Caroline Criado Perez Audiobooks

Invisible Women: the book that proved the world is built on male-shaped data

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Who is Caroline Criado Perez?

Caroline Criado Perez read English at Oxford, then went to the London School of Economics to study behavioural and feminist economics, which turns out to be the perfect training for the work she does. She is a writer and broadcaster, but she came to public attention as a campaigner: the Bank of England banknote that now carries Jane Austen, the report abuse button on Twitter, the statue of Millicent Fawcett that became the first woman in Parliament Square. Each of those started as her argument.

The banknote campaign brought a torrent of abuse that made national news and, indirectly, made her case for her. She was named Liberty’s Human Rights Campaigner of the Year in 2013 and appointed OBE in 2015. Her method has stayed consistent throughout: find the data, or find where the data is missing, and then make the absence impossible to ignore.

She is, in the best possible sense, relentless about evidence, and a great many everyday things are safer because of it.

Caroline Criado Perez in audiobooks

Invisible Women did something rare for a book of data journalism: it changed the way institutions collect information. The premise is simple and its consequences are not. Most of the data on which the modern world is designed was gathered from men, so cars, medicines, phones, office temperatures and public transport timetables all quietly assume a male body and a male day.

It won both the Royal Society science book prize and the Financial Times and McKinsey business book of the year, which tells you it is neither a polemic nor a lecture. Criado Perez narrates it herself, and the delivery is worth having: the driest statistic lands harder when the person reading it is audibly angry about it.

Nine and a half hours, and you will not look at a crash test dummy the same way again. Queue it up below.