Map of Inequalities

‘Everybody who studies motion sickness has known that women are more susceptible than men basically forever,’

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But in 2010, Stoffregen made a discovery. ‘I was sort of fooling around

in the literature and I came across some results that I didn’t know about,’ and which showed that there are sex differences in body sway. ‘These are small subtle differences. You can’t just watch somebody and see them, but in terms of the subtle quantitative details of how the body moves back and forth, there are in fact reliable sex differences.

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‘women’s postural sway changes across the menstrual cycle’. And this is significant because ‘a woman’s susceptibility to motion sickness changes across the menstrual cycle. And those two things link up, believe it or not.’

A considerable gender data gap remains. We don’t yet know exactly how and when women’s body-sway changes.

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When you’re sitting down, you’re still swaying. ‘If you’re sitting on a stool then you’re swaying around your hips,’ explains Stoffregen. ‘If your chair has a back, then your head is swaying on your neck. The only way to really get rid of that is to have a headrest and to use it,’ he adds. And I feel like one of those cartoon light bulbs has just gone off in my head. What if the headrest is at the wrong height, at the wrong angle, and the wrong shape to accommodate your body? Could women’s increased propensity to motion sickness in cars be exacerbated by cars being designed around the male body.

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