How society overlooks
women
Points raised in Invisible Women:
Exposing Data Bias In A World Designed For Men by Caroline Criado Perez,
published by Chatto and Windus, 2019.
*****
Everyday
women struggle to use products, software and spaces that have been designed by
men, for men. They fail to take into account women’s typically smaller size and
different needs. While not generally malicious or even deliberate, this can
even be fatal in a car crash or medical treatment. This comes from assuming
that a male viewpoint is the ‘default’, while half the global population
(women) are a niche interest.
It all starts
with education.
“A study of US
school history textbooks from 1960 to 1990 found only 9 per cent of names were
female. A 2017 analysis of political science textbooks found only 10.8 per cent
of pages referenced women. And in language example sentences, men outnumber
women three to one, according to 30 years of Western studies.”
The result?
Girls starting primary school aged five are as likely to think women can be ‘really,
really smart’ but by age six they no longer think this is true. And a 2016
study found male students consistently ranked fellow men as more intelligent
than better-performing women.
One size fits
all …men.
Product
design focuses on men. Smartphone screens are typically around 5.5 in, so the
average man can use it one handed – but the average woman can’t. (But women are
more likely to buy a smartphone.) [Blogger
note: smartphone design for women tends to focus on looks (colour of case) than
function.]
The first
emojis were intended to be gender neutral, but looked like men. When women
complained, they designed a separate set: male runner and female runner.
Most pianos
are made with a standard keyboard octave of 7.4 in. The average male handspan
of 8.9 in but the average of women is 7.9 in when fully stretched. In addition,
this results in a 50% higher risk of pain and injury for women pianists. A
smaller piano does exist, and numerous studies confirm it’s better for players’
health and musical ability, but there remains a real reluctance in the music
world to adapt.
Whose safety
comes first?
Women are 47%
more likely to be seriously injured in a car crash than men, and 17% more likely
to die. Why? Women are usually shorter, so tend to sit further forward when
driving in order to reach the pedals and see out. Car makers say this increases
the risk of internal injury as it is not the ‘standard seating position’ –
which is determined by the fact that crash test dummies are typically 1.77m
tall and 76 kg, with male muscle mass and a male spinal column (women’s
vertebrae are spaced differently, among other things). While there is now a single
European regulatory test that uses a ‘female’ dummy — but it’s only tested in
the passenger seat and is really just a scaled-down male dummy.
Right tools
for the job
A 2017 study
of emergency workers found that 95 per cent of women said their protective gear
interfered with their work, as the gear is largely designed for men. Stab vests
ride up leaving the abdomen unprotected, and body armour is removed in order to
use equipment; this leaves women more vulnerable to injury and death.
While serious
injuries at work have long been decreasing for men, there is evidence that they
have been increasing among women, but we know little about effects on women.
Dust disease in miners is well researched, but exposures in ‘women’s’ work is
not. Toxins affect women differently to men: women tend to be smaller, with
thinner skin, lowering the levels with which they can safely cope, and also
have more body fat in which chemicals can accumulate. Women are often left out
of studies in industries where men and women work together, as including both
might muddle the data. And in most female-dominated industries (such as nail
salons, where workers use a toxic cocktail of chemicals with known links to
cancer, miscarriage and lung disease), an incredibly small number of studies
have ever been done.
Why drugs don’t
work
For
millennia, medicine has assumed that male bodies are the default [Blogger: actually the female is biologically
the default human.] so there is a huge data gap with regard to women’s
health. Women are very often excluded from clinical trials, and medical
students learn about women’s bodies and health as an ‘extra’, not the norm.
There are big
differences between male and female physiology. Using male mice for one study,
and female mice for another on the same topic gave the opposite result. Which
is why, from blood pressure pills to aspirin, many drugs just don’t work as
well for women. U.S. data on ‘adverse drug reactions’ from 2004 to 2013 shows
women suffered 2 million bad reactions, compared to 1.3 million for men. The
second most common ‘adverse reaction’ for women, after nausea, was that the
drug simply didn’t work at all.
Although some
groups of women are now more likely than men to have a heart attack, they often
have different symptoms — only one in eight women experience chest pain, for
example. A US study found that the ‘risk prediction strategies’ used in many
hospitals are based on two-thirds male patients, meaning women’s ‘atypical’
heart attacks are often missed.
Of around 50
drugs for heart failure, some just aren’t safe for half the population. One,
used to break up blood clots, can cause ‘significant bleeding problems in
women’.
And we may be
missing drugs which would work for women. Period pain affects up to 90 per cent
of women, but there is little available to help. While a 2013 study appeared to
have found a cure, it ran out of funding before it could prove its primary
hypothesis, which suggested that sildenafil citrate could give four hours of
‘total pain relief’ without apparent side-effects. No further funding has been
forthcoming.
Yet
sildenafil citrate is no new drug — it’s the medical name for Viagra. Tested in
the Nineties, it didn’t work as a heart medication, but the all-male study
participants reported an increase in erections, and so it was rushed to market
for erectile dysfunction. A happy ending for men. But what if that first trial
included women? Might we have had an effective drug for period pain for
decades?
Staying (too)
cool in the office
Modern
workplaces often have doors too heavy for women to open easily, and glass
stairs and lobby floors mean anyone can see up your skirt.
The standard
office temperature was determined in the Sixties based on the metabolic resting
rate of the average 40-year-old, 70kg man. But a recent study found that ‘the
metabolic rate of young adult females performing light office work is
significantly lower’ than men’s. The standard formula may overestimate female
metabolic rate by as much as 35 per cent, meaning current offices are on
average five degrees too cold for women.
Falling on
deaf ears
Virtual
reality headsets fall off the average woman’s head, and augmented reality
glasses have lenses too far apart for a woman to focus on the image. Apple’s
much-hyped health tracker app failed to build in the most basic of female needs
— a monthly period tracker.
Female
business owners receive less than half the investment of their male
counterparts, but generate twice as much revenue.
Voice-recognition
software is often hopelessly male-biased. One study found Google’s was 70 per
cent more likely to recognise male speech. Some helpful experts have suggested
women have ‘lengthy training’ to fix the ‘many issues’ with their voices!! The
problem is that speech recognition technology is trained on large databases of
voice recordings — which appear dominated by men (the data used is
confidential, but the results speak for themselves).
When women
are under or misrepresented in data, it can play havoc with modern technology.
Programs which are trained to associate images and terms with qualities can end
up with gender bias. So a male programmer’s website could be judged more
relevant than that of a female programmer, potentially meaning the woman would
not be considered for a job.
Sources:
END
