Who is Caroline Criado-Perez
Caroline Criado Perez is a writer, broadcaster and award-winning feminist campaigner.
Caroline followed her passions of opera singing and then attended the University of Oxford as a mature student in 2012 to study English Literature and Language. Here, Caroline studied gender and language which led her to explore feminism.
Caroline’s most notable campaigns include getting Jane Austin on the Bank of England banknotes, forcing Twitter to revise its procedures for dealing with abuse and campaigning for a statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square.
In 2012 Caroline founded the website, ‘The Women’s Room’ with the aim of increasing female expert and professional representation within media. Providing women with a collective voice and questioning what knowledge is valued in society and why.
In 2013, Caroline was the winning recipient of the Liberty Human Rights Campaigner of the Year Award and in 2015 was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List.
What's the book about?
The book deconstructs reality, 'exposing the data bias in a world designed for men’. Caroline has collected a remarkable range of case studies, stories and new research illustrating the concealed ways women are forgotten and the resulting impact on health and wellbeing. Caroline reveals that when in a car accident, women are 47% more likely to be seriously injured all because the cars have been designed using crash-test dummies based on the average male. Even heart attacks in women can look very different to the symptoms often publicised, which are based on the effects of a heart attack on men. And that’s just the start.
The book shines a light on the gender data gap, the gap in our knowledge that is at the root of systemic discrimination against women, creating an invisible bias. The book is a call for change exposing this gap in knowledge which is a powerful tool to understand the system and how to change it.
“I wrote it because I want things to change. And I have heard from men who have read it and said they have understood for the first time what feminism means; that is so satisfying.”
Who should read it?
If you want to learn about what we don’t know and why we don’t know it. If you are curious and concerned it’s a stimulating and scholarly read!
Written by Nayha Patel