Invisible AI

Caroline Criado Perez, the British author who introduced us in “Invisible Women” to the gender data gaps in heart disease research and seat-belt design, takes a look in her January 18, 2026, newsletter at another gendered phenomenon: the economic illiteracy of excluding unpaid women’s housework in the nation’s GDP because it was “too complicated to calculate.” Lo and behold, however, the technology world is starting to take notice, not out of a desire to count the contribution of women, but because Open AI have to figure out a way to measure the value of automated housework and care-giving by algorithms in order to include it in the nation’s economic output!

My thanks to Perez, who inspired my own novel about invisible women “Old Bean’s Last Fantasy,” for continuing to monitor gendered data gaps.