3rd December 2019: The Financial Times and McKinsey & Company today announce that Caroline Criado Perez is the winner of the 2019 Business Book of the Year Award for INVISIBLE WOMEN: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, published by Abrams Press/Abrams in US and Chatto & Windus in the UK, on how designers and developers have persistently excluded or played down women in the data they use.

The award recognises the book that provides the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues. It was presented this evening to Caroline Criado Perez at a ceremony at the Park Hyatt Hotel in New York, by Lionel Barber, Editor of the Financial Times and chair of the panel of judges, and Kevin Sneader, Global Managing Partner of McKinsey & Company. Keynote speaker at the ceremony was Ronan Dunne, Executive Vice President & Group CEO, Verizon Consumer Group.

Caroline Criado Perez saw off strong competition from a shortlist of titles with a focus on subjects ranging from the triumph of the quant revolution in financial markets to the dangers of the data-driven economy, gender inequality, and the unbridled influence that can arise from a privately held company, to win the £30,000 prize. Each of the five runners-up received a cheque for £10,000.

Lionel Barber said, "Invisible Women is a stunning book that tells people about sexism that is hidden in plain sight. The data that Criado Perez marshals are overwhelming and her call for action is compelling.”

“Unassailable facts, backed by powerful stories, are what moves minds, “ said Kevin Sneader, McKinsey’s global managing partner. “This year’s winner brilliantly uses that combination to cast a bright light on one of the most important issues of our time.”

The distinguished judging panel for the 2019 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, chaired by Lionel Barber, comprised:

The Financial Times and McKinsey & Company also announced Jonathan Hillman as the winner of the 2019 Bracken Bower Prize. The prize is designed to encourage young authors to tackle emerging business themes. We hope to unearth new talent and encourage writers to research ideas that could fill future business books of the year.

Hillman was awarded £15,000 for his book proposal, The Sinolarity, which provides a map for navigating China's rise as a network power as it wires the world, connecting everything between the ocean floors and outer-space.

The judges commented, "We were impressed by the depth and variety of this year's entries. Jonathan Hillman's winning proposal is a thought-provoking and topical analysis of the battle between the US and China for control over tomorrow's technology and networks and we look forward to seeing how he enlarges on these important ideas."  

The distinguished judging panel for the Bracken Bower Prize comprised:

Photographs of the presentation of the Business Book of the Year Award, the winner of the Bracken Bower Prize, shortlisted authors, the judges, and speaker Ronan Dunne are available for download from https://www.flickr.com/photos/45442848@N05/albums/72157712047507293.

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To learn more about the awards, visit ft.com/bookaward and follow the conversation at #BBYA19 and #BrackenBower.

For further information please contact:

UK:

Steven Williams/Ben McCluskey, Midas PR - T: + 44 (0)207 361 7860 // E: Steven.williams@midaspr.co.uk; E: Ben.McCluskey@midaspr.co.uk

Katrina Fedczuk, Financial Times - T: +1 347 213 1944 // E: Katrina.fedczuk@ft.com 

US:

Andrew DeSio, Fortier Public Relations - T: +1 267-987-3810 // E: andrew@fortierpr.com      

Media Relations, McKinsey & Company - Graham Ackerman / Steffi Langner - T: +1 (212) 415-1971 // E: media_relations_inbox@mckinsey.com  

The Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 2019:

WINNER 2019

Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, by Caroline Criado Perez, Abrams Press/Abrams (US); Chatto & Windus (UK)

Imagine a world where your phone is too big for your hand, where in a car accident you are 47% more likely to be seriously injured, where every week the countless hours of work you do are not recognised or valued. If any of this sounds familiar, chances are that you're a woman.

Invisible Women shows us how, in a world largely built for and by men, we are systematically ignoring half the population. It exposes the gender data gap – a gap in our knowledge that is at the root of perpetual, systemic discrimination against women, and that has created a pervasive but invisible bias with a profound effect on women’s lives. From government policy and medical research, to technology, workplaces, urban planning and the media, Caroline Criado Perez brings together for the first time an impressive range of case studies, stories and new research from across the world that illustrate the hidden ways in which women are forgotten, and the impact this has on their health and well-being. In making the case for change, this powerful and provocative book will make you see the world anew.

Caroline Criado Perez is a writer, broadcaster and award-winning feminist campaigner. Her most notable campaigns have included co-founding The Women's Room, getting a woman on Bank of England banknotes, forcing Twitter to revise its procedures for dealing with abuse and successfully campaigning for a statue of suffragist Millicent Fawcett to be erected in Parliament Square in London. She was the 2013 recipient of the Liberty Human Rights Campaigner of the Year Award, and was awarded an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours 2015. Her first book, Do it Like a Woman, was published in 2015. She lives in London.

SHORTLIST 2019

Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein, Riverhead Books (US); Pan Macmillan (UK)

From the ‘10,000 hours rule’ to the power of Tiger parenting, we have been taught that success in any field requires early specialisation and many hours of deliberate practice. And, worse, that if you dabble or delay, you'll never catch up with those who got a head start. This is completely wrong.

In Range, David Epstein demonstrates why, as the world has become increasingly complex, developing range can help us excel by sampling widely, gaining a breadth of experiences, taking detours, experimenting relentlessly and juggling many interests.

Studying the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, and scientists Epstein discovered that in most fields – especially those that are complex and unpredictable – generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. They are also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can’t see. Range proves that by spreading your knowledge across multiple domains is the key to success rather than deepening their knowledge in a single area.

David Epstein is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Sports Gene. He has master's degrees in environmental science and journalism and has worked as an investigative reporter for ProPublica and a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. He lives in Washington, DC.

Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America, by Christopher Leonard, Simon & Schuster

Christopher Leonard uses the extraordinary account of Koch’s ascent to tell the story of modern corporate America. If you want to understand how the income divide widened, how progress stalled on climate change, and how corporate America bought the influence industry, you have to understand the story of Koch Industries, one of the largest private companies in the world, a sprawling conglomerate whose operations span the entire landscape of the American economy.

For Kochland, Leonard devoted seven years to penetrating Koch Industries’ veil of secrecy. He spent hundreds of hours interviewing dozens of current and former Koch Industries employees, managers, whistle-blowers and senior executives—including Charles Koch. He talked to outside regulators, prosecutors, politicians, bankers and competitors. The result is an epic tale of how one private company, operating in deepest secrecy, consolidated wealth, power, and influence over half a century—and in doing so, helped transform capitalism into something that has come to feel deeply alienating to many Americans.

Christopher Leonard is a business reporter whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and Bloomberg Businessweek. He is the author of The Meat Racket and Kochland, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award.

The Third Pillar: The Revival of Community in a Polarised World, by Raghuram Rajan, Penguin Press (US); William Collins (UK); HarperCollins (India)

Raghuram Rajan has an unparalleled vantage point onto the social and economic consequences of globalisation and their ultimate effect on politics and society. In The Third Pillar, he offers a magnificent big-picture framework for understanding how three key forces – the economy, society, and the state – interact, why things begin to break down, and how we can find our way back to a more secure and stable plane.

Economists all too often understand their field as the relationship between the market and government, and leave social issues for other people. That’s not just myopic, Rajan argues; it’s dangerous. As he shows, throughout history, technological innovations have ripped the market out of old webs and led to violent backlashes, and to what we now call populism.

As markets scale up, government scales up with it, concentrating economic and political power in flourishing central hubs and leaving the periphery to decompose. Rajan offers a way to rethink the relationship between the market and civil society and argues for a return to strengthening and empowering local communities as an antidote to growing despair and unrest.

Raghuram Rajan is the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He was the 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India between September 2013 and September 2016. Euromoney magazine named him Central Banker of the Year in 2014. Between 2003 and 2006, Dr. Rajan was the Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund. He co-authored Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists with Luigi Zingales in 2003. He then wrote Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, for which he was awarded the 2010 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Award.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Shoshana Zuboff, PublicAffairs (US); Profile Books (UK)

The Cambridge Analytica scandal and the continuing Facebook headlines are just glimpses of the ways big tech companies exploit personal data without our knowledge, and how those data are used to shape our behaviour. Our challenge now is to move past the shock and revulsion to ask the most important question of our time: Will we be the masters of the information age or will it master us?

The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff, reveals what is at stake for our digital future and how we can reclaim control by harnessing the collective power of indignant citizens, journalists, students, artists, scholars, policymakers, and regulators. Surveillance capitalism is the foundation of a new economic order. Firms from every industry compete for supplies of the “behavioural surplus” used to manufacture “prediction products” that are traded in lucrative new “behavioural futures markets.” This book lifted the lid off this hidden territory in a comprehensive geography, seven years in the making: its economics, operations, secrets, power, plan for society, and consequences for humanity.

Shoshana Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor emerita, Harvard Business School. She is the author of In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power and The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and The Next Episode of Capitalism. Prof Zuboff won the 2019 Axel Springer Award, which is ‘given to outstanding personalities who are particularly innovative, and who generate and change markets, influence culture and at the same time face up to their responsibility to society.’” She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and her BA from the University of Chicago.

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution, by Gregory Zuckerman, Portfolio Penguin (US); Penguin Business (UK)

In The Man Who Solved the Market, Gregory Zuckerman tells the gripping story of how James Simons, a retired math professor, assembled a band of renegade mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists to pioneer algorithmic trading, launching a quantitative revolution that has fundamentally reshaped our understanding of financial markets. Simons and his team developed methods to crunch data and turn tasks over to machines well before these tactics were embraced in Silicon Valley, sports stadiums, military command centres and most everywhere forecasting is done today. Since 1988, Renaissance Technologies’ Medallion fund has generated average annual returns of 66 per cent while earning profits of more than $100 billion dollars. Zuckerman ran into imposing obstacles to get his story about the most secretive traders in the history of finance, but eventually conducted more than four hundred interviews with current and former Renaissance employees and many more of Simons’ friends, family members, as well as Simons himself.

Gregory Zuckerman is the author of The Greatest Trade Ever and The Frackers, and is a Special Writer at the Wall Street Journal. At the Journal, Zuckerman writes about financial firms, personalities and trades, as well as hedge funds and other investing and business topics. He's a three-time winner of the Gerald Loeb award, the highest honor in business journalism. Zuckerman also appears regularly on CNBC, Fox Business and other networks and radio stations around the globe.