When Women Didn’t Count: The Chronic Mismeasurement and Marginalization of American Women in Federal Statistics. Robert Lopresti. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2017.

How many women were the head of their households in 1930? How many were single mothers in 1890? Librarians have a desire to answer every question that comes their way, but some questions have no accurate answers. This is especially true of government statistics on women, as Lopresti demonstrates this beautifully in When Women Didn’t Count. His treatise on the subject is enlightening, delving into the inconsistencies in how women were considered (or ignored) across different government surveys. Most infuriating are the times when results were labeled as unreliable or flat-out wrong because the answers did not meet expectations. As a result, we can never truly know how many women bucked expectations, finding work in the unlikeliest of professions—for a woman, that is. This book is an important work that sheds light on the sexism that permeates our statistics, even as recently as the last decade. Lolpresti is good at keeping a neutral, informational tone while also explaining the bias that makes some of these statistics questionable. The book is organized by various topics, such as demographics, women at home, and concepts of employment, with each chapter addressing a subtopic like women factory workers or contraception. This makes the book easy to navigate without disrupting the natural flow from one chapter to the next.—Sonnet Ireland (sonnet@stpl.us), Reference Librarian, St. Tammany Parish Library, Mandeville, Louisiana