Hello, I'm Caroline Criado Perez and I'm here on the top floor of Waterstones
Piccadilly and as you can see I'm going to have to walk even further up to get
to the lady's toilet. I'm the author of Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a
World Designed for Men and actually ladies toilets are one of the things
that I talk about. Now we're all used to seeing women in a massive line trailing
around the corner, particularly at the interval in the cinema
or the theatre, you know anytime that women want to go to the loo it's a
massive bun fight to get there before everyone else because otherwise we'll be
waiting there in line for 10 minutes. And and a lot of people think that that's
because women are just in there chatting and putting on makeup, well a lot of men
think that, obviously women don't think that. But the real reason is far more
interesting than that. It is to do with male bias in toilet design. So you might
think that it would be equitable and fair to have 50/50 floor space for men
and women but the reality is if you have 50/50 floor space men get double the
amount of provision because they have urinals. Women can't tend to use urinals
because we don't tend to have penises. But it's not just that, it's also that
women take longer, 2.3 times longer than men for a variety of reasons.
It'll be things like more complicated clothing,
it'll be things like you know we have to actually take our clothing off and get
down on the loo and women are also more likely to be with children or with
elderly people or with disabled people. They're also more likely to be elderly
and disabled. So for all those reasons we need more than 50% floor space. Of course
that's all incredibly annoying and unfair but it actually gets a lot worse
than that. In fact according to the UN one in three women worldwide lack access
to a safe toilet and women and girls spend collectively 97 billion hours
every year finding a safe space to relieve themselves. And it's actually
incredibly important that women have a safe place to relieve themselves because
a 2016 study in India found that women who didn't and had to use fields were
twice as likely to face non-partner sexual violence as women who have an
indoor toilet. So we've come down to the fourth floor, we're looking out over
Piccadilly, one of London's busiest streets, cars and buses rushing by. And
most of us will use some form of transport
every day but what a lot of people don't realise is that it's a very
different business for a woman to be travelling in a car than it is for a man
to be traveling in a car. So men are more likely to be in a crash and therefore
more likely to be injured overall but if a woman is in a crash she is 47%
more likely to be seriously injured and 17% more likely to die. And this
is all because of how the car is designed and for whom. Essentially for
decades we have used a 50th percentile male crash-test dummy and that means
that the whole car is set up for women to be out of position drivers. We sit
forward, too far forward, in order to see over the dash and to reach the pedals
with our feet – you know kind of important for driving. The seats aren't designed
for either our height or our weight or our muscle distribution. So we're
basically doing it all wrong and as a result were much more likely to be
injured. So you might think well maybe women should use public transport.
Well not so lucky there either. It turns out in London women, a fifth of women in
fact have been sexually assaulted on buses and tubes and 90% of them didn't
report it. And also there's the problem that public transport isn't really
designed in a way that accounts for women's care work and that's partly
because of how we collect data. So we collect data on paid employment and
educational purposes as two blocks, so they come out as huge amounts of travel
that is done. And those are called compulsory mobility. But the kind of
trips that women have to do in addition to their paid work: taking the kids to
school, taking an elderly relative to work, picking up the groceries – you know,
all the things that actually have to get done for life to carry on – are not seen
as compulsory mobility. They're seen as leisure and they are divided into lots
of different little blocks so it looks like there's not really that much of it
going on. But actually, when you put it all together, it turns out it is the single
biggest reason for travel that women do and it's as big as employment. In fact
even the device that you're probably using to watch this on, your mobile phone,
that's designed to fit into men's hands rather than women's hands. The average
smartphone is now 5.5 inches, which is too big for the average woman
to use comfortably one-handed. And sometimes you have to use it one-handed
if you're on the tube or you're carrying shopping
or you're with your kids. So on this short journey through Waterstones I've
shared just a few of the statistics that I uncovered in my book but there are so
many more from heart attack symptoms all the way through to occupational health.
Women are being inconvenienced and women are dying as a result of the male bias
in data. So I hope you'll pick up a copy of my book, Invisible Women, and whether
you're a man or a woman it'll change the way you see the world,