Mind The Gap: The Infamous Gender Data Divide
There’s a pervasive issue of the gender data gap — a lack of gender-specific data that leads to the design of a world that disproportionately disadvantages women. ⍯ It extends throughout the history and across various sectors, illustrating systemic issues in how data is collected and analyzed. 📊
Let’s dive a little deeper into the breadth and impact of this gap through a few examples.
- Crash Test Dummies: Historically, crash test dummies have been modeled on the average male body. As a result, women are 47% more likely to be seriously injured in a car crash than men, according to a study by the University of Virginia.
2. Healthcare Bias: Women often experience different heart attack symptoms than men, such as nausea and back pain, rather than the classic chest pain. However, awareness and research have lagged, leading to women being 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed after a heart attack. A 2018 report found that women only made up 22% of participants in heart disease clinical trials, even though heart disease is the leading cause of death for women globally.
3. Drug Dosages: Most drug dosage recommendations are based on clinical trials that predominantly involve male participants. This can result in over-medication for women, as they metabolize some drugs differently, leading to higher incidences of adverse drug reactions. 💊💉
4. Office Temperatures: Office temperature standards have been set based on the metabolic rate of an average 40-year-old man, weighing 70 kilograms. A study published in “Nature” found that these standards may overestimate the female metabolic rate by up to 35%, making many women find office environments too cold.
4. Public Toilets: The lack of consideration for women’s needs in the design of public toilets leads to longer queues. Women need to use toilets more frequently and for longer periods due to menstrual hygiene, pregnancy, and being more likely to accompany children, yet toilet provision often does not reflect this. 🚽
5. Fitness Trackers: Early fitness trackers were criticized for not accurately tracking activities more common among women, such as Yoga or Pilates, and for not including menstrual cycle tracking in health metrics.
6. Job Application Algorithms: Some AI algorithms used for screening job applicants have been found to exhibit bias against women, as they were trained on data sets composed predominantly of male-dominated resumes, perpetuating historical hiring biases. 💻
7. Voice Recognition: Voice recognition technologies often have higher error rates for women’s voices compared to men’s. 🗣 ️For instance, a study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed Google’s speech recognition software was 70% more likely to accurately recognize male speech.
8. Snow Clearing Policies: A study in Sweden found that prioritizing the clearing of roads over pedestrian pathways after snowfalls disproportionately affected women, who were more likely to walk or use public transportation. ❄ ️Adjusting these policies to prioritize sidewalks reduced winter accidents, demonstrating how gender-neutral policies can have gendered impacts.
9. Agricultural Practices: In many developing countries, women make up a significant proportion of the agricultural workforce but have less access to resources, training, and land than men. This discrepancy is often overlooked in agricultural policy and research, impacting productivity and food security. 🚜
10. Entrepreneurship Funding: Women entrepreneurs receive significantly less venture capital funding than men. 💰 In 2019, businesses with all-women founders received only 2.7% of the total venture capital invested in the U.S., despite women-owned businesses showing comparable performance to those owned by men.
11. Disaster Relief: Research has shown that women and children are 14 times more likely than men to die during a natural disaster. 🌊 This discrepancy is partly due to a failure in disaster planning to take gender differences into account, such as the design of refugee camps that lack adequate facilities for women.
12. Economic Inequality: The OECD has reported that women perform 75% of the world’s total unpaid care and domestic work. This significant contribution to society is often invisible in economic analyses, contributing to policy decisions that fail to support or acknowledge women’s roles in the economy.
13. Technology and Product Design: Smartphones, for example, are often designed for male hand sizes. A 2018 study highlighted that the average smartphone size is now 5.5 inches, which can be too large for many women’s hands, impacting usability.
14. Public Policy and Urban Planning: Women are more likely to use public transportation and walk than men, yet transportation planning does not always reflect this. A study in Vienna found that men’s travel patterns were more likely to be a simple to-and-from work, whereas women’s travel patterns included multiple stops for caregiving tasks, yet public transportation was not optimized for these patterns. 🚍🚈
15. Workplace Safety: Another striking example is the design of personal protective equipment (PPE), like safety vests and gloves, which are often based on male body dimensions. This misfit can increase the risk of accidents on the job. For instance, in the UK, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) reported that 57% of women said their PPE sometimes or significantly hampered their work.
These examples underline that gender data gap is not a myth. Let’s choose balance over ignorance and try to mitigate the gender data gap and work towards a world that equally serves all its inhabitants. 🌎
References:
Invisible Women, World Health Organization (WHO) , United Nations Women, The National Institutes of Health (NIH) , The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) , Journal of Safety Research , Harvard Business Review (HBR) , The American Journal of Public Health.
