Invisible Women: The Curious Case of Percy Pig & The Missing Pocket

I saw an Elvie pump “in the wild” last week and it’s unbelievable! I was in my doctor’s wait room and there was a young couple with a baby. I didn’t even realise the woman was pumping till she started to put away all the bits! And I have misophonia so even the slightest noise can bother me!

“While women in our cohort were more likely than men to be hospitalised for contusions, the severity of hospitalised injuries sustained by women were not substantially different from men. This indicates that the higher rate of admission among women is unlikely to reflect increased admissions for less severe injuries.”

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. (IW, p.186)

It’s easy to slam phone manufacturers and social media plat- forms as sexist (and, as we shall see, they are, if often unknowingly), but the reality is that even if they had somehow managed to design an image of a ‘gender neutral’ runner, most of us would still have read that runner as male, because we read most things as male unless they are specifically marked as female. And so while it is of course to be hoped that angry grammarians will come round to the idea that saying ‘he and she’ (or even, God forbid, ‘she and he’) instead of just ‘he’ may not be the worst thing that has ever happened to them, the truth is that getting rid of the generic masculine would only be half the battle: male bias is so firmly embedded in our psyche that even genuinely gender-neutral words are read as male.

A 2015 study identified the top five words used to refer to peo- ple in human–computer interaction papers published in 2014 and found that they are all apparently gender neutral: user, participant, person, designer and researcher. Well done, human–computer interaction academics! But there is (of course) a catch. When study participants were instructed to think about one of these words for ten seconds and then draw an image of it, it turned out that these apparently gender-neutral words were not perceived as equally likely to be male or female. For male participants, only ‘designer’ was interpreted as male less than 80% of the time (it was still almost 70% male). A researcher was more likely to be depicted as of no gender than as a female. Women were slightly less gender-biased, but on the whole were still more likely to read gender-neutral words as male, with only ‘person’ and ‘participant’ (both read by about 80% of male participants as male) being about 50/50.

This rather disheartening finding tallies with decades of ‘draw a scientist’ data, where participants overwhelmingly draw men (the bias has historically been so extreme that media around the world celebrated as great progress a recent paper which found that 28% of children now draw women). It also tallies, perhaps more disturbingly, with a 2008 study in which Pakistani students (aged nine and ten) who were asked to draw an image of ‘us’. Hardly any of the female students drew women and none of the male students did.

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, pp.9-10)

“Male and female raters gave highly correlated gender ratings for a given illusory face”