If you are not a white straight male, with a height of 1,77cm the world is not designed for you.
Kitchen Counter
Many women struggle to reach shelfs, cabinets or struggle to work comfortable on the kitchen counter. This is because these things are set to a male height norm. These are just a few at home things but there are a lot more of things that women and minorities use everyday.
Invisible women - Caroline Criado Perez
Pockets
A study shows that in comparison to men’s pockets, women’s pockets are 6.5% narrower and an entire 48% shorter.
When you talk about your everyday inequality of design, the first thing you come across are pockets. We all know men's pockets are made to fit things. However women's jeans fail to fit a phone in the back pocket. Not to mention pants without pockets or the real enemy jeans that have fake pockets!
Some history in the matter:
Pockets made their way out of women's fashion when the handbag came to the market in the 1790's.
Another cause for the lack of pockets in women’s clothing is derived from the thought that women’s garments needed to be slim.
Women’s jeans were not necessarily designed without taking women in mind, but it is to cater to this beauty standard (the beauty standard that is made up by men (and for men). Womens jeans don’t have pockets or small pockets to comply with the beauty of the slim fit, which has been pushed on women for ages. And it is now entirely to cater to the industry of the handbag.
White and male goes without saying
whiteness and maleness are silent, precisely because they do not need to be vocalised. Whiteness and maleness are implicit. They ate unquestioned. They are the default.
And this reality is inescapable for anyone whose identity does not go without saying, for anyone whose needs and perspective are routinely forgotten. For anyone who is jarring up against a world that has not been designed around them and their needs.
Car Measurements
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’s all to do with how the car is designed – and for whom.
Crash-test dummies were first introduced in the 1950s, and for decades they were based around the fiftieth percentile male "The reference man".
Zeikwijven - NPO3
Reference Man
The reference man is defined as being between 20-30 years of age, weighing 70 kg, is 170 cm in height. He is Caucasian and able-bodied.
Almost everything is designed to fit this Reference man. The most commonly used dummy is 1.77 cm tall and weighs 76 kg. This are the averages for the male population. Which means this 'reference man' only represents 50% of humanity
Office Temperatures
Offices are currently on average five degrees too cold for women. The formula to determine standard office temperature was developed in the 1960s around themetabolic resting rate of the average forty-year-old, 70 kg man. But a recent 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 type of 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. Which leads to the odd sight of female office workers wrapped up in blankets in the New York summer while their male colleagues wander around in summer clothes.
Reference Man - NPO start
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Ontmoet Reference man: een witte man, zo'n 1.75m lang en ongeveer 80 kilo. En onze wereld is afgestemd, getest en gebouwd op hem. ​ Dat is soms bijna knullig, maar af en toe ook levensbedreigend. In dit vierluik neemt Sophie Frankenmolen de kijker mee in haar onderzoek naar dit bizarre fenomeen.
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Podcast:
Invisible Women
by Diane Greig
'Stories of women in WW2 espionage'
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‘Well-behaved women seldom make history’
- Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
The Unwomanly Face of War
Women in History
Women have always been 50% of the population, but only occupy around 0.5% of recorded history. There are brilliantly feisty women from history who have made an impact, and whose stories need to be told. We need to actively look for women’s stories, and put them back into the historical narrative, there are so many women that should be household names but just aren’t.
The used explanation of women's exclusion from cultural history, is the exclusion of women from positions of power, which is often given as an excuse for why, when we teach them about the past, we teach children almost exclusively about the lives of men. The lack of women's representation in history classrooms implies that women's history is not important.
Written out
Women are not only forgotten in history but are actively written out.
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Lack of medical information
There’s a chronic gap: data on the female body itself.
It begins with how doctors are trained. Historically it’s been assumed that there wasn’t anything fundamentally different between male and female bodies other than size and reproductive function, and so for years medical education has been focused on a male ‘norm’, with everything that falls outside that designated ‘atypical’ or even ‘abnormal’. References to the ‘typical 70 kg man’2 abound, as if he covers both sexes.
Doing Harm by Maya Dusenbery
The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick
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Unpaid work
Women do 75% of the world’s unpaid care. Women have always worked. They have worked unpaid, underpaid, underappreciated, and invisibly, but they have always worked. But the modern workplace does not work for women. From its location, to its hours, to its regulatory standards, it has been designed around the lives of men and it is no longer fit for purpose. The world of work needs a wholesale redesign – of its regulations, of its equipment, of its culture – and this redesign must be led by data on female bodies and female lives. We have to start recognising that the work women do is not an added extra, a bonus that we could do without: women’s work, paid and unpaid, is the backbone of our society and our economy. It’s about time we started valuing it.
As women have increasingly joined the paid labour force, men have not matched this shift with a comparative increase in their unpaid work: women have simply increased their total work time.
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A 2007 international study of 25,439 children’s TV characters found only 13% of non-human characters are female. The figure for female human characters was slightly better, although still low at 32%.
Work equipment
When women work in male-dominated industries, they are treated as ‘confounding factors’, and data on female workers goes uncollected.
The result is that even in industries with a good historical health and safety record women are still being failed. In the US, where by 2007 there were nearly 1 million female farm operators, ‘virtually all tools and equipment on the US market have been designed either for men or for some “average” user whose size, weight, strength etc. were heavily influenced by the average man’. This has led to tools that are too heavy or long; hand tools that are not appropriately balanced; handles and grips that are not appropriately sized or placed (women’s hands are on average 0.8 inches shorter than men’s); and mechanised equipment that is too heavy or that is difficult to control (for example pedals on tractors being placed too far from the seat).
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Uniforms
It wasn’t until 2011, thirty-five years after women were first admitted to US military academies, that the first uniforms were designed that accounted for women’s hips and breasts. The uniforms also included repositioned knee pads to account for women’s generally shorter legs, and, perhaps most exciting of all for a general audience, a redesigned crotch: these uniforms reportedly abandoned the ‘universal’ zippered fly, instead being designed in such a way that women can pee without pulling down their trousers. But even though the existence of female bodies has finally been recognised by the US military, gaps remain: boots designed to accommodate women’s typically narrower feet and higher arches were not included in the uniform changes.
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Women in Positions of power
Addressing the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence is often framed as a good in itself. And, of course, it is. It is a matter of justice that women have an equal chance of success as their equally qualified male colleagues. But female representation is about more than a specific woman who does or doesn’t get a job, because female representation is also about the gender data gap. There will be certain female needs men won’t think to cater for because they relate to experiences that men simply won’t have. And it’s not always easy to convince someone a need exists if they don’t have that need themselves.
Women in the military are also affected by equipment designed around the male body.
Failing to account for female bodies in the military doesn’t just result in equipment that doesn’t work for women: it can injure them too.
Research in women dominated work
We know everything about dust disease in miners but we can’t say the same for exposures, physical or chemical, in ‘women’s’ work.
This is partly a historical problem. ‘For many long-latency diseases, like cancer,’ ‘it can be decades before the pile of bodies gets big enough to reach a conclusion.’ We’ve been counting the bodies in traditional men’s jobs – mining, construction – for several generations. Specifically, we’ve been counting male bodies: when women did work in those industries, or had similar exposures, ‘they were often discounted from studies as “confounding factors”.’ Meanwhile, in most female-dominated industries, the studies simply weren’t done at all. So even if we started the studies now, says, 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 twenty-five to thirty, who weigh 70 kg. The ‘Reference Man’ and his superpower is being able to represent humanity as a whole. Of course, he does not.
Radium Girls
by Kate Moore
The story of the American women from the roaring 1920s who were poisoned by the paint they worked with, and courageously fought for justice.
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Female Farmers
National surveys often don’t report on whether farmers are men or women. Even where data is sex-disaggregated, careless survey design can lead to an under- reporting of female labour: if women are asked if they do ‘domestic duties’ ‘work’, as if they are mutually exclusive (or as if domestic work is not work), they tend to just select ‘domestic duties’ because that describes the majority of what they do.
A similar problem arises with the division of work by researchers into ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ activities. For a start, secondary activities are not always collected by surveys. Even when they are, they aren’t always counted in labour-force figures, and this is a male bias that makes women’s paid work invisible. Women will often list their paid work as their secondary activity, simply because their unpaid work takes up so much time, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t spending a substantial proportion of their day on paid work. The result is that labour-force statistics often sport a substantial gender data gap.
But even if we were to address all these gender data gaps in calculating female agricultural labour we still wouldn’t know exactly how much of the food on your table is produced by women. And this is because female input doesn’t equal male output: women on the whole are less productive in agriculture than men. This doesn’t mean that they don’t work as hard. It means that for the work that they do, they produce less, because agriculture (from tools to scientific research, to development initiatives) has been designed around the needs of men. In fact, writes Doss, given women’s various constraints (lack of access to land, credit and new technologies as well as their unpaid work responsibilities) ‘it would be surprising if they were able to produce over half of food crops’.
Low income
Some call women's segregation into low-paid work a choice. but it’s a funny kind of choice when there is no realistic option other than the children not being cared for and the housework not getting done.
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Sexual Harassment
A woman doesn’t need to be in precarious employment to have her rights violated. Women on irregular or precarious employment contracts have been found to be more at risk of sexual harassment (perhaps because they are less likely to take action against a colleague or employer who is harassing them) but as the #MeToo movement washes over social media, it is becoming increasingly hard to escape the reality that it is a rare industry in which sexual harassment isn’t a problem.
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Women's pension
Women earn between 31% and 75% less than men over their lifetime. This all leaves women facing extreme poverty in their old age, in part because they simply can't afford to save for it. But it’s also because when governments are designing pension schemes, they aren’t accounting for women’s lower lifetime earnings. This isn’t exactly a data gap, because the data does mostly exist. But collecting the data is useless unless governments use it. And they don’t.
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The payments a pensioner receives are directly based on their past contributions and the number of years during which the person is expected to collect benefits. This means women are penalised for the following: having to take time out for unpaid care work; early retirement (still a legal requirement in certain countries and professions); and for living longer.
Many pensions policies around the world make the standard error of forgetting to compensate women for the time they have to take out of the paid labour force to attend to their unpaid care load. As a result, women ‘miss out on vital contributions to their pension’. More unforgivable is the British system’s failure to account for the fact that women are more likely to have several part-time jobs in order to combine their paid and unpaid workloads.
Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)
We tend to think of data as cold, unbiased facts — but this ignores the fact that the tools we have developed to collect and analyze this data are designed by (fallible) humans. We should be concerned about how prejudices and assumptions can creep into the sphere of data science and exacerbate social inequalities or create higher risks for certain populations.
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Biases in the hiring process
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Algorithms used in the hiring proces are made to remove human biases. But the way these are made are and on what information they are based are gender biased, which means women are less likely to get trough this hiring proces and get the job.
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Algorithms used in the hiring proces for example search for keywords used on resumes. But the keywords they are looking for are mostly words used to describe men.
"God, give me the confidence of a mediocre white dude"
- Sarah Hagi
The World is Designed for Men
Flip the situation
If cars were designed with only smaller framed women in mind, we’d find ourselves in an equally problematic situation. It seems immediately absurd when the roles are reversed, but we seldom question the disparity in design when it’s the status quo.
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The Peculiar Psychology Of #MediocreWhiteMen
by Matt Wallaert
Mediocre
by Ijeoma Oluo
What happens to a country that tells generation after generation of white men that they deserve power? What happens when success is defined by status over women and people of color, instead of by actual accomplishments?
Biased job applications
An advertised for a technical position using a stock photo of a man alongside copy that emphasised ‘aggressiveness and competitiveness’ resulted in only 5% of the applicants being women. When the ad changed to a stock photo of a woman and focused the text on enthusiasm and innovation, the number of women applying shot up to 40%.73 Digital design company Made by Many found a similar shift when they changed the wording of their ad for a senior design role to focus more on teamwork and user experience and less on bombastic single-minded egotism.74 The role was the same, but the framing was different – and the number of female applicants more than doubled.
These are just two anecdotes, but there is plenty of evidence that the wording of an ad can impact on women’s likelihood to apply for a job. A study of 4,000 job ads found that women were put off from applying for jobs that used wording associated with masculine stereotypes such as‘aggressive’, ‘ambitious’ or ‘persistent’.75 Significantly, women didn’t consciously note the language or realise it was having this impact on them. They rationalised the lack of appeal, putting it down to personal reasons – which goes to show that you don’t have to realise you’re being discriminated against to in fact be discriminated against.
Women Don't Owe You Pretty
by Florence Given