“Men are more likely than women to be involved in a car crash, which means they dominate the numbers of those seriously injured in car accidents. But when a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured than a man, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured, even when researchers control for factors such as height, weight, seat-belt usage, and crash intensity…She is also 17% more likely to die and it all has to do with how the car is designed - and for whom…When men and women are in a car together, the man is most likely to be driving. So not collecting data on passengers more or less translates as not collecting data on women. The infuriating irony of all this is that the gendered passenger/driver norm is so prevalent that…the passenger seat is the only seat that is commonly tested with a female crash-test dummy, with the male crash-test dummy still being the standard dummy for the driver's seat. So stats that include only driver fatalities tell us precisely zero about the impact of introducing the female crash-test dummy.” - Caroline Criado Perez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
Crash-test dummies based on the ‘average’ male are just one example of design that forgets about women – and puts lives at risk
The formula to determine standard office temperature was developed in the 1960s around the metabolic resting rate of the average man. But a recent Dutch study found that the metabolic rate of young adult females performing light office work is significantly lower than the standard values for men doing the same activity. In fact, the formula may overestimate female metabolic rate by as much as 35%, meaning that current offices are on average five degrees too cold for women. This leads to the odd sight of female office workers wrapped in blankets in the summer, while their male colleagues wander around in shorts.
Not only is this situation inequitable, it is bad business sense: an uncomfortable workforce is an unproductive workforce. But workplace data gaps lead to a lot worse than simple discomfort and inefficiency. Over the past 100 years, workplaces have, on the whole, got considerably safer. In the early 1900s, about 4,400 people in the UK died at work every year. By 2016, that figure had fallen to 135. But while serious injuries at work have been decreasing for men, there is evidence that they have been increasing among women. The gender data gap is again implicated, with occupational research traditionally focused on male-dominated industries.
Every year, 8,000 people in the UK die from work-related cancers. And although most research in this area has been done on men, it’s far from clear that men are the most affected. Over the past 50 years, breast cancer rates in the industrialised world have risen significantly – but a failure to research female bodies, occupations and environments means that the data for exactly what is behind this rise is lacking. “We know everything about dust disease in miners,” Rory O’Neill, professor of occupational and environmental policy research at the University of Stirling, tells me. “You can’t say the same for exposures, physical or chemical, in ‘women’s work’.”
Cancer is a long-latency disease, O’Neill says, so even if we started the studies now, it would take a working generation before we had any usable data. But we aren’t starting the studies now. Instead,we continue to rely on data from studies done on men as if they apply to women. Specifically, Caucasian men aged 25 to 30, who weigh 70kg. This is “Reference Man” and his superpower is being able to represent humanity as a whole. Of course, he does not.
Men and women have different immune systems and hormones, which can play a role in how chemicals are absorbed. Women tend to be smaller than men and have thinner skin, both of which can lower the level of toxins they can be safely exposed to. This lower tolerance threshold is compounded by women’s higher percentage of body fat, in which some chemicals can accumulate. Chemicals are still usually tested in isolation, and on the basis of a single exposure. But this is not how women tend to encounter them.
In nail salons, where the workforce is almost exclusively female (and often migrant), workers will be exposed on a daily basis to a huge range of chemicals that are “routinely found in the polishes, removers, gels, shellacs, disinfectants and adhesives that are staples of their work”, according to the Canadian researcher Anne Rochon Ford. Many of these chemicals have been linked to cancer, miscarriages and lung diseases. Some may alter the body’s normal hormonal functions. If these women then go home and begin a second unpaid shift cleaning their home, they will be exposed to different chemicals that are ubiquitous in common products. The effects of these mixing together are largely unknown.
Most of the research on chemicals has focused on their absorption through the skin. But many of the ones used in nail salons are extremely volatile, which means that they evaporate at room temperature and can be inhaled – along with the considerable amounts of dust produced when acrylic nails are filed. The research on how this may impact on workers is virtually nonexistent.
Part of the failure to see the risks in traditionally female-dominated industries is because often these jobs are an extension of what women do in the home (although at a more onerous scale). But the data gap when it comes to women in the workplace doesn’t only arise in female-dominated industries.
Little data exists on injuries to women in construction, but the New York Committee for Occupational Safety & Health (NYCOSH) points to a US study of union carpenters that found women had higher rates of sprains, strains and nerve conditions of the wrist and forearm than men. Given the lack of data, it’s hard to be sure exactly why this is, but it’s a safe bet to attribute at least some of the blame to “standard” construction site equipment being designed around the male body.
Wendy Davis, ex-director of the Women’s Design Service in the UK, questions the standard size of a bag of cement. It’s a comfortable weight for a man to lift – but it doesn’t actually have to be that size, she points out. “If they were a bit smaller, then women could lift them.” Davis also takes issue with the standard brick size. “I’ve got photographs of my [adult] daughter holding a brick. She can’t get her hand round it. But [her husband] Danny’s hand fits perfectly comfortably. Why does a brick have to be that size?” She also notes that the typical A1 architect’s portfolio fits nicely under most men’s arms while most women’s arms don’t reach round it.
NYCOSH similarly notes that “standard hand tools like wrenches tend to be too large for women’s hands to grip tightly”.
In the UK, employers are legally required to provide well-maintained personal protective equipment (PPE) – anything from goggles to full body suits – to workers who need it, free of charge. But most PPE is based on the sizes and characteristics of male populations from Europe and the US. The TUC found that employers often think that when it comes to female workers all they need to do to comply with this legal requirement is to buy smaller sizes.
Differences in chests, hips and thighs can affect the way the straps fit on safety harnesses. The use of a “standard” US male face shape for dust, hazard and eye masks means they don’t fit most women (as well as a lot of black and minority ethnic men). A 2017 TUC report found that the problem with ill-fitting PPE was worst in the emergency services, where only 5% of women said that their PPE never hampered their work, with body armour, stab vests, hi-vis vests and jackets all highlighted as unsuitable.
When it comes to frontline workers, poorly fitting PPE can prove fatal. In 1997, a British female police officer was stabbed and killed while using a hydraulic ram to enter a flat. She had removed her body armour because it was too difficult to use the ram while wearing it. Two years later, a female police officer revealed that she had had to have breast-reduction surgery because of the health effects of wearing her body armour. After this case was reported, another 700 officers in the same force came forward to complain about the standard-issue protective vest.
But although the complaints have been coming regularly over the past 20 years, little seems to have been done. British female police officers report being bruised by their kit belts; a number have had to have physiotherapy because of the way stab vests sit on their body; many complain there is no space for their breasts. This is not only uncomfortable, it also results in stab vests coming up too short, leaving women unprotected.
Why women are 50 percent more likely to be misdiagnosed after a heart attack and 17 percent more likely to die in a car crash.
“In medical lore, the term “Yentl syndrome” has come to describe what happens when women present to their doctors with symptoms that differ from men’s — they often get misdiagnosed, mistreated, or told the pain is all in their heads. This phenomenon can have lethal consequences.
Many, many women have had this experience when they go to the doctor. I had it myself, years ago. As a spate of articles about the phenomenon has come out in the past couple of years, more people have begun talking about a “gender pain gap.”
In a new book, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, the British journalist and feminist activist Caroline Criado Perez argues that this is part of a larger problem: the “gender data gap.” Basically, the data our society collects is typically about men’s experience, not women’s. That data gets used to allocate research funding and make decisions about design. Because most things and spaces — from pain medicationsto cars, and from air-conditioned offices to city streets — have been designed by men with men as the default user, they often don’t work well for women.
Even when researchers do gather data from women as well as men in their studies, they often fail to sex-disaggregate it — to separate out the male and female data they’ve collected and analyze it for differences. That’s crucial, because a new pain medication that’s ineffective for men may work great for women, but you’d never know it if you mixed all their data together.”
Still stuck on book 1 in 2k21 because my thesis is literally and figuratively consuming me.
I can easily recommend Invisible Women though. It was one of the most insightful books I read in my life and a solid answer to the question of why feminism stays relevant despite the supposed emancipation of women (which is mostly old white cis-man lingo).
I loved researching into The Gender Data Gap and would HIGHLY recommend Caroline Creado Perez’s book, Invisable Women. But these are some more bloopers for you! I hope you enjoy them 😁
“What may seem objective can actually be highly male biased…Worth is a matter of opinion, and opinion is informed by culture. And if that culture is as male-biased as ours is, it can’t help but be biased against women. By default…The presumption that what is male is universal is a direct consequence of the gender data gap. Whiteness and maleness can only go without saying because most other identities never get said at all. But male universality is also a cause of the gender data gap: because women aren’t seen and aren’t remembered, because male data makes up the majority of what we know, what is male comes to be seen as universal. It leads to the positioning of women, half the global population, as a minority. With a niche identity, and a subjective point of view. In such a framing, women are set up to be forgettable. Ignorable. Dispensable - from culture, from history, from data. And so, women become invisible.” - Caroline Criado Perez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
Reading Invisible Women for the first time and this bit really hit home. No amount of gender ideology will change your basic biology or the way you were socialized, and those are the things that actively disadvantage women across the world.
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A page from Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez which reads:
When planners fail to account for gender, public spaces become male spaces by default. The reality is that half the global population has a female body. Half the global population has to deal on a daily basis with the sexualized menace that is visited on that body. The entire global population needs the care that, currently, is mainly carried out, unpaid, by women. These are not niche concerns, and if public spaces are truly to be for everyone, we have to start accounting for the lives of the other half of the world. And, as we've seen, this isn't just a matter of justice: it's also a matter of simple economics.
By accounting for women's care responsibilities in urban planning, we make it easier for women to engage fully in the paid workforce - and as we will see in the next chapter, this is a significant driver of GDP. By accounting for the sexual violence women face and introducing preventive measures - like providing enough single-sex public toilets - we save money in the long run by reducing the significant economic cost of violence against women. When we account for female socialization in the design of our open spaces and public activities, we again save money in the long run by ensuring women's long-term mental and physical health.
In short, designing the female half of the world out of our public spaces is not a matter of resources. It's a matter of priorities, and, currently, whether unthinkingly or not, we just aren't prioritising women. This is mainfestly unjust, and economically illiterate. Women have an equal right to public resources: we must stop excluding them by design.
One of the most important things to say about the gender data gap is that it is not generally malicious, or even deliberate. Quite the opposite. It is simply the product of a way of thinking that has been around for millennia and is therefore a kind of not thinking. A double not thinking, even: men go without saying, and women don’t get said at all. Because when we say human, on the whole, we mean man.
