Listen, we all know the world is built by men for men, but the full extent of it? Absolute eye-opener. Not in a sticking-your-finger-in-an-electrical-outlet kind of way, but more like a surprise tap-to-the-sack kind of way.

This book runs the full list of practically everything around us and breaks down how default settings aren’t just designed for men—they range from mildly indifferent towards women and girls to straight-up hostile towards mothers, daughters, sisters, and grandmothers…. Or really just not dudes. 

The book definitely goes hard in the paint, like really hard. Sometimes it feels like it’s reaching a bit, straining to slap a patriarchal spin on every single thing on the planet. But even with that, the core of the read is deeply surprising and genuinely dismaying. The women in our group spent half the session giving the guys a collective “yeah-we-fucking-know” look, but when it hit the weirder, more specific data points? Every person in the group was shaken by the sheer scale of the prejudice.

We’re talking about everything from corporate office design and work schedules to the actual definition of a "standard human body" and even what counts as "room temperature." Our main group takeaway was that this isn’t just a simple men-versus-women binary. The real culprit is that most scientific data, safety norms, business norms, and design metrics aren’t built around all men either—they’re based on western male grad students… an even smaller, wildly unrepresentative sample of humanity. But hey, that's a whole separate rabbit hole for another meeting.

Caroline is fighting the good fight, and we are very here for it.