A typical female travel pattern involves, for example, dropping children off at school before going to work; taking an elderly relative to the doctor and doing the grocery shopping on the way home. This is called ‘trip-chaining’, a travel pattern of several small interconnected trips that has been observed in women around the world. In London women

But there is hope in this story too, because it’s when women are able to step out from the shadows with their voices and their bodies that things start to shift. The gaps close. And so, at heart, Invisible Women is also a call for change. For too long we have positioned women as a deviation from standard humanity and this is why they have been

When you have been so used, as a white man, to white and male going without saying, it’s understandable that you might forget that white and male is an identity too.

Elite women, brought up to believe absolutely in the myth of their own helplessness, simply could not get over their understanding of work as intrinsically unfeminine. Unable to bring themselves to take up the jobs vacated by enlisted men, they wrote to their husbands begging them to desert, to come home and protect them. Poorer women proved a

The arbitrary division of the world into ‘private’ and ‘public’ is in any case arguably a false distinction. Invariably both bleed into each other. When I spoke to Katherine Edwards, a history teacher who was heavily involved in the fight against Gove’s reforms, she pointed to recent research on women’s role in the American Civil War. Far from

Canon formation is passed off as the objective trickle-down of the musical marketplace, but in truth it is as subjective as any other value judgment made in an unequal society. Women have been locked out of the canon wholesale because what success looked like in composing has historically been almost impossible for women to achieve.

Such subjective designations of worth masquerading as objectivity crop up all over the place. In 2015 a British A level student called Jesse McCabe noticed that of the sixty-three set works included in her music syllabus, not a single one was by a woman. When she wrote to her exam board, Edexcel, they defended the syllabus. ‘Given that female

None of this means that the Bank of England deliberately set out to exclude women. It just means that what may seem objective can actually be highly male-biased: in this case, the historically widespread practice of attributing women’s work to men made it much harder for a woman to fulfil the Bank’s requirements. The fact is that worth is a matter

These men were experiencing even minor female representation as an iniquity. As far as they were concerned, the playing field was already level, and the entirely male line-up was just an objective reflection of merit.