Hello, this is Tim here. This week on the podcast, we're playing an interview with Caroline

Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women, which is currently running on our programme on

the BBC's World Service. Some of you may remember that we carried a short interview with

Caroline in an earlier podcast, but this podcast is new material. So enjoy!

Caroline Criado Perez is a British activist who's written a book called Invisible Women,

exposing data bias in a world designed for men. In it, she covers a wide range of topics,

where she argues that data is collected in a way that misses women's experiences of life

to detrimental effect. We sat down to talk about the book and we began with a story about Viagra.

The way Viagra was discovered was by accident. It was in a trial actually for heart medication

and it turned out that it didn't work very well as a heart medication, but it did have this

wonderful side effect, which they discovered because all the participants in the drug trial

were men. And having discovered that Viagra could give men erections, it very quickly was

developed as a drug and it was on the market in a couple of years. And that was in the late 90s.

Fast forward to 2013 and a medical researcher decides to do a small scale study on whether or not

the active ingredient in Viagra would ease period pain, for which there isn't really much out there

for most women. Period pain is just a feature for a long part of your life. And so this would be

amazing. And the primary hypothesis was that it would reduce period pain entirely in comparison to

a placebo for four consecutive hours. The trial results were very suggestive, but they weren't able to

prove the primary hypothesis because they ran out of funding. Just to reiterate then Viagra might be a

cure for period pain. Yes. But we don't know because we haven't done a big enough study. The end of the

study they said we should do a big study. This looked promising. And the lead researcher applied for

funding twice and was rejected both times with the rejection basically just being that this isn't a public

...