Invisible Women

Nevertheless, we persisted

Caroline Criado Perez — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 05:45:39 GMT

Dear GFPs,

As I mentioned in my previous email, I was asked to deliver this year’s Edinburgh University annual International Women’s Day lecture — which I have now done! When I was there, the lovely people at ENDO1000 told me that after my newsletter last week you absolutely AMAZING people gave £1000 in donations to the project. That is in itself fantastic — but what is even more fantastic is that £1000 is how much it costs for each woman to take part in the research. So GFPs have fully funded a whole research participant which is just so brilliant and YOU are all brilliant and I honestly can’t think of a better way for this community to mark IWD. So thank you again — and if you haven’t got around to donating yet, you can do so here.

And as a special (and rare) bonus for the extremely generous GFPs who pay for a monthly subscription to my newsletter (and in so doing make it possible for me to carry on writing to everyone), I am sharing the full text of my speech below (GFPs who get this newsletter for free can read the introduction). Taking in the history of women in medicine, the history of Edinburgh university’s medical school, and the global backlash against women’s rights, this is an absolute beast of a lecture that took me weeks to pull together. I really hope you enjoy it.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming next time!

The future is female…or is it?

Good afternoon, thank you for having me, I’m delighted to be here today to deliver this year’s International Women’s Day Lecture.

What I’m less delighted about, though, is the context in which I’m giving it — because let’s face it, things feel pretty grim right now.

Everywhere you look, women’s freedoms and rights seem to be under threat. Government ministries focused on women’s rights are being defunded, deprioritised, or in some cases closed down altogether. Women’s reproductive choices are being taken away. Companies are one by one sensing the prevailing winds and, now that it is no longer politically expedient for them to do so, are no longer pretending to care about equality. People who have always been hostile to women’s rights are becoming increasingly emboldened, and women who fight for equality are being targeted with increased virulence both online and offline.

What a difference a decade makes.

Ten years ago it was fashionable to declare that the Future is Female, and politicians, CEOs, and celebrities were all lining up to wear “this is what a feminist looks like” t-shirts. From our position today, though, that future looks, at the very least, extremely strained.

But I’m not here to tell you how terrible everything is.

I don’t imagine that anyone who has come to listen to me here today isn’t aware of the turn we have taken in our political discourse. Many of you may be feeling scared, helpless, even hopeless. You may be feeling overwhelmed. And that is understandable. I’m scared. I often feel helpless and I often feel overwhelmed too.

But one thing I don’t feel — or at least, I try not to feel, is hopeless. Partly this is my natural stubbornness. I know the intention is for me to feel hopeless and I simply refuse to comply in advance.

But it’s not just that.

It’s also because I have good reason to have hope. And that reason comes from my knowledge that we have been through periods of intense backlash before — and we’ve got through them.

We have prevailed.

And we have come back fighting.

Backlash, Endometriosis, and an International Women's Day Lecture

Caroline Criado Perez — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 06:00:41 GMT

Dear GFPs,

Happy (almost) March! The spring is springing, the birds are chirping and the women they are internationaling — and on that note, to the subject of today’s email, which is to let you know about the International Women’s Day lecture I’m giving next weekend (Saturday 7th March) at the University of Edinburgh. The lecture is free, open to the pub…

Of mice and men and female rats.

Caroline Criado Perez — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 06:01:56 GMT

Dear GFPs,

Since I last wrote to you something terribly sad has happened: Debbie Cameron, the sociolinguist and author of several highly influential feminist books on language, has died of pancreatic cancer. She was only sixty-seven.

For anyone who has heard me speak about my personal journey to feminism, you will know how important Debbie’s writing was f…

What's that coming over the hill is it a majestic AI Gift-Horse?

Caroline Criado Perez — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 06:01:36 GMT

Dear GFPs, hello and welcome to the first edition of the Invisible Women newsletter in 2026! We’re starting the year with the thrilling news that an unlikely ally has emerged in the fight to address GDP’s woman problem. You remember GDP’s woman problem, I wrote about it extensively in Chapter 12 of Invisible Women, and as I’m sure you’ll recall, the pro…

Sex-disaggregated data to own the libs

Caroline Criado Perez — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 06:00:34 GMT

My dear GFPs, hello! I trust you all had a wonderful Christmas and are now lolling on the sofa in your pyjamas (the only trousers you can currently fit in), basking in a carb-haze, maybe with a few chocolate wrappers stuck to your leg, which as we all know, is the true meaning of Christmas. This season of goodwill is sadly cancelled for me this year — a…

Highly filtered images of highly perfected faces

Caroline Criado Perez — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 06:02:23 GMT

Dear GFPs, this week I want to talk to you about a weird habit I’ve developed recently: I’ve started collecting women. Not literally, obviously, I’m not Hugh Grant in Heretic. No, my collection is strictly metaphorical. Still, I hang on to these women increasingly tightly, clucking over my rarified horde like a feminist Gollum, fearful that one of them …

"Non-traditional" heart attacks

Caroline Criado Perez — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 05:01:16 GMT

Well, hello there GFPs, and a happy Autumn to you. This used to be my favourite season. I loved the crisp air, the warm layers and colours, the mists and the mellow fruitfulness. And of course I still do, but since moving up north, the onset of autumn also brings with it the dread of the on-coming and endless damp and dark and skin-biting cold I know is…

Being stubbornly female

Caroline Criado Perez — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 05:02:39 GMT

Hello, hello GFPs! Thought it might be just about time again for me to emerge from my book-writing hermitage and demonstrate some proof of life. I’m currently in the stage of stringing together all the draft sections I’ve written and turning them into a fully-formed narrative — or at least that’s what I thought I was doing. It is turning out to be more …

An ode to ageing like the Smashing Pumpkins

Caroline Criado Perez — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 05:00:33 GMT

Something a little different from me today, GFPs. Normal service (or as normal as I’m managing in the final months of book writing) should resume in the next edition - unless of course another band from my past instigates an existential crisis in me…then all bets are off.

So you want to be a genius?

Caroline Criado Perez — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 05:01:30 GMT

Well hello there, my dear GFPs! Forgive me for I have sinned; it has been…some weeks since my last newsletter for which I can only point to the following:

the never-ending book
post-op recovery
and probably most important, a 3 week visit from Nathan’s family, including five magical nieces who I have been obviously working hard to ~~radicalise~~ ok fine spoilin…

Epic poetry by women

Caroline Criado Perez — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 05:01:08 GMT

Well hello there, my dear GFPs! Today I am writing to you not exactly from my sickbed, but let’s call it my R&R sofa. I’m a week out from having had a laparoscopy and while I’m no longer permanently exhausted and shovelling back pain meds on a strict schedule, the post-op inflammation means that I DO look like I’m a couple of months pregnant and I curre…

Oh, Canada! or, Be more Bonobo

Caroline Criado Perez — Mon, 26 May 2025 05:00:28 GMT

Hello GFPs, and let’s start with the good news this week: the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has, for the first time ever, done a thorough analysis of the clinical trials conducted in this country.

Hooray!

Now, if you click on that link, you may be confused about why I’m framing this as good news, and admittedly, the MHRA…

Schrodinger's research

Caroline Criado Perez — Mon, 05 May 2025 04:00:59 GMT

Good morning GFPs! Do you always hear that in the Robin Williams Good morning Vietnam voice, because that’s how I’m always saying it — not deliberately, it’s just my brain and I can’t make it stop. And now you probably won’t be able to make it stop either, you’re welcome.

Making the case for humans

Caroline Criado Perez — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 04:09:44 GMT

Hello GFPs!

Just a quick little missive to share the lovely news that I have been announced as the winner of the inaugural Unwin Award. This award is a little different to most literary awards, because it isn’t focused on the merits of a specific book; rather it recognises the work of authors in the early stages of their careers (I think the limit is thr…

The Perfection Trap

Caroline Criado Perez — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 05:00:48 GMT

Dear GFPs, it’s the last day of Feminist Christmas! I trust everyone had a great month and that sexism has now been solved…ah well, maybe next year.

I opened Women’s History Month (I mean, just on here; not in general, not internationally) with my mega-essay looking back at the witch hunts, the population decline that contextualised them, and asking what…

Witches and babies and DEI, oh my!

Caroline Criado Perez — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 06:01:58 GMT

My dear GFPs,

It's March! Or at least it will be by the time this goes out to you. Which means not only is spring right around the corner, or maybe even here already, it’s also FEMINIST CHRISTMAS — which let’s face it, this year feels a little like rearranging deck chairs on the titanic…but let’s not succumb to despair! Instead gorge yourself on the near…

Invisible Women: diversity on the naughty step

Caroline Criado Perez — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 06:02:44 GMT

Good morning GFPs! First up a HUGE thank you to the very many of you who so kindly got in touch offering to help me out with academic papers. I am, thanks to GFP Anne at Erasmus University and GFP Debbie at Bath university, now sorted which is a mega relief. Thank you all so much for all your offers, I am so grateful to this wonderful community 🥰

Talkin…

Are women underrepresented or are men overrepresented?

Caroline Criado Perez — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 06:00:45 GMT

Hello GFPs and welcome to 2025, which as you know doesn’t officially begin until the first Invisible Women newsletter of the year goes out. And I bring you glad tidings of GREAT JOY (for me anyway) since I have FINALLY as of yesterday officially finished the first draft of a section of the book I’ve been working on since JULY 😭. At 20,000 words for a s…

Invisible Women goes global!

Caroline Criado Perez — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 06:00:58 GMT

My dear GFPs, hello and welcome to your last Invisible Women newsletter of 2024! Thank you for your responses to my last two newsletters, in particular those who so generously donated to Age UK and to Katja’s crowdfunder. It brings me such enormous pleasure to know what a force for good this community is — here’s to more of that sort of thing in 2025!

Ka…

“They just don’t want me over Christmas”: assisted dying and domestic abuse

Caroline Criado Perez — Sat, 14 Dec 2024 06:01:03 GMT

GFPs, a quick note before we get going that the following post includes discussion of domestic violence, violent homicide, and suicide, so please proceed with caution.