Minutes after Caroline Criado Perez won the Business Book of the Year Award last week for Invisible Women, I had to interview her for a short video.

I am taller than Ms Criado Perez. To avoid a “l(fā)ittle and large” effect, the producer suggested finding something for the author and activist to stand on. Given that her book is all about how women are forced to adapt to a default based on male norms, humiliating our prize-winner seemed a bad idea. Instead, I stood with legs uncomfortably wide apart to bring my height down by a couple of inches. Manspreading, but in a good cause.

Admittedly, this is a far from perfect example of the embedded bias that Ms Criado Perez attacks so successfully. I have interviewed plenty of male book-prize winners who are shorter than I am. It is also trivial compared with some of her examples. Invisible Women lays out in cool, data-backed detail how more women die as a result of using default male crash test dummies for cars or succumb to heart attack, because tests, technology and research have in the past skewed towards men.