Caroline Criado Perez

Failing to account for female socialisation can also lead to women living for decades with undiagnosed behavioural disorders. For years we have thought that autism is four times more common in boys than in girls, and that when girls have it, they are more seriously affected.45 But new research suggests that in fact female socialisation may help girls mask their symptoms better than boys and that there are far more girls living with autism than we previously realised.46

We like to think that the unpaid work women do is just about individual women caring for their individual family members to their own individual benefit. It isn’t. Women’s unpaid work is work that society depends on, and it is work from which society as a whole benefits.

But there was one major aspect of production that was excluded from what came to be the ‘international convention about how you think about and measure the economy’, and that was the contribution of unpaid household work, like cooking, cleaning and childcare. ‘Everyone acknowledges that there is economic value in that work, it’s just not part of ‘the economy’,’ says Coyle.

Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.

Simone de Beauvoir

female-shaped ‘absent presence’

male bias that attempts (often in good faith) to pass itself off as ‘gender neutral’.

unpaid care burden,

Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.

Simone de Beauvoir

But men forget them, because men do not have female bodies.

By ‘sex’, I mean the biological characteristics that determine whether an individual is male or female. XX and XY. By ‘gender’, I mean the social meanings we impose upon those biological facts – the way women are treated because they are perceived to be female. One is man-made, but both are real.