The author, who wrote about a world biased against women, is back with answers in a new podcast. She talks about not fitting in, compassion for her younger self and finding her feminism
It’s one of those things that once seen, can’t be unseen. But sometimes Caroline Criado Perez wonders if she would rather not realise that the world is designed for men. “That might be nice,” she says. From every day irritants such as her phone being too big to hold as it was designed for male hands, to the lethal – ill-fitting PPE, lack of research for medical conditions that predominantly affect women knowing that women are more likely to die or be injured in car crashes, because crash-test dummies are built like men – it is exhausting. But the alternative to not knowing that the world was never designed for you in the first place – apart from if you can’t see it, you can’t change it – is going through life feeling as if you just don’t fit, that there’s something wrong with you.
This was the experience of many readers of Criado Perez’s award-winning 2019 book Invisible Women, and it will almost certainly be the same for listeners of her new podcast, Visible Women, in which she explores how we fix the gender data gap. That was the question that came up every time she did a talk about her book, she says. “It would often be a woman standing up and saying: ‘I had no idea this was going on, I’m so angry, what can I do?’ And I didn’t have a lot of answers. The book had some solutions in it, but people wanted more.”
