Invisible Women: the Sunday Times number one bestseller...

Most Helpful Review

"Example #1: Women are at greater risk of being mis-prescribed medicines because they are under-represented in medical testing data.Medical data is what you collect from running medical tests on people.Medical test subjects are people who receive small amounts of money to have substances with unknown biological effects administered to them over weeks or months. If they're lucky, they end up in the control group and have been receiving a placebo. If they're unlucky, they end up with chronic illness, disease, or death.There was a recent case in the UK where a group of subjects ended up with Elephantitis, which so disfigured their faces and bodies that they were unrecognisable. That is how they will look now for the rest of their lives - all for something equivalent to minimum wage over the course of a few months.Unsurprisingly, for anyone who knows anything about young men and women (key phrase: risk tolerance), the vast majority of test subjects are young men. Is the right conclusion here, as the author implies, that women have been victimised by this voluntary process?Example #2: Products (including phones) are designed in ways that don't perfectly suit all women. I'd hoped this one would be in the category of 'self-explanatory,' but let's have a look anyway.If you had to choose between a car that was optimised from a safety standpoint - expensive to make, slow, bulky, ugly, fuel inefficient - would that be your first choice over one which looks good, is faster, cheaper, more manoueverable and fuel efficient?If you had to choose between a phone that was small enough to fit into the palm of your hand but had a smaller screen and battery, and fewer functions as a result - would you pick that over a larger one that may be more unwieldy to hold?The reality is that successful companies like Apple know what you actually want, not what you think you want during that 1% of the time (while reading this book) when you are only focused on health, safety and gender disparities. They used to only manufacture smaller phones, but now they have a range of phones that are all larger than their predecessors, yet have more sold than ever, among women and men. Anecdotally I know more women with the larger varieties than the smaller ones - should we as a society, as the author implies, have rules to stop them exercising their free choice?None of this above addresses the vastly more significant disparities for people who are blind or deaf or disabled, very large or very small, very obese or underweight, suffering from illnesses or diseases, illiterate etc. The author apparently deems average females to be the most important group of all to champion in the field of political and legal interventions, and judging by the success of the book, she has chosen well.Ultimately, though, what must we conclude from the book?Should we be pushing for a reality where you can have the benefits of not choosing a thing while also having the benefits of choosing the thing? How do we bring that about?If female choice is the culprit of some bad outcomes in some cases, what is the solution? Should women be forced to choose differently? What if their choices suit them in ways the author has not considered?"