For me, it’s never being able to reach and close car boots. Having to throw my entire weight behind doors of public buildings to open them. Not being able to find a work/travel bag that is not already as heavy as I am, even before I start to fill it with the things I need. I had thought I was wrong, that I didn’t fit the world. It turns out the world doesn’t fit me.

Invisible Women is a new book by Caroline Criado Perez, the feminist activist who first came to prominence in 2013 campaigning for a female figure to be depicted on the £10 note. It’s about how data and design are biased towards men and how most of the norms around which the world turns are in fact only normal for men.

It’s basically the world’s most revelatory Did You Know… collection. Did you know that cars are mostly tested using crash test dummies of male dimensions, with deleterious effects on outcomes on real women in real crashes? Did you know that most things that require manual handling, from bricks to smartphones, have been tailored to fit male hands? And – believe it or not – standard medicine doses and symptoms are based almost entirely on male bodies not female ones, which often respond quite otherwise.

Lucy Mangan discovers how the world was literally designed with men in mind