Skip to main content

Invisible Women

Image
By

 I grew up in the 80s and 90s being told, over and over, that everyone was essentially the same. Treat everyone the same, expect the same, design for the same, that was the message. 

Reading Invisible Women has shifted that foundation more than I expected.

What struck me most wasn’t just the scale of the data gaps Caroline Criado Perez exposes, but how quietly and consistently they shape everyday life. Page after page, I found myself realising that “treating everyone the same” often means treating everyone as if they were one very specific type of person, and ignoring everyone who doesn’t fit that mould. It’s not malicious, but it is deeply consequential.

The book made something click for me: recognising and celebrating differences isn’t about division, it’s about accuracy. It’s about fairness. If we don’t include people properly when we collect data, we end up designing a world that literally doesn’t see them. And once you see that, you can’t unsee it.

I’ve always been anti positive discrimination, mostly because it didn’t seem any fairer than negative discrimination. This book helped me understand why it’s sometimes necessary. If the playing field has been uneven for that long, pretending it’s level now doesn’t make it so.

This book didn’t just teach me new facts; it changed the way I think about fairness and what it means to build a world that works for everyone. I’m genuinely grateful for that.

Caroline Criado Perez 
ISNB: 978-1784706289

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's great to be back at the ACCU Conference 2025!

By
Last week I was back at the ACCU Conference in Bristol, for the first time since I gave an opening keynote in 2019 . In March 2020, COVID hit the UK and I got out of the habit of attending and speaking at conferences. Plus the ACCU Conference, and the organisation in general, took a big step back towards C++ and that hasn’t been relevant to me for nearly two decades. It’s taken until now, 2025 for me to want to talk again, and I was really pleased to be accepted for the ACCU Conference again. It was just a 20 minute session and I only attended for the day I was speaking. There was enough varied content for it to be interesting to me and I’m hoping to be back for the full conference next year. I really enjoyed attending and it was great to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for years. I felt re-engaged and particularly liked being asked if I’d been to nor(DEV):con . Learning to stop writing code (and why you won't miss it) Daisy Hollman I should have read the summary of the openin...
1 comment
Read more

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...
Post a Comment
Read more

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

By
I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...
22 comments
Read more