#data bias

“Several studies conducted over the past decade or so show that letters of recommendation are another seemingly gender-neutral part of a hiring process that is in fact anything but. One U.S. study found that female candidates are described with more communal (warm; kind; nurturing) and less active (ambitious; self-confident) language than men. And having communal characteristics included in your letter of recommendation makes it less likely that you will get the job, particularly if you're a woman: while 'team-player' is taken as a leadership quality in men, for women the term ‘can make a woman seem like a follower’”. - Caroline Criado Perez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)

“Sex is not the reason women are excluded from data. Gender is. The female body is not the problem. The problem is the social meaning that we ascribe to that body, and a socially determined failure to account for it…The gender data gap is both a cause, and a consequence of the type of unthinking that conceives of humanity as almost exclusively male…Seeing men as the human default is fundamental to the structure of human society…If human evolution is driven by men, are women even human?” - Caroline Criado Perez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)