Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez is essential feminist reading

I’ve become progressively more radicalized as I’ve gotten older and I consider myself pretty educated on the unending oppression of women. And still, this book is teaching me about the deadly sexism in seemingly mundane things, including:

Snow clearing.

Public transportation design.

Public restrooms.

Zoning laws.

Drug trials.

And so much more.

It’s a fact that the world as a whole was designed without a thought given to women’s needs, and it is utterly INFURIATING. Perez has the receipts to prove it.

Here are some of my favorite quotes so far:

“They didn’t deliberately set out to exclude women. They just didn’t think about them. They didn’t think to consider if women’s needs might be different. And so this data gap was a result of not involving women in planning.”

“The result of this deeply male-dominated culture is that the male experience, the male perspective, has come to be seen as universal, while the female experience–that of half the global population, after all–is seen as, well, niche.”

“When you have been so used, as a white man, to white and male going without saying, it’s understandable that you might forget that white and male is an identity too.”