuriating irony of all this is that the gendered passenger/driver norm is so prevalent that…the passenger seat is the only seat that is commonly tested with a female crash-test dummy, with the male crash-test dummy still being the standard dummy for the driver's seat. So stats that include only driver fatalities tell us precisely zero about the impact of introducing the female crash-test dummy.” - Caroline Criado Perez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)

[fanficclub]

Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez, 2019

This makes me homicidal. Even without basic human rights to autonomy, to decency, to respect, women create things, they think up things, they discover and invent. And then men steal that anyway. Or if they can't steal, they conceal and bury it in history. Unconsciously? I'm doubtful, but sure. Unconsciously malicious, and unconsciously strategic, and unconsciously vitriolic. And, in the end, unconsciously evil.

[maaarine]

Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (Caroline Criado-Perez, 2019)

"The good news is that this kind of male bias can be designed out and some of the data collection has already been done.

In the mid-1990s, research by local officials in Vienna found that from the age of ten, girls’ presence in parks and public playgrounds ‘decreases significantly’.

But rather than simply shrugging their shoulders and deciding that the girls just needed to toughen up, city officials wondered if there was something wrong with the design of parks.

And so they planned some pilot projects, and they started to collect data. What they found was revealing.

It turned out that single large open spaces were the problem, because these forced girls to compete with the boys for space.

And girls didn’t have the confidence to compete with the boys (that’s social conditioning for you) so they tended to just let the boys have the space.

But when they subdivided the parks into smaller areas, the female drop-off was reversed.

They also addressed the parks’ sports facilities.

Originally these spaces were encased by wire fencing on all sides, with only a single entrance area – around which groups of boys would congregate. And the girls, unwilling to run the gauntlet, simply weren’t going in.

Enter, stage right, Vienna’s very own Leslie Knope, Claudia Prinz- Brandenburg, with a simple proposal: more and wider entrances.

And like the grassy spaces, they also subdivided the sports courts. Formal sports like basketball were still provided for, but there was also now space for more informal activities – which girls are more likely to engage in.

These were all subtle changes – but they worked. A year later, not only were there more girls in the park, the number of ‘informal activities’ had increased.

And now all new parks in Vienna are designed along the same lines.

The city of Malmö, Sweden, discovered a similar male bias in the way they’d traditionally been planning ‘youth’ urban regeneration.

The usual procedure was to create spaces for skating, climbing and painting grafitti.

The trouble was, it wasn’t the ‘youth’ as a whole who were participating in these activities.

It was almost exclusively the boys, with girls making up only 10-20% of those who used the city’s youth-directed leisure spaces and facilities. (…)

In the city of Gothenburg in Sweden, around 80 million kronor is distributed every year to sports clubs and associations.

Of course, the funding is meant to benefit everyone equally. But when city officials examined the data, they found that it wasn’t.

The majority of funding was going to organised sports – which are dominated by boys. Grants benefited boys over girls for thirty-six out of forty-four sports.

In total, Gothenburg was spending 15 million kronor more on boys’ than girls’ sports.

This didn’t just mean that girls’ sports were less well funded – sometimes they weren’t provided for at all, meaning girls had to pay to do them privately.

Or, if they couldn’t afford to pay, girls didn’t do sports at all."

[ovaruling]

— Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez

[eclecticwordblender]

the second sex by simone de beauvoir and invisible women by caroline criado perez are my guns, germs and steel and sapiens respectively.

[dramioneficrecommendations]

I’ve been reading Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez (an awfully depressing and eye opening read), and it made me think of how women are underrepresented in fanfiction as well. I know fanfiction is supposed to be fun, but I can’t help it but find it sad that they’re underrepresented even in works written mostly by women, in the area so dominated by female creators.

And don’t even get me started on misogyny in fandom and how female characters always get judged more harshly than men in fanfiction.

[tubularfem]

YESSS this is amazing!!!!

[pillarsalt]

Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women (2019)

[haggishlyhagging]

Two quotes, the first from 1983 and the second from 2019.

The value of a female life is determined by its reproductive value. What will happen to all the women who are not altogether necessary because their children in particular are not altogether desirable? The old women starving in poverty are starving because their reproductive lives are over and they are worth nothing. The old women incarcerated in cruel nursing homes are there because their reproductive lives are over and they are worth nothing. The women who are too poor or too black or brown and who have too many children are starved and threatened and degraded and slowly killed through state-sponsored neglect because they are having children, because they reproduce too much, because the value put on their reproducing is negative and characterized by annihilating disregard. The women who are kept in line now, millions upon millions of them each year, through the judicious application of mood-altering drugs, are kept chemically happy, calm, tranquil, or energetic so that they will hang in there, have and raise the children and keep house for their husbands even though their lives fill them with distress and addiction is what keeps them conforming. They too are part of a throwaway population of females: because their own well-being is viciously subordinated to a predetermined standard of what a woman is and what a woman does and what a woman needs to be a woman (she needs to keep doing female things, whether she wants to or not). What are the lives of all these women worth? Is there anything in the way they are viewed or valued that upholds their human dignity as individuals? They already matter very little. They are treated with cruelty or callous indifference. They have already been thrown away.

-Andrea Dworkin, Right Wing Women

For millennia, medicine has functioned on the assumption that male bodies can represent humanity as a whole. As a result, we have a huge historical data gap when it comes to female bodies, and this is a data gap that is continuing to grow as researchers carry on ignoring the pressing ethical need to include female cells, animals and humans, in their research. That this is still going on in the twenty-first century is a scandal. It should be the subject of newspaper headlines worldwide. Women are dying, and the medical world is complicit. It needs to wake up.

-Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women

[woman-for-women]

[itellmyselfsecrets]

“There are plenty of accounts of hostility from men when women venture into supposedly gender-neutral shared exercise spaces. Like transit environments…Gyms are often a classic example of a male-biased public space masquerading as equal access.” - Caroline Criado Perez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)

[fanficclub]

The part about unpaid labour blows my mind, though, I suppose, it shouldn't be that surprising.

Moving in with a partner decreases the housework burden for men and increases it for women. In other words, women work for two, and don't get compensated for it.

Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez, 2019

[maaarine]

Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (Caroline Criado-Perez, 2019)

"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.

Following the 2008 financial crash, the UK has seen a mass cutting exercise in public services.

Between 2011 and 2014 children’s centre budgets were cut by £82 million and between 2010 and 2014, 285 children’s centres either merged or closed.

Between 2010 and 2015 local-authority social-care budgets fell by £5 billion, social security has been frozen below inflation and restricted to a household maximum, and eligibility for a carers’ allowance depends on an earnings threshold that has not kept up with increases in the national minimum wage.

Lots of lovely money-saving.

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.

These needs have become, on the whole, the responsibility of women. (…)

In 2017 the House of Commons library published an analysis of the cumulative impact of the government’s ‘fiscal consolidation’ between 2010 and 2020.

They found that 86% of cuts fell on women.

Analysis by the Women’s Budget Group (WBG) found that tax and benefit changes since 2010 will have hit women’s incomes twice as hard as men’s by 2020.

To add insult to injury, the latest changes are not only disproportionately penalising poor women (with single mothers and Asian women being the worst affected), they are benefiting already rich men.

According to WBG analysis, men in the richest 50% of households actually gained from tax and benefit changes since July 2015."