Caroline Criado Perez

To be fair, it’s not an entirely unreasonable assumption: often it really is a he. A 2007 international study of 25,439 children’s TV characters found that only 13% of non-human characters are female (the figure for female human characters was slightly better, although still low at 32%).43 An analysis of G-rated (suitable for children) films released between 1990 and 2005 found that only 28% of speaking roles went to female characters – and perhaps even more tellingly in the context of humans being male by default, women made up only 17% of crowd scenes.44

We think of ancient Greece as the cradle of democracy although the female half of the population were explicitly excluded from voting.

‘trip-chaining’, a travel pattern of several small interconnected trips that has been observed in women around the world.