When Britain’s EU Withdrawal Bill was announced in 2017, the Human Rights Act was explicitly excluded from alteration – but it took a woman, Maria Miller, the Conservative MP for Basingstoke, to force the government to agree to make a statement requiring that Brexit is also compatible with the Equalities Act.18 Without this concession, a whole range of women’s rights could be scrapped after Brexit, with no avenue for legal redress. In the workplace it is often women, like developmental biologist Christiane Nusslein-Volhard with her foundation to help female PhD students with children, who are putting in place solutions to structural male bias – a bias which male leaders have overlooked and ignored for decades.
Women are also leading the way when it comes to closing the gender data gap. A recent analysis of 1.5 million papers published between 2008-15 found that the likelihood of a study involving gender and sex analysis ‘increases with the proportion of women among its authors’19. The effect is particularly pronounced if a woman serves as a leader of the author group. This concern for women’s health also extends to the political sphere: it took a woman (Paula Sherriff, the Labour MP for Dewsbury) to set up the UK’s first All-Party Parliamentary group for women’s health in 2016. It was two rogue female Republicans who scotched Donald Trump’s attempts to repeal Obamacare (which would have disproportionately impacted on women), voting three times against his proposals.20
And women are making a difference in politics more generally. It was two women, Melinda Gates and Hillary Clinton, who spearheaded the UN-backed organisation Data2x that is aimed specifically at closing the global gender data gap. It was a woman, Hillary Clinton, who insisted on going to Beijing in 1995 to make the now famous declaration that ‘Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights.’
And when the worst happens, women are there too, filling in the gaps left by male-biased disaster relief. Researchers found that the ‘masculine and muscular image[s] of relief workers’ that dominated the media post-Katrina were belied by women who were ‘working tirelessly and courageously’ behind the scenes.21 The same thing has happened in Puerto Rico, all but abandoned by the US government after Hurricane Maria devastated the region in 2017. ‘The reality is that when you go to communities, mostly it is women as leaders and as community organizers,’ Adi Martinez-Roman, executive director for a non-profit that provides legal assistance to low-income families, told journalist Justine Calma.22 These women have collected data by ‘wad[ing] into flooded neighbourhoods’ and canvassing the abandoned communities.23 And they have developed and provided evidence-based solutions. They’ve set up soup kitchens. They’ve raised money and rebuilt roads. They’ve distributed ‘solar-powered lights, generators, gas, clothes, shoes, tampons, batteries, medication, mattresses, water’. They set up ‘free legal aid societies to help families navigate the confusing and ill-designed processes required to file FEMA claims’. They’ve even managed to source some communal, solar-powered washing machines.
The solution to the sex and gender data gap is clear: we have to close the female representation gap. When women are involved in decision-making, in research, in knowledge production, women do not get forgotten. Female lives and perspectives are brought out of the shadows. This is to the benefit of women everywhere, and as the story of Taimina, the crocheting maths professor shows, it is often to the benefit of humanity as a whole. And so, to return to Freud’s ‘riddle of femininity’, it turns out that the answer was staring us in the face all along. All ‘people’ needed to do was to ask women.
Acknowledgements
Writing a book can feel like a lonely endeavour and often it is. But it’s also in many ways a group achievement. My first thanks have to go to Rachel Hewitt, who introduced me to her, now my, amazing agent Tracy Bohan at the Wylie Agency, because without that introduction this book would probably never have happened. And Tracy has been a dream to work with. I’m so grateful to her for taking me on and helping me to shape a book proposal that got me my very first book auction – not to mention always being on hand to very calmly, politely and Canadianly, deal with every problem (including those of my own making) that I’ve thrown at her. Thanks too to her wonderful assistant Jennifer Bernstein who has been so supportive throughout.
Next thanks go to my two brilliant editors, Poppy Hampson and Jamison Stoltz, both of whom immediately got the idea in a way no-one else did. They have been painstaking and methodical, taking me carefully through the various drafts, asking questions that forced me to sharpen my argument and defend my thesis. This book is what it is because of them, and I’m so grateful to them for challenging me to make it better. Special thanks to Poppy for having at least two crisis coffees with me as I had minor breakdowns about Never Finishing. And huge thanks also to all at Chatto & Windus and at Abrams Books for taking this on and being so dedicated to making it work from the very beginning.
I have so many people to thank who were generous with their time and expertise. Nishat Siddiqi for giving me a crash-course in how the heart works and answering all my no doubt ridiculous questions about the cardiovascular system. James Ball who did the same with all my stats questions alongside being a brilliant friend who listened to my more or less daily wails about getting to the end. Thanks too to my lovely friend Alex Kealy who was my other go-to for stats and also had to put up with semi-regular wailing. Alex Scott gets special mention for being amazingly kind and reading through my medical chapters to make sure I hadn’t made any howlers, as does Greg Callus who did a legal fact-check for me.
Special acknowledgement has to go to Helen Lewis for her spot on coinage ‘vomit draft’ which I found incredibly useful to hold in mind as a way to just get the initial words down. Huge thanks also to her, Sarah Ditum, Alice Ford, Nicfy Woolf and Luke McGee for bravely reading some very early sections (and particularly to Helen for turning her expert eye to some particularly knoty sections). I hope none of you emerged too traumatised from the experience.
To all my lovely friends for supporting me and putting up with my disappearing for months on end and repeatedly cancelling plans: thank you for your patience and support and thank you for listening. I couldn’t ask for a better bunch and I’m so grateful to have all of you in my life, especially my beloved HarpySquad and the gang of who really have had to suffer with me through this book on a daily basis. You know who you are.
Biggest thanks of all, though, have to go to my amazing Official Friend and cheerleader Tracy King, who has not only worked with me on my madcap feminist campaigns, but who read the very earliest vomit drafts of this book and never stopped encouraging me and promising me I would eventually finish. I could never have done this and have remained (relatively) sane without her.
OK, there is one more thanks: to my beloved dog Poppy. She really does make the work that I do possible – not just by sitting on my lap, but also by distracting me when I’ve been typing for too long. She literally just licked my arm as I typed that. She’s the gorgeous best and I couldn’t do anything without her.