How the Modern Workplace Fails Women
The world of work needs a wholesale redesign — led by data on female bodies and female lives
Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez (Abrams Press) was the winner of the 2019 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award. In this excerpt from the book, the author describes some of the many ways in which women are harmed by workplaces designed without their needs in mind.
It was in 2008 that the big bisphenol A (BPA) scare got serious. Since the 1950s, this synthetic chemical had been used in the production of clear, durable plastics, and it was to be found in millions of consumer items from baby bottles to food cans to main water pipes. By 2008, 2.7 million tons of BPA was being produced globally every year, and it was so ubiquitous that it had been detected in the urine of 93% of Americans over the age of six. And then a U.S. federal health agency came out and said that this compound that we were all interacting with on a daily basis may cause cancer, chromosomal abnormalities, brain and behavioral abnormalities, and metabolic disorders. Crucially, it could cause all these medical problems at levels below the regulatory standard for exposure. Naturally, all hell broke loose.
Fearing a major consumer boycott, most baby-bottle manufacturers voluntarily…
