Invisible Women: a default male stew

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez surprised me because even though I know the world is male-dominated, I had never seen the case for data bias presented so convincingly and thoroughly (and with personality!)

Two brilliant books I read back to back infuriated me because they detail the pernicious real-world effects of sexism, that refusal of the world to see female humans as full humans.

“The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World,” by Michelle Goldberg, and “Invisible Women,” by Caroline Criado Perez.

We don’t even allow non-humans to escape our perception of the world as overwhelmingly male: when researchers in one study attempted to prompt participants to see a gender-neutral stuffed animal as female by using female pronouns, children, parents and carers still overwhelmingly referred to the animal as ‘he’. The study found that an animal must be ‘super-feminine’ before ‘even close to half of participants will refer to it as she rather than he’. (IW, p.10)

Human faces are sexually dimorphic, and adults are able to rapidly and accurately classify the sex of faces even in the absence of typical sex-defining features such as hairstyle, clothing, facial hair, or makeup. Children show an increase in the ability to accurately classify both children and adult’s faces by sex in the absence of external cues such as hair from ages 7 to 9 years of age, although their performance remains below that of adults.

We found the male bias in our youngest group of children from 4 to 8 years of age, evidence that the male bias for face pareidolia emerges before the ability to determine gender from facial cues alone is fully developed. This suggests that the bias to perceive illusory faces as male is unlikely to be driven by a sophisticated ability to discriminate the distinguishing visual features of faces associated with each sex. Consistent with this, in our previous study with adults a computational analysis of the visual features in the same examples of face pareidolia we used here did not show an association with their perceived gender, and control experiments ruled out explanations based on pre-existing semantic or visual gender associations with the objects that contain the illusory face.

This led the researchers to conclude that humans simply have a cognitive bias to read faces as male. As for where the bias comes from, well, I have my own theories about that. I even wrote a whole book about it– maybe you’d like to pick up a copy in your local independent bookstore 😘

Numerous studies in a variety of languages over the past forty years have consistently found that what is called the ‘generic masculine’ (using words like ‘he’ in a gender-neutral way) is not in fact read generically. It is read overwhelmingly as male.

When the generic masculine is used people are more likely to recall famous men than famous women; to estimate a profession as male-dominated; to suggest male candidates for jobs and political appointments. Women are also less likely to apply, and less likely to perform well in interviews, for jobs that are advertised using the generic masculine. In fact the generic masculine is read so overwhelmingly as male that it even overrides otherwise powerful stereotypes, so that professions such as ‘beautician’, which are usually stereotyped female, are suddenly seen as male. It even distorts scientific studies, creating a kind of meta gender data gap: a 2015 paper looking at self-report bias in psychological studies found that the use of the generic masculine in questionnaires affected women’s responses, potentially distorting ‘the meaning of test scores’. (IW, p.5)