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.

Once they have accepted that they have a problem, step two for transport planners is to design evidence-based solutions.

There is no such thing as a woman who doesn’t work. There is only a woman who isn’t paid for her work.

This all leaves women facing extreme poverty in their old age, in part because they simply can’t afford to save for it. But it’s also because when governments are designing pension schemes, they aren’t accounting for women’s lower lifetime earnings. This isn’t exactly a data gap, because the data does mostly exist. But collecting the data is useless unless governments use it. And they don’t.

is women’s unpaid work under valued because we don’t see it – or is it invisible because we don’t value it?

we continue to rely on data from studies done on men as if they apply to women. Specifically, Caucasian men aged twenty-five to thirty, who weigh 70 kg. This is ‘Reference Man’ and his superpower is being able to represent humanity as a whole. Of course, he does not.

Failing to account for female socialisation can also lead to women living for decades with undiagnosed behavioural disorders. For years we have thought that autism is four times more common in boys than in girls, and that when girls have it, they are more seriously affected.45 But new research suggests that in fact female socialisation may help girls mask their symptoms better than boys and that there are far more girls living with autism than we previously realised.46

We like to think that the unpaid work women do is just about individual women caring for their individual family members to their own individual benefit. It isn’t. Women’s unpaid work is work that society depends on, and it is work from which society as a whole benefits.