Frances’s Reviews > Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men > Status Update

‘We like to think that the unpaid work women do is just about individual women caring for their individual family members to their own individual benefit. It isn’t. Women’s unpaid work is work that society depends on, and it is work from which society as a whole benefits.’

‘If governments want to tap the GDP source of women’s increase participation in paid labour it’s clear that they have to reduce women’s unpaid work…introducing properly paid maternity and paternity leave is an important step to achieving this, by increasing female paid employment and potentially even helping to close the gender pay gap - which is in itself a boon to GDP.’

On training programmes: ‘Women may sign up for these programmes, but if the initiatives don’t account for women’s childcare demands, women don’t complete them. And that’s development money down the drain - and more women’s economic potential wasted. In fact, the best job-creation programme could simply be the introduction of universal childcare in every country in the world.’

‘Women have always worked. They have worked unpaid, underpaid, underappreciated, and invisibly, but they have always worked. But the modern workplace does not work for women. From its location, to its hours, to its regulatory standards, it has been designed around the lives of men and it is no longer fit for purpose.’

‘…for the vast majority of hiring decisions around the world, meritocracy is an insidious myth. It is a myth that provides cover to institutional white male bias….The fact that meritocracy is a myth is not a popular one. Around the industrialised world, people believe that not only is meritocracy the way things *should* work, it’s the way things *do* work.’

‘…it is simply a fact that none of us, including businesses, could do without the invisible, unpaid work carers do. So it is time to stop penalising them for doing it. Instead, we must start recognising it, valuing it, and designing the paid workplace to account for it.’

‘…women’s unpaid workload doesn’t begin and end with newborn babies, and the traditional workplace is tailored to the life of a mythical unencumbered worker.’

‘Whiteness and maleness are silent precisely because they do not need to be vocalised. Whiteness and maleness are implicit. They are unquestioned. They are the default. And this reality is inescapable for anyone whose identity does not go without saying, for anyone whose needs and perspective are routinely forgotten.’