I have always trusted science. As a woman, maybe I shouldn’t have.
What I mean is, science is only as good as the data it’s based on. And the data is only accurate to the population it’s collected from. And I was shocked (which maybe I shouldn’t have been, but this is just not something that ever occurred to me) to learn that the overwhelming majority of data sets in healthcare and behaviour are based solely on the average male.
There is a critical data gap on women — so we design our world around men
What you measure is what you design for. And historically, we tended to measure only males. The army is one of the main drivers of innovation — up to a few decades ago, they only collected data from men — and to this day we base our new innovations on those data sets. Again, until recently 100% of political decision makers were men. And you don’t have to be particularly ill willed to just honestly don’t think about how people who are different from you may be leading their lives differently. (enter human-centered design)
Gender-neutral snow plowing
My favourite example started off with a gender equality training for city officials in the Swedish city of Karlskoga. After the training they started checking all city rules, regulations and processes for gender biases. They joked about how at least snow clearing is something not affected by gender — after all, you just clear the main roads people use to get to and from work first, lesser used roads later — right? Except, when they started collecting data they realised that men and women commute differently. Men usually get in the car, go to work, then get home. Women on the other hand use side-roads, because they drop off children at daycare on the way to work, maybe drop in on an old relative, and get some grocery shopping done before they get home in the evening. This also means walking, biking or public transport is more frequently used by women.
And if you take the data even further, you can see that after snowfall, there were a lot more women and children injured who needed hospital care: because walking or biking in 10 cm’s of snow is far more dangerous than driving. (But this is getting into systems thinking that takes into consideration the consequences of the things we design for in a holistic way, which is a whole other topic). So Karlskoga changed its snow clearing routine to prioritise walk- and bike lanes as well as bus stops over roads — and inspired the rest of Sweden to follow suit (while saving loads on healthcare).
(And yes, thankfully traditional male-female behaviour patterns are changing, and men also take their children to daycare more and more often, etc. but that also means that traditional data sets and policies won’t serve them well either).
Women and driving, eh…amirite?
This is the story that gets me the angriest — because it’s something that affects billions of people on a daily basis, it could save lives, we know what we should be doing, it’s not hard, it’s just…expensive for car makers.
So, you know the crash test dummy that is used in the safety tests to, you know, make cars safer for us?
Well, it’s only based on the average male anatomy. Which, all equality aside, is very different from the average female body. The strength of the neck muscle, upper-body build-up, flexibility — all of it.
Surprisingly, in 2011 the US realised that women exist, and added a ‘female’ test dummy. The EU followed suit in 2015. And you would think that OK, they’re incredibly late to the game, but in the end we got there. Not so fast. What they have introduced is actually just a scaled down version of the male dummy (so car travel is now safer for smaller men as well), and they only introduced it into ONE out of the 5 mandatory tests, and ONLY in the passenger seat. I can’t even…
And if you’re thinking, well, OK, but I mean, what difference does it really make? Well, women are 47% more likely to get seriously injured in a car accident, and 17% more likely to die than men.
Heart attacks and working life
I don’t want this to get super long, just two more quick ones to show the diversity in how this affects our lives.
- The ‘typical’ symptoms of heart attack that doctors learn in medical school and that we are all taught to recognise early through mass media are, you guessed it, only typical for males. The female heart attack is often mistaken for the flu or reflux.
2. You know the workplace initiatives to get more women into leadership positions? To build their confidence and be more assertive. Well, studies show that women are usually rating themselves pretty accurately — and it’s the men who overestimate their skills. So maybe we would need a different kind of training for equality in leadership.
But this is already getting too long, so I’m closing off things with:
A. Go buy the book Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez for much more examples and information on how this affects our lives, (or listen to the podcast first of 99% invisible which this article is based on)
B. Try to be more conscious about your own research and the data you use, and how we can design for diversity — in the most basic ways.
