Nina

“A 2008 analysis of a range of textbooks recommended by twenty of the ‘most prestigious universities in Europe, the United States and Canada’ revealed that across 16,329 images, male bodies were used three times as often as female bodies to illustrate ‘neutral body parts’.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“But the next thing she says provides something of an explanation for how male-default thinking could be so prevalent in a world that is, after all, 50% female. ‘It’s just a feature of human psychology,’ she explains, to assume that our own experiences mirror those of human beings in general. This is a concept in social psychology that is sometimes called ‘naive realism’ and sometimes called ‘projection bias’. Essentially, people tend to assume that our own way of thinking about or doing things is typical. That it’s just normal. For white men this bias is surely magnified by a culture that reflects their experience back to them, thereby making it seem even more typical. Projection bias amplified by a form of confirmation bias, if you like. Which goes some way towards explaining why it is so common to find male bias masquerading as gender neutrality. If the majority of people in power are men – and they are – the majority of people in power just don’t see it. Male bias just looks like common sense to them. But ‘common sense’ is in fact a product of the gender data gap.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Tech’s love affair with the myth of meritocracy is ironic for an industry so in thrall to the potential of Big Data, because this is a rare case where the data actually exists. But if in Silicon Valley meritocracy is a religion, its God is a white male Harvard dropout.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“A more ambitious route would be changing the structure of governance altogether: away from majority-based, and towards unanimous decision-making. This has been shown to boost women’s speech participation and to mitigate against their minority position. A 2012 US study found that women only participate at an equal rate in discussions when they are in ‘a large majority’ – interestingly while individual women speak less when they are in the minority, individual men speak the same amount no matter what the gender proportion of the group.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men