Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

This powerful, male-dominated tech company is of great significance to Perez’s argument about the negative consequences of the gender data gap. Google’s products evince a male bias: Speech recognition software does not work as well for women, search results underrepresent women, and algorithms reward male activities and habits in job searches. As Google and other tech companies create artificial intelligence, Perez fears that its algorithms will entrench male bias. Since Google keeps its algorithms private, there is no way of knowing the full extent of the discrimination against women within them.

Google does not discriminate intentionally; rather, the company subsidizes childcare, includes household services on its campus, and improved its maternity leave policy after noticing that it was losing female employees after childbirth. Yet even this progressive company at times overlooks the female perspective. When women failed to apply for promotion under a policy inviting employees to nominate themselves, Google assumed that the problem was with the women, not the policy—an example of the male tendency to wish women were more like men. 

A strong advocate of women’s rights, Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee for President in 2016. Perez uses this campaign and Clinton’s loss as a prime example of the treatment that female contenders for a traditionally male office receive. Like so many women in politics and business, Clinton was criticized for her ambition—a trait rewarded in male presidential contenders. During the Presidential debate, Clinton’s opponent Donald Trump and journalist Matt Lauer interrupted her multiple times without censure; as Perez points out, when a woman interrupts a man, she is declared rude and pushy. Increasingly, female public figures are subjected to threats of violence and actual physical violence. Clinton received almost twice as many abusive tweets as her Democratic opponent Bernie Sanders.

Perez applauds Clinton’s 1995 statement that “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights” (317). When Clinton made this remark at the 1995 United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing, she was criticized for emphasizing the issue given genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia despite the fact that rape of women was used as a weapon in those genocides.

Perez cites Clinton as a force of change who helped establish Data 2X, an organization that seeks to close the gender data gap.

Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for President in 2016, experienced a markedly different reception as a candidate than Clinton. No one criticized Trump for his ambition in seeking the Presidency despite his total lack of knowledge of politics and his record of business failures. The reader is left to imagine the reception a woman with a similar resume would receive. The myth of male universality prevented observers from seeing the Trump campaign for what it was—an identity politics appeal to white men. The more hostile voters were toward women, the more likely that they would vote for Trump. As president, Trump encouraged the harassment of women in public office, a troubling trend that decreases female representation.