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Invisible Women Excerpt
Invisible Women Excerpt
WOMEN
Data Bias in a World
Designed for Men
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2907-2
eISBN: 978-1-68335-314-0
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2 Invisible Women
Before they caved, the Bank of England’s case for their all-male
line-up also rested on the meritocracy argument: historical figures
were, they said, chosen using an ‘objective selection criteria’. To
join the ‘gilded list’ of ‘key figures from our past’, a person must
fulfil the following: have broad name recognition; have good art-
work; not be controversial; and have made ‘a lasting contribution
which is universally recognised and has enduring benefits’. Reading
these subjective designations of worth, I realised how the Bank
had ended up with five white men on its banknotes: the historical
gender data gap means that women are just far less likely to be able
to fulfil any of these ‘objective’ criteria.
In 1839 the composer Clara Schumann wrote in her diary, ‘I
once thought that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up
this idea; a woman must not desire to compose – not one has been
able to do it, and why should I expect to?’ The tragedy is, Schumann
was wrong. Women before her had been able to do it, and they
included some of the most successful, prolific and influential com-
posers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.71 It’s just that
they didn’t have ‘broad name recognition’, because a woman barely
has to die before she is forgotten – or before we consign her work to
the gender data gap by attributing it to a man.
Felix Mendelssohn published six of his sister Fanny Hensel’s pieces
under his own name and in 2010 another manuscript previously
thought to be his was proven to be Hensel’s.72 For years classical
scholars argued that the Roman poet Sulpicia couldn’t possibly have
written the verses signed with her name – they were too good, not to
mention too smutty.73 Judith Leyster, one of the first Dutch women
to be admitted to an artists’ guild, was renowned in her time, but
after her death in 1660 she was erased, her work attributed to her
husband. In 2017, new works by nineteenth-century artist Caroline
Louisa Daly were discovered – they had been previously attributed
to men, one of whom was not even an artist.74
Introduction: The Default Male 17
At the turn of the twentieth century, award-winning British
engineer, physicist and inventor Hertha Ayrton remarked that
while errors overall are ‘notoriously hard to kill [. . .] an error that
ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has
more lives than a cat’. She was right. Textbooks still routinely name
Thomas Hunt Morgan as the person who discovered that sex was
determined by chromosomes rather than environment, despite the
fact that it was Nettie Stevens’ experiments on mealworms that
established this – and despite the existence of correspondence
between them where Morgan writes to ask Stevens for details of
her experiment.75 Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’s discovery that the
sun is predominantly composed of hydrogen is often credited to her
male supervisor.76 Perhaps the most famous example of this kind of
injustice is Rosalind Franklin, whose work (she had concluded via
her X-ray experiments and unit cell measurements that DNA con-
sisted of two chains and a phosphate backbone) led James Watson
and Francis Crick (now Nobel Prize-winning household names) to
‘discover’ DNA.
None of this means that the Bank of England deliberately set out
to exclude women. It just means that what may seem objective can
actually be highly male-biased: in this case, the historically wide-
spread practice of attributing women’s work to men made it much
harder for a woman to fulfil the Bank’s requirements. The fact is
that worth is a matter of opinion, and opinion is informed by cul-
ture. And if that culture is as male-biased as ours is, it can’t help
but be biased against women. By default.
The case of the Bank’s subjective selection criteria also shows
how male default can be both a cause and a consequence of the
gender data gap. By neglecting to account for the historical gender
data gap, the Bank’s selection procedure for historical figures
was designed around the kind of success typically achieved by
men; even a requirement as seemingly benign as that the figure
18 Invisible Women
through feminist eyes. When I pointed out that this was true for him
too (he identified as a libertarian) he demurred. No. That was just
objective, common sense – de Beauvoir’s ‘absolute truth’. For him,
the way he saw the world was universal, while feminism – seeing
the world from a female perspective – was niche. Ideological.
I was reminded of this man in the wake of the 2016 US presi-
dential election, when it felt you couldn’t move for tweets, speeches
and op-eds by (usually) white men decrying the ills of what they
called ‘identity politics’. Ten days after Donald Trump’s victory, the
New York Times published an article by Mark Lilla, professor of
humanities at Columbia University, that criticised Clinton for ‘call-
ing out explicitly to African American, Latino, LGBT and women
voters’.83 This left out, he said, ‘the white working class’. Lilla
presented Clinton’s ‘rhetoric of diversity’ as mutually exclusive with
‘a large vision’, linking this ‘narrow’ vision (clearly, Lilla has been
reading his V. S. Naipaul) with what he felt he was witnessing with
college students. Students today, he claimed, were so primed to
focus on diversity that they ‘have shockingly little to say about such
perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common
good’.
Two days after this was published, ex-Democratic candidate
Bernie Sanders was in Boston at a stop on his book tour84 explain-
ing that ‘It is not good enough for someone to say, I’m a woman!
Vote for me!’85 In Australia, Paul Kelly, editor of the Australian,
described Trump’s victory as ‘a revolt against identity politics’,86
while over in the UK, Labour MP Richard Burgon tweeted that
Trump’s inauguration was ‘what can happen when centre/left
parties abandon transformation of economic system and rely on
identity politics’.87
The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins concluded the annus horribilis that
was 2016 with a diatribe against ‘the identity apostles’, who had
been ‘over-defensive’ of minorities, and thus killed off liberalism.
Introduction: The Default Male 23
‘I have no tribe,’ he wrote. He could not ‘join the prevailing hys-
teria’. What he wanted was ‘to re-enact the glorious revolution of
1832’ – which resulted in the extension of the British franchise to a
few extra hundred thousand men of property.88 Heady days, indeed.
These white men have in common the following opinions: that
identity politics is only identity politics when it’s about race or sex;
that race and sex have nothing to do with ‘wider’ issues like ‘the
economy’; that it is ‘narrow’ to specifically address the concerns of
female voters and voters of colour; and that working class means
white working-class men. Incidentally, according to the US Bureau
of Labor Statistics, the coal mining industry, which during the 2016
election became the shibboleth for (implicitly male) working-class
jobs, provides 53,420 jobs in total, at a median annual wage of
$59,380.89 Compare this to the majority female 924,640-strong
cleaning and housekeeper workforce, whose median annual income
is $21,820.90 So who’s the real working class?
These white men also have in common that they are white men.
And I labour this point because it is exactly their whiteness and
maleness that caused them to seriously vocalise the logical absur-
dity that identities exist only for those who happen not to be white
or male. 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.
Pierre Bourdieu wrote in 1977 that ‘what is essential goes without
saying because it comes without saying: the tradition is silent, not
least about itself as a tradition’.91 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. For anyone who is used to jarring up against a
world that has not been designed around them and their needs.
24 Invisible Women