The opening example of Serena William’s birth story is important when examining power in order to address the ways in which powerful people can be oppressive. The people in these positions of power (more often than not they are white men) can be blinded by the privilege that they face and not be able to recognize that others don’t share the same experience as they do.

When discussing complications and deaths related to childbirth the authors write, “So what were these complications, more precisely? And how many women had actually died as a result? Nobody was counting.” If the people in power are not being effected negatively by the same things as the people without power, they aren’t likely to look into the matter. This is why it took Serena Williams, a world famous athlete, to get the conversation going about the struggles black women face when dealing with the health care industry while pregnant. This situation ties into the quotes in the prompt for this question, “What we choose to measure is a statement of what we value in health,” he explains. We might edit his statement to add that it’s a measure of who we value in health, too.” If the people in power valued women’s health, more importantly black women’s health, we would have more data on why black women are three times as likely to die from childbirth than white women and we’d be able to begin to take measures to prevent this happening, but we don’t have that.

The book “Invisible Women” brings up other issues that follow the same principle of, if the people in power only look out for people similar to themselves, others will remain oppressed. The book mentions that car crash test dummies were only made for men up until recently, which probably contributed to many women dying. Again going back to the quotes about what we value, if we valued women’s safety and health, there would have always been test dummies for women as well.

Another case where people in power did not account for others (in this case, women) was when Amazon created an algorithm to screen job applicants and it discriminated against women. “But because the model had been trained on the resumes of prior applicants, who were predominantly male, it developed an even stronger preference for male applicants. It downgraded resumes with the word women and graduates of women’s colleges.”  We need to examine the power structures that allowed this to happen, so that it doesn’t happen again and so that we can recognize when something similar is happening somewhere else.