Morally Indefensible PPE

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?

Can playgrounds be sexist?

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.

Computer says no: is AI making healthcare worse for women?

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.

Deadly injustice: Why cars aren’t safe for women

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.

The curious case of Percy Pig and the missing pocket

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.

Privacy vs the gender data gap

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.

Murderous menstrual blood

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.

Are pianos sexist?

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.

The concussed female brain

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.

The day the women went on strike

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.

Waiting for the ladies

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.

The contraceptive headache

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.