It appears to be the latest example of a world designed for men...
NASA axing its first all-female spacewalk as the International Space Station does not have enough suits for women. It means astronaut Christina Koch will now be replaced by a male colleague.
In her new book activist Caroline Criado Perez – who was behind campaigns to get author Jane Austen on the £10 note – lists some other examples and argues that in a data-driven age women can be invisible.
Heartbreaking reason woman sent card to stranger she'd never met for 30 years
Women are 47% more likely to be seriously injured in a car crash
Women tend to sit further forward than men when driving. This is because we are on average shorter. Our legs need to be closer to the pedals, and we need to sit more upright to see clearly over the dashboard. This is not, however, the “standard seating position”.
Women are 17% more likely to die in car crashes than men
The passenger seat is the only seat that is commonly tested with a female crash-test dummy anyway, with the male crash-test dummy still being the standard dummy for the driver’s seat.
Female pianists are 50% more likely to suffer hand injuries
The average female handspan is between seven and eight inches, which makes the standard 48-inch keyboard something of a challenge.
NASA is paying people £14,000 to stay in bed for two months watching TV and reading
Women are 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed with a heart attack
Women often don’t have the “Hollywood heart attack” as it’s known in medical circles (chest and left-arm pains). Women (particularly young women) may in fact present without any chest pain at all, but rather with stomach pain, breathlessness, nausea and fatigue. These symptoms are often referred to as “atypical”.
90% of drugs testing is tested on male-only animals
Like the failure to include women in anatomy textbooks, the failure to include women in medical trials has its roots in seeing the male body as the default human body.
11% of participants in studies to find a cure for HIV are female
Women represent 55% of HIV-positive adults in the developing world, and in parts of Africa and the Caribbean women aged five to 24 are up to six times more likely to be HIV-positive than men of the same age.
75% of unpaid work is done by women
They spend between three and six hours per day on it. Men, 30 minutes to two hours.
There is no such thing as a woman who doesn’t work. Only a woman who isn’t paid for work.
Argos denies request to change company name in tribute to shopper's late uncle
There are more statues called John in the UK than there are of non-royal women.
The only reason adding royal women to the figure just beats the Johns is down to Queen Victoria, who just loved putting up statues of herself.
Women make up only 24% of people heard, read about or seen in newspaper, television and
radio news
The result of this deeply male-dominated culture is that the male experience, the male perspective, has come to be seen as universal, while the female experience – that of half the global population – is seen as, well, niche.
Female police officers wear stab vests that are designed for the male physique
British female police officers report being bruised by their kit belts; a number have had to have physiotherapy as a result of the way stab vests sit on their female body; many complain there is no space for their breasts.
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This is not only uncomfortable, it also results in stab vests coming up too short, leaving women unprotected. Which negates the point of wearing one.
Google Home is 70% more likely to recognise male speech
Speech-recognition technology is trained on large databases of voice recordings, called corpora. These are dominated by recordings of male voices.
Mum reveals 'no regrets' at leaving kids in economy while she flies first class
Male actors spend 100% more time on screen in films than females do
This rises to nearly three times when the film has a male lead
Women in the UK are 53% more stressed at work than men
For men the rate was 1,270 cases per 100,000 workers; for women it was nearly double that, at 2,250 cases per 100,000 workers
One in three women in the world lack access to safe toilets
The lack of adequate toilet provision is a public health problem for both sexes, but the problem is particularly acute for women. In no small part this because of the attitude that men can “go anywhere”’, while for women to be seen urinating is thought to be shameful.
10.8% of the pages of political science textbooks reference women
Seeing men as the human default is fundamental to the structure of human society.
- Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men is out now (Chatto & Windus £16.99).
