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Night after night at the stroke of midnight,Ongoing Series Archives the street lights in my hometown would switch off, plunging everything into darkness. I lived in this town for three years during my twenties — three years of having a self-imposed curfew because of local authority cuts.

During those years, I had to make like Cinderella and get home before 12. Not because my car would turn into a pumpkin, but because I was terrified I'd find myself outdoors in the pitch black night. Every plan I made had to factor in the impending darkness that would arrive like clockwork, bringing with it an immediate threat to my safety. Without setting out to do so, my local authority had failed me.

SEE ALSO: 9 ways science has been totally sexist, and totally wrong

Leafing through the pages of a new book by feminist campaigner and writer Caroline Criado Perez, I read a line that reignited the anger I felt about my curfew (albeit, a self-imposed one)."Urban planning that fails to account for women's risk of being sexually assaulted is a clear violation of women's equal right to public spaces," writes Criado Perez in Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed For Men.

"What's interesting is that [councils] often say things like, 'oh but the crime doesn't go up,' without accounting for the fact that women don't go out because we've self-imposed a curfew," Criado Perez tells me.

"Numbers and data are meant to just be numbers and data, they are not meant to carry society's problems within them."

In her book, Criado Perez takes on the invisibility of women in a world that has not only been designed by men, but with men — and men alone — in mind. A dearth of sex-disaggregated data — data specific to women —means that urban planning, transportation, policy, design, manufacturing are overlooking the needs of half the world's population. By failing to collect data about women, designers and scientists look through the prism of the "default male" — "seeing men as the human default" when designing products, medicines, our streets, and cities, as Criado Perez puts it. The real-world implications of the hegemony of this male default creates a data gap, causing women daily discomfort to placing their safety and lives at risk.

Criado Perez — who spearheaded the campaign to erect a statue of a suffragist outside parliament — spent three years researching and writing this book, which essentially reads as an extended investigation into the tangible ways in which women's lives are affected, and placed at risk, by this data gap. "We have unconsciously just presented the world as male," says Criado Perez. "Women are being left out of numbers, data, the way in which we allocate our resources, the way in which we design safety for cars, the way in which we design medicine."

Women serving in the military are provided with equipment designed to fit male bodies. Citing a government report, Criado Perez states: "Women in the British Army have been found to be up to seven times more likely than men to suffer from musculoskeletal injuries, even it they have 'the same aerobic fitness and strength.'" The non-existence of anthropometric female crash-test dummies also means that the impact of car crashes on female bodies isn't being investigated. Seat-belted female drivers are 47 percent more likely to be seriously injured in a car crash than their male counterparts, a study by the University of Virginia’s Centre for Applied Biomechanics revealed.

The kernel of the idea for the book came when Criado Perez was researching her last book Do It Like a Woman, when she discovered that female heart attack symptoms are considered atypical and doctors are failing to recognise them. "All the public information I'd ever seen was about typical male heart attack symptoms, so I wouldn't recognise if I were having a heart attack. Then on top of that, to realise that doctors aren't realising it either, I just couldn't believe it really." "Science is not meant to be like this, science is meant to be objective, science is not meant to suffer from sexism," Criado Perez tells me. "Numbers and data are meant to just be numbers and data, they are not meant to carry society's problems within them."

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But, there are aspects of so-called "women's work" that we simply aren't collecting data on, Criado Perez says. "Women working in nail bars, there's very little data on how all the chemicals and dust from filing acrylic nails is going to be impacting on them," she says. "Because we just aren't used to thinking of women's occupations as dangerous." Criado Perez cites in the book a 2014 review by Anne Rochon Ford, which states that women working in nail salons are frequently exposed to toxic chemicals linked to "cancer, miscarriages, and lung diseases."

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Indeed, the absence of data on the health impacts of work for women offers a glimpse of how society might view work carried out by women. "We don't measure it because it's just seen as 'women's work,' and that can't possibly be difficult and dangerous."

"It's just seen as 'women's work,' and that can't possibly be difficult and dangerous."

Reading this book, it's difficult not to be alarmed. And, Criado Perez says that we shouldbe alarmed. "No one wants women to die," she says. "I think that when people are made aware of it, they do think it's shocking." But, that's not to say that these industries aren't aware. "There are people who know about this," she says. "None of the stuff that I have uncovered is stuff that people in the field don't know about. Researchers know about this."

Criado Perez spoke to Astrid Linder, research director of traffic safety at the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute, who's working on what she hopes will be the "first crash-test dummy to accurately represent female bodies. Linder told Criado Perez that female crash-test dummies were suggested in the 1980s, "manufacturers lobbied to not have to include them because of the cost."

"When you hear things like that, you can't help but think, maybe it is a lack of care," says Criado Perez, caveating that she also doesn't believe people are evil or that this is some kind of conspiracy. "You would hope that people would put women's safety above profit margins," she adds.

So, how do we go about bridging the data gap and reducing the very real risks that it carries? Well, the answer is right in front of us. "It's incredibly simple, you just need to collect data on women," says Criado Perez. "Collect sex-disaggregated data, full stop, the end. The solution is so blindingly simple. It can be fixed tomorrow, you just need to start doing it."

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Hiring female researchers and ensuring women occupy roles in every echelon of an organisation is also vitally important. "Having women in all positions of your company, from the top to the bottom is not just a box-ticking exercise — it is incredibly important for the outcomes of the work you do because all the evidence shows that women just don't forget women," says Criado Perez.

"Collect sex-disaggregated data, full stop, the end. The solution is so blindingly simple. It can be fixed tomorrow, you just need to start doing it."

Hiring more female researchers is one way to ensure that gender-analysed work is produced, but encouraging more young women to enter the STEM field is important — particularly given that only 23 percent of the UK STEM workforce is female.

In the weeks preceding its publication, Invisible Womenhas already proved hugely divisive on social media. "There are men who have been very angry saying 'but men work in the most dangerous occupations,'" says Criado Perez. "There is this idea that women's work just isn't dangerous, but that's because we know about the dangers of men's work because we've been collecting data."

This isn't a book about individuals, it's about how systems are failing women. I ask Criado Perez if perhaps this data gap can offer us an insight into the way women are seen in society.

"Insofar as we aren't seen," she replies. "The data gap to me is at the heart of basically everything about the way women are discriminated against," she adds. "We don't see their bodies, we don't see their lives, therefore the world does not account for them."

The solution is painfully obvious: don't ignore half the world's population.

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