When the BBC’s gender pay gap was revealed to the public in 2017, it unleashed a firestorm. The corporation’s top seven highest-paid stars were men. This single set of data had an instant transforming effect, raising the salaries of hitherto overlooked women almost overnight, and putting the bloated salaries of certain men under the spotlight. It proved that statistics matter. In our time, they have a power of their own.

In Invisible Women, campaigner and writer Caroline Criado Perez brings gender data like this to the fore. Although it sells itself as a book about data bias, it’s more of a book about data on bias, a catalogue of the facts and figures that document persistent gender inequalities in society.

These aren’t facts that will shock all women. We already know that we’re paid less, that we do far more unpaid labour at home, that the queues for our loos are longer, that we are the disproportionate victims of domestic violence. But it’s nevertheless useful and sobering to have it listed in this way, to have numbers to quantify our pain and misery. Seeing imbalance in percentage terms gives the process of understanding and combating it an important dimension.

The book offers endless nuggets to chew on. Women in the UK, Criado Perez notes, are 53% more stressed at work than men. One in three women in the world lack access to safe toilets. It took until 2011 for carmakers in the US to start using crash test dummies based on the typical female body (although this does beg the question of whether there is such a thing as a “typical” female body, and whose body carmakers consider “typical”).

Invisibility takes many forms, and only the invisible can fully appreciate their predicament. Reading this book made me recall – oddly, perhaps – growing up in the 1980s, when we would cheer every time we saw someone of Indian origin on television. Quick, Mum, look – a brown person like us! We knew that the culture we lived in didn’t necessarily include us, but we were over the moon when it did. The feeling of being overlooked was hardwired into us. We took it for granted because we were minorities. We were the ones who did not count.

There are so many factors that make a person less visible to society – not just race, but poverty, disability, and even, in a world designed around the physically average white man, the physically not-average white man. It doesn’t always sit along binary gender lines. It can manifest in countless ways, making some people more invisible than others.

What’s odd about women’s invisibility is that women aren’t a minority. They are the majority. They are absolutely everywhere and always have been. Yet as Criado Perez shows, women must live in a society built around men. From a lack of streetlights to allow us to feel safe, to an absence of workplace childcare facilities, almost everything seems to have been designed for the average white working man and the average stay-at-home white woman. Her answer is to think again, to collect more data, study that data, and ask women what they want. It’s that simple.

But is it enough? While infrastructural change is vital, when Criado Perez calls for more streetlighting and buses redesigned to minimise the risk of sexual assault, where is the responsibility on men? Should we build cities that assume a certain proportion of men will be violent sexual predators? Or should we demand that men be better so women feel safe everywhere? Should we make workplaces with built-in creches to help women back to work, or should we demand that fathers take on an equal share of childcare responsibilities and make childcare everyone’s problem?

In the end, an equal world can only be one in which people change. We don’t win by just having more streetlights. We win when there’s a change of mindset, of attitude and behaviour. If some men are the perpetrators of a problem, the beneficiaries of women’s invisible work and bodies, the ones doing the ignoring, then they clearly need to be part of the solution. And as more women are able to take on the jobs of designing and building things, their perspectives will have to be taken into account. It’s the case for representation across work, whether that work is at home or away from home.

What I would have liked to see more of in this book is some investigation of why, given all the data we have, we do so little to fix things. Criado Perez does note that it was a UK politician, the junior Brexit minister Martin Callanan, who wanted to scrap the EU’s pregnant workers directive, designed to protect the health and safety of women at work. It is fathers who are failing to take up shared parental leave when it is available. It is “undermining behaviour from managers” that is forcing women out of the tech industry. The UK Department for Transport knows that 62% of women are scared walking in multistorey car parks, but haven’t made them any friendlier.

The power of data to shame people into making society fairer, it seems, goes only so far. Beyond a certain point, it’s difficult not to conclude that they don’t particularly care. What should worry us more than the data gap, then, is that huge and seemingly intractable don’t-give-a-damn gap.

Angela Saini is a science journalist and the author of Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story.

• Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez is published by Chatto & WIndus (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99