This book was selected as part of the @Femi.Books book club, and I glad I read this! Through the course of the book, Perez lays out the degree to which women are ignored in the design, function, and operation of the world. Some of these things readers may already know, like how women present heart attacks differently than men, but just so much the average reader won’t know, like how Viagra has proven extremely effective against period pain, but nobody is willing to provide funding to research it further.

Over and over again, the reader is shown how the supposedly “gender neutral” design of the world is actually biased to men, but because research is rarely sex-disaggregated, nobody realizes (except the women, in many cases). Why research doesn’t include women surprisingly often has the same answer, whether you are doing a transportation study, vehicle testing, or medical testing: women are too complicated. Our trips around our communities are too erratic, with too many stops (daycare, seniors facility, clinic, work, daycare, grocery, etc.). Our bodies are too complicated for medical testing, or crash testing, despite the fact that women are much more likely to die in a car crash than men. How often more issues are not discovered, or solved, simply because the researcher or designer didn’t ask or listen to women is even more baffling.

I’m sure I frustrated my partner reading this book as I was so often huffing, muttering, or straight-up saying “listen to this!” and reading him the better part of a page (or more). Every page seemed to have something new to learn, about how this world wasn’t built for me, and how in some cases, it's a matter of life and death. I can't recommend this book to other women enough.

c/w for the book: sex-essentialism, trans/nbphobia
A quick search shows the author previously espoused transphobic and enbyphobic ideas (some deleted, others not), and the concept of sex-essentialism is prevalent in the book (women are XX, men XY, etc.). That the data reported in this book exists shows that women are living in a world not designed for them. BUT, for Perez to ignore that other groups alsow face that same discrimination is doing the same thing she accuses men of doing: ignoring a group of folk because they are complicated. Gender is complicated. It's not a spectrum, and every day people are left out because they don't fit into a rigid box society puts on them. For this book to not even acknowledge this, let alone research it, is to perpetuate the issue Perez was trying to raise awareness of.