Invisible Women

For the women who persist: keep on being bloody difficult

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.

More than 40% of women leave tech companies after ten years compared to 17% of men.13

Women do 75% of the world’s unpaid care work

We class the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries as ‘the Renaissance’ even though, as social psychologist Carol Tavris points out in her 1991 book The Mismeasure of Woman, it wasn’t a renaissance for women, who were still largely excluded from intellectual and artistic life. We call the eighteenth century ‘the Enlightenment’, even though, while it may have expanded ‘the rights of man’, it ‘narrowed the rights of women, who were denied control of their property and earnings and barred from higher education and professional training’. We think of ancient Greece as the cradle of democracy although the female half of the population were explicitly excluded from voting.

78% of women versus 60% of men frequently use emoji.37 And yet, until 2016, the world of emojis was curiously male.

This observation may go some way to explaining why a Finnish study26 found that single women recovered better from heart attacks than married women – particularly when put alongside a University of Michigan study27 which found that husbands create an extra seven hours of housework a week for women. An Australian study similarly found that housework time is most equal by gender for single men and women; when women start to cohabit, ‘their housework time goes up while men’s goes down, regardless of their employment status’.28

The truth is that around the world, women continue to be disadvantaged by a working culture that is based on the ideological belief that male needs are universal.

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

In any case, fifty year’s worth of US census data46 has proven that when women join an industry in high numbers, that industry attracts lower pay and loses ‘prestige’,47 suggesting that low-paid work chooses women rather than the other way around.