Visible Women

When the pandemic hit, Caroline Criado Perez was inundated with messages from female healthcare workers telling her that their PPE – things like masks and goggles – didn’t fit. In this first episode of her brand new investigative series, join Caroline as she goes on the hunt for missing data and asks: can we fix PPE?

In the first Visible Women bonus episode, Caroline Criado Perez is joined by producer Hannah Varrall and data correspondent Patricia Clarke as she listens to tales of ill-fitting PPE sent in by listeners. They discuss everything from offshore survival suits to armoured bras – and how they never quite fit.

Girls around the world are being pushed to the edges of their own playgrounds – forced into corners, or under stairs, as boys dominate the space. Caroline finds the data that shows why this matters -- and asks what we can do to fix it. She also whizzes down some slides in the name of research.

In this bonus episode, Caroline Criado Perez speaks to a feminist architect and urban planner about superillas – street blocks that are designed to be friendlier, more sociable and safer for children. The Visible Women team goes to investigate

Artificial intelligence has the potential to drastically improve so much of our lives. But it all depends on feeding the algorithms good data. Thanks to the gender data gap, when it comes to women, this is something of a problem. In this episode, Caroline investigates how, in a world where women’s heart attacks are already systematically underdiagnosed, artificial intelligence might actually be making healthcare worse for women. She also uncovers an intriguing solution – and dabbles in pre-crime.

In this bonus episode, Caroline Criado Perez speaks to a woman called Hayley Moulding about her experience of AI-gone-wrong – and tries to get to the bottom of why voice recognition software is so bad at recognising women’s voices

If a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 17% more likely to die than a man in the same crash. In this episode, Caroline investigates why... and comes up with a campaign to fix crash testing. To email Euro NCAP President Niels Ebbe Jacobson with a message asking for more transparency, just click through to the link on the Tortoise site.

In this bonus episode we get to hear more from Dr Tim Nutbeam, the researcher behind the finding that women are nearly twice as likely as men to get trapped in a car following a crash. Tim talks Caroline through the even more shocking sex disparity he uncovered subsequently – and explains how we nearly didn’t get to see any of this research at all.

In this episode the Visible Women team try to get to the bottom of one of the world’s most trying problems: the paucity of pockets in women’s clothes compared to men’s. Caroline speaks to a pocket historian, learns to make her own pocket, and takes on some troubling mysteries.

Caroline sews her own tie-on pocket and takes it on a trip around London – with nearly disastrous consequences

Caroline has spent over a decade calling for more data to be collected on women -- but in this episode the Visible Women team investigates: what happens when that data gets used against us? For many of us, concerns about privacy may seem like an intellectual exercise, but post Roe V Wade, this is has become a live issue for millions of American women. And, as we discover, this is something all women should care about.

We are used to hearing about “illegal” abortion in the context of the US, but there are two women currently being prosecuted for having an abortion in the UK. Do we need to decriminalise abortion in Britain?

If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that periods are terrifying. Well, men have certainly seemed to think so. All the way back to Roman times, the male chroniclers of the human condition have agreed on one thing: menstruation is unseemly, ungodly and just plain horrible. The resulting taboo means we know really very little about periods, with obvious knock-on consequences for women’s health. Now, researchers are investigating the healing powers of period blood, and how it could hold the key to developing treatments for conditions like endometriosis. In this episode, the Visible Women team asks: what could we gain from breaking the taboo over periods.

Dr Noémie Elhadad tells us how her experience with endometriosis led her to create an app, PHENDO, that is now collecting data on the condition – and using AI to improve women’s lives

The standard piano keyboard is too big for 87% of women and 25% of men, limiting the range of pieces they can play. But how did pianos end up this size? Is it time we came up with an alternative? The Visible Women team investigates.

After learning shocking data about concussions in women's rugby, Caroline takes a closer look, and discovers an even more widespread and worrying issue. Domestic violence affects one in three women worldwide, and new research suggests many of these women may experience repeated concussions after violent abuse. Caroline meets the people working in this under researched area, and hears from a woman who is still recovering from her own experience.

In October 1975, the women of Iceland took a 'day off', leading to national chaos. It highlighted the importance of women’s roles in the economy, of which unpaid care work - cooking, cleaning, caring for family - is a vital part. In this episode, Caroline asks whether the Covid pandemic could be the shock we need to finally fix perhaps the greatest gender data gap of all.

Caroline is sent photos of women’s toilet queues on an almost daily basis, since writing in her book Invisible Women about how women’s queues are always longer than the men’s. In this episode, she investigates the history of public conveniences, what impact they have on women’s participation in society and why councils and businesses seem unable to get it right.

If you ask any woman whether she’s happy with her contraception, chances are she’ll say no - but that she’s settled for the best of a bad bunch. In this episode, Caroline asks why our options are stuck in the 1960s. We take a deep dive into the history of family planning; we investigate the hurdles standing in the way of progress; and we uncover some ground-breaking forms of contraception that could one day be coming to a clinic near you.