Invisible Women goes global!

plus, good news data stories and the year that was...

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!

Katja in fact got in touch to thank you all, not only for “the stream of donations” she woke up to on Saturday morning and which she says kept coming all weekend, but also for the comments you left that she says touched the $hare team deeply. My favourite was from a GFP who said "This is my mom's age and I want her to be represented in TV as well." ❤️❤️❤️

If you missed either of those newsletters and would like to donate, the link for Katja’s crowdfunder is here (and the newsletter I wrote is here); and the link to donate to Age UK is here (and the corresponding newsletter is here).

NB: a Scottish GFP got in touch to note that despite its name, Age UK does not in fact cover the whole UK, so if you live in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland and want to be sure your money goes to older people living in that country you can donate to Age Scotland, Age Cymru, Age NI or even Age International!

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Now, to return briefly to feminist films I have some important feminist-film-related showing off to do.

If you follow me on instagram you may already know the exciting news that Invisible Women features in Her Story, the sleeper hit that has been described as “China’s answer to Barbie”, and which is currently selling out cinemas across the UK and US, and topped China’s box office for weeks.

How cool is that?!

When I posted about this Very Exciting News on social media I had yet to watch the film — and wasn’t sure I was going to be able to given it’s been selling out showings every day, but there are some perks that come with your book being featured in a film and one of those perks is that the distribution company can be persuaded to send you a password protected link so you can watch said film from the comfort of your own home.

And I’m so glad I did, because beyond it obviously being thrilling that IW was featured in Her Story, I LOVED this film. It was literally laugh-out-loud funny, as well as being sweet and tender and genuinely female-centred.

The film follows the life of two women, Wang Tiemei, a single mother and journalist, and Xiao Ye, the free-spirited lead singer of a rock band, and Tiemei’s new neighbour. It’s a feminist buddy film with a side order of romantic comedy — but refreshingly, the buddy part is the main event, with the central narrative arc being not will they/won’t they with their romantic interests, but will they/won’t they as BFFs.

One of the things I really loved about the film is how it centres women’s unpaid care, but not in a preachy or clumsy way, it is just very naturally woven into the narrative, most brilliantly I thought in a sequence where Xiao Ye, who uses every day sounds in her music, is playing a series of them to Tiemei’s daughter, Moli and asking her to guess what they are. Alongside Moli’s guesses, the audience sees a montage of Tiemei doing various chores around the house that make the same noise as the recorded sound. It’s a touching and very clever scene and I couldn’t have loved it more.

I was also a big fan of the scene where the eminently capable, regular electric drill-wielder Tiemei tells Xiao Ma, her younger male lust interest, that she isn’t “looking for a man to do chores for me,” in response to his offer to take over from her as she fixes her air conditioning unit.

“Then what are you looking for?” he asks. “What do you think,” she replies, matter-of-factly.

On the subject of men, there has been some criticism from certain male quarters of the internet that the men in this movie don’t come off too well and, well, I can’t disagree exactly, but what I can say is that it never feels mean-spirited. It’s simply poking gentle fun at certain tiresome male tics that I can assure you I have despaired of with my friends many times (and, did I mention, it’s very funny?).

There’s the eye-roll-inducing douche who immediately post-sex tells you how broken he is, that he just can’t commit; there’s the sweet but inept man who is trying, but has learned what women want from watching “videos” (nothing violent or overly racy, don’t worry, it’s just funny and ultimately quite sweet); and, of course, there’s the man who, having just discovered feminism, is now the best feminist in the whole wide world (spoiler: he is in fact not the best feminist in the world).

In conclusion, I loved this film and cannot recommend it enough. The good news for those of you who would like to watch it is that it’s done so well its UK run now appears to have been extended, so you can still catch it at the cinema. Consider it a Christmas present to yourself!

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Data-themed Xmas pressies

In more present-related content, I thought I would make up to you for a run of rather depressing newsletters to give you the gift of a couple of data-related Good News Stories to round off the year! I know, how I do spoil you.

First up is the launch of a “groundbreaking new database,” the first to comprehensively “capture sex-based differences across four interconnected domains: drug responses, biomarkers, cancer risk factors, and microbiome variations.” The database, called OncoSexome, “was created in response to the tendency of scientists and clinicians to overlook sex differences in clinical trials” and “catalogs sex-based information on 2,051 anticancer drugs, 12,551 oncological biomarkers, 350 cancer risk factors, and 1,386 microbes.”

This, as I’m sure I don’t need to tell GFPs, is huge.

A National Cancer Institute study published earlier this year found that although only 0.5% of oncology clinical trials had curated post-treatment sex comparisons, many of these trials uncovered important differences in treatment outcomes. These findings highlight the critical importance of considering sex differences when planning treatment strategies, the Yale researchers said. For example, females receiving adjuvant fluoropyrimidine-based chemotherapy for colon cancer experienced higher toxicity rates. (Source)

Having a database that captures and makes these differences visible could — and hopefully will! — revolutionise cancer treatment.

Corrr is that a sex-based analysis in your pocket… 👀

Second! A new coronary risk scoring model has been developed for women, using female data! And it “accurately predicted major adverse cardiovascular events in women who were categorized as high and very high risk and performed better than other risk models”! As GFPs don’t need me to tell them, this too is incredibly important because although heart disease is the number one killer of women worldwide, women are 50% more likely than men to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack. Anything that helps to improve cardiovascular diagnostics in women is to be welcomed.

So good news all round! Shush you at the back, ok the good news is maybe not all around, but within this specific newsletter it reigns supreme. Happy?

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The year, has gone, to bed [nearly] and so must I [shortly], so let me round out this missive with a round-up of the top 5 Invisible Women newsletters of the year. And I’m afraid for the most part, this is where the good cheer stops thank to the aforementioned run of miserable news I sent your way this year.

In at number 5 was the story of Eleanor and her endometriosis crowdfunder in the face of Britain’s gynaecological care crisis.

This one does have a happy ending though since Eleanor managed to make her funding target and is currently at home recovering from the surgery. 🙏

Number 4 was about the first woman documented to have died from preventable pregnancy-related complications since the fall of Roe vs Wade in the US

Number 3 was my love-despair letter to America…

Well, that went well.

Number two was my no-holds-barred love letter to Taylor Swift and Jane Austen

And number one was, I’m afraid, my essay about the Gisele Pelicot case and the striking sex differences in who was talking about it…

Since I wrote that piece, on Thursday, the verdict and sentences were handed down in this case. All the defendants were found guilty, with Gisèle’s husband receiving the maximum sentence of 20 years, while his 50 co-defendants were handed sentences of between three and fifteen years. And no that doesn’t feel long enough to me either, but I think it’s safe to say that Gisèle’s intent in waiving her anonymity, to shift the shame from victims onto perpetrators, has been fully achieved. What a woman.

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Final poppy pic of the year!

I call this “THANKS I HATE IT” (don’t worry I gave her a treat to make up for making her live the influencer lifestyle.

That’s it! Until next year, my dear GFPs…xoxoxo