#or her obviously not believing me when I say that trans women face harder difficulties than she probably does

[chaserofstarsandtheabyss]

Mother stop calling me your “biological daughter” challenge and using that to explain why you’re so upset at trans women competing in sports (impossible)

[tsunflowers]

just finished reading “invisible women: data bias in a world designed for men” which is basically just a book full of damning statistics about how women are overlooked and excluded from data worldwide and always have been. some stats that really stood out to me were

living in a favela is obviously not ideal but your whole family is there so grandma can watch the kids and you can easily get to your shit job as a cleaning lady in a rich neighborhood. when the housing ministry in rio built new government housing units they were in the middle of nowhere and there wasn’t room for parents and relatives so women lost jobs. so they had to run business out of their new homes, except since the government housing is zoned as residential it’s illegal to do that

in the US academics have seven years to get tenure. usually a person trying to get tenure is 30-40 and if they want to have kids they need to be doing that at the same time. which makes married mothers with young children 35% less likely to achieve tenure bc they’re splitting their time between work and childcare. some universities tried to fix this by giving an extra year to “parents” but bc it wasn’t specifically targeting the parent who gave birth and spent the most time on childcare there was a 22% decline in women getting tenure and men under the policy actually increased chances of getting tenure by 19%

personal protective equipment (umbrella term for life jackets, climbing harnesses, overalls for foul weather conditions) is sized and shaped for men and clothing items like overalls are designed for someone with a penis to pee through and people without have to struggle to take them off, often causing them to just... not pee while wearing them. only between 10 and 29 percent of women are wearing ppe designed for women and the sizing of straps and boots designed for men can be safety hazards when worn by women

bulletproof jackets and stab vests in particular are huge safety hazards when women wear the “standard” size and it doesn’t fit them but a Spanish cop faced disciplinary action bc she spent 500 euros of her own money on a bulletproof jacket that fit her instead of wearing the standard-issue jacket. 700 British cops have complained about the body armor they’re assigned, with issues ranging from constant bruising to getting breast reduction surgery to fit in the damn thing

the thing about this book is that although the author says at the beginning that “sex is not the reason women are excluded from data. Gender is. [...] the female body is not the problem. The problem is the social meaning we ascribe to that body, and a socially determined failure to account for it” I don’t think that she mentions trans women once in her book, not even in sections on women at high risk of sexual violence, women experiencing homelessness, or women having difficulty finding and using public restrooms. she also spends a lot of time talking about things women’s bodies do and don’t have, and about biological differences between men and women. I want to believe that she knows trans women are women and are impacted just as badly as any other women by the policies and failures she describes but this does feel like an intentional omission. she says that it’s already hard to find data on women and for women who are minorities it’s even harder, but that’s in the context of women of color. at least just mention trans women in your book please

I do still recommend it, it was very interesting