Women forgotten in design
In some ways it’s hard to understand why a proper female crash-test dummy hasn’t been developed and made a legal requirement in car tests years ago. But on the other hand, and given all we know about how women and their bodies are routinely ignored in design and planning, it’s not surprising at all. From development initiatives to smartphones, from medical tech to stoves, tools (whether physical or financial) are developed without reference to women’s needs, and, as a result these tools are failing them on a grand scale. And this failure affects women’s lives on a similarly grand scale: it makes them poorer, it makes them sicker, and, when it comes to cars, it is killing them. Designers may believe they are making products for everyone, but in reality they are mainly making them for men. It’s time to start designing women in.
Zeikwijven - NPO3
Reference Man - NPO
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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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Some argue that phones are no longer designed for one-handed use. He’s also been told that actually many women opt for larger phones, a trend that was ‘usually attributed to handbags’. And look, handbags are all well and good, but one of the reasons women carry them in the first place is because our clothes lack adequate pockets. So designing phones to be handbag-friendly rather than pocket-friendly feels like adding injury to insult. In any case, it’s rather odd to claim that phones are designed for women to carry in their handbags when so many passive-tracking apps clearly assume your phone will be either in your hands or in your pockets at all times, rather than sitting in your handbag on your office desk.
There is a theory for why the big-screen fixation persists: because the received wisdom is that men drive high-end smartphone purchases, women in fact don’t figure in the equation at all. If this is true it’s certainly an odd approach for Apple to take given the research about women being more likely to own iPhones. But there is a fundamental problem with this analysis, because it suggests that the problem is with women, rather than male-biased design. In other words: if women aren’t driving high-end smartphone purchases is it because women aren’t interested in smartphones, or could it be because smartphones are designed without women in mind?
On the bright side, however screens probably wouldn’t be getting any bigger because ‘they’ve hit the limit of men’s hand size’.
Phone size
The reluctance to abandon design that suits only the largest male hands seems endemic. I remember a time back in the early 2000s when it was the smallest handsets that were winning phone measuring contests. That all changed with the advent of the iPhone and its pretenders. Suddenly it was all about the size of your screen, and bigger was definitely better. The average smartphone is now 5.5 inches,9 and while we’re admittedly all extremely impressed by the size of your screen, it’s a slightly different matter when it comes to fitting into half the population’s hands (not to mention minuscule or non-existent pockets). The average man can fairly comfortably use his device one-handed – but the average woman’s hand is not much bigger than the handset itself.
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This is obviously annoying – and foolish for a company like Apple, given that research shows women are more likely to own an iPhone than men. But don’t expect to uncover a method to their madness any time soon, because it’s extraordinarily difficult to get any smartphone company to comment on their massive-screen fixation.
Apps
In the tech world, the implicit assumption that men are the default human remains king. When Apple launched its health-monitoring system with much fanfare in 2014, it boasted a ‘comprehensive’ health tracker. It could track blood pressure; steps taken; blood alcohol level; even molybdenum and copper intake. But as many women pointed out at the time, they forgot one crucial detail: a period tracker.
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When Apple launched their AI, Siri, she (ironically) could find prostitutes and Viagra suppliers, but not abortion providers. Siri could help you if you’d had a heart attack, but if you told her you’d been raped, she replied ‘I don’t know what you mean by ‘I was raped.’ These are basic errors that surely would have been caught by a team with enough women on it – that is, by a team without a gender data gap. Products marketed as gender-neutral that are in fact biased towards men are rife across the (male-dominated) tech industry. From smartwatches that are too big for women’s wrists, to map apps that fail to account for women’s desire for ‘safest’ in addition to ‘fastest’ routes, etc.
Seatbelts
Even though car crashes are the number-one cause of foetal death related to maternal trauma, we haven’t even yet developed a seat belt that works for pregnant women. Research from 2004 suggests that pregnant women should use the standard seat belt, but 62% of third-trimester pregnant women don’t fit the standard seat-belt design.
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Standard seat belts aren’t great for nonpregnant women either: apparently, in an effort to accommodate our breasts many of us are wearing seat belts ‘improperly’ which again, increases our risk of injury (another reason we should be designing explicitly female dummies rather than just smaller male dummies). And it’s not just a woman’s belly that changes in pregnancy: breast-size changes can also diminish seat-belt efficacy by affecting positioning. Here again, we find an example of a situation where we have the data on women, but are just ignoring it. Clearly what is needed is a wholesale redesign of cars using complete data, and this should be fairly simple since it’s not exactly hard to find women to model a test dummy on. Even with all these gaps, the 2011 introduction of the female crash-test dummy in the US still sent cars’ star ratings plummeting. The Washington Post reported on the experience of Beth Milito and her husband, who bought a 2011 Toyota Sienna, based primarily on its four-star safety rating. But all was not as it seemed. The passenger seat, which Milito says she is likely to be sitting in when they are ‘out and about as a family’, had a two-star rating. In the previous year’s model, the front passenger seat (tested on a male dummy) had earned a top five-star rating. But the shift to female dummies revealed that in a front collision at 35 mph a female passenger had a 20-40% risk of being killed or seriously injured. The average risk of death for that class of vehicle, explains the, is 15%.