I find the word “default” a little suspicious now. It used to be a fairly innocuous word. Default settings. Default option. Something someone had presumably thought through so I wouldn’t have to. A small administrative kindness. Post this book, I would like to have a word with the administrator.
Caroline Criado Perez writes about the gender data gap · what happens when the information we collect, and subsequently use to make decisions, fails to account for women. Somewhere between collecting the data and designing the world, a man becomes a person and a woman becomes a special requirement. How curious. There are rather a lot of us to be a special requirement.
What I found myself thinking about was the confidence with which we accept things that have been measured. I like evidence. I like being able to point to something more substantial than “I feel this is unfair”. But someone has to decide what to measure first. And whom to ask. And whether to ask at all.
You see, I had been imagining the bias arriving later. During the interpretation, perhaps. I hadn’t given enough thought to the empty space before it.
The discussion of unpaid care work stayed with me. Someone cooks, cleans, remembers an appointment, takes a relative where they need to go. Necessary things. Repeated things. Things whose absence would become apparent very quickly. I wonder how much work has to disappear into an ordinary day before we stop recognising it as work.
I am going to take off on a tangent here. A small one. Hopefully. There is a particular exhaustion in finding something difficult and immediately making it evidence against yourself. Perhaps I am inefficient. Perhaps I should organise myself better. Perhaps everyone else has figured out something I haven’t.
This book makes me want to pause before arriving at that conclusion. To ask another question first: what assumptions were made about the person expected to do this?
I don’t think every frustration in my life can be explained by a missing row in a spreadsheet. But I would like to become more curious about the spreadsheet before scolding myself. And more careful about the ones I help make.
Who answered our questions? Whose time did we count? What have we quietly expected someone else to accommodate? I started with a book about missing data. I seem to have acquired more questions. I suspect that was the point.