The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/feb/23/truth-world-built-for-men-car-crashes

by O_H_E • 7 years ago

33 50 7 years ago

umvi3• 7 years ago

This leads to the odd sight of female office workers wrapped in blankets in the summer, while their male colleagues wander around in shorts.

Won't you have a problem either way, then? Unless you can climate control individual offices based on biological sex of the occupant, you'll either have shivering women or sweaty men.

mgamache3• 7 years ago

I suppose you could split the difference.

mgamache3• 7 years ago

That comment was not meant to be snarky (not sure why the DV)... I thought it was a common sense, if obvious, solution to the objection raised. Any time you optimize for one variable you usually do it at the expense of others.

scarmig• 7 years ago

One solution would be for the temperature to be mid way between men and women.

But, if I have a choice of jobs, I'm not going to work at a place that keeps the heat blasting so that the coldest person in the building feels warm. And of course the same could be said of someone who's freezing in a building meant to keep the warmest person from overheating.

I guess the ideal solution would be some kind of advanced technology you could wear to insulate yourself from the cold of the environment, while also letting you take it off when it gets too warm. Startup idea?

smegger001• 7 years ago

like a sweater you mean?

b_tterc_p• 7 years ago

I don’t think this anecdote makes sense either. I have heard it described this way when it was assumed men would wear jackets but not in casual shorts.

I also find it hard to believe that offices are five degrees too cold for women. That feels too extreme.

sdwa• 7 years ago

Well, you could have it somewhere in between the two extremes.

SerLava• 7 years ago

The lack of empathy around this issue is baffling. If you don't want women to be cold, kill the stupid dress code for men.

Otherwise, women just have to wear borderline cold-weather clothing at the office because the men are already wearing the absolute minimum they can wear without being fired.

I don't understand how people keep writing about this issue where there are 2 or more people who collectively require 2 temperatures and the answer is to just... switch it.

Pretty much every office on Earth has come to the same obvious conclusion about how to set the thermostat. It turns out that people wearing coats is better than people drenched in sweat all day turning the place into a reeking locker room halfway through the day.

mises8• 7 years ago

Yes. Someone will have to be uncomfortable, and it's better to have people in warmer clothing than smelly. Also, women tend to weather skimpier clothing (short dresses, bare arms, lower-cut lines all around). It's not fair to sweat people out (and, quite frankly, not pleasant for the noses of the cold people) just because many women don't wear full clothing.

grayed-down4• 7 years ago

Interesting article, but don't men invent and build a lot of things, so they do so with a certain male frame of reference?

And this reminds me of a time when I built a work bench in the garage. My wife needed to use it for a project she was working on one weekend. She got aggravated and asked why I made it so tall.

I didn't have a real good answer for her so I just chuckled and went to work on something else.

isostatic4• 7 years ago

Interesting article, but don't men invent and build a lot of things, so they do so with a certain male frame of reference?

Yes, which is why if you are building something you need a diverse viewpoint on your team.

And this reminds me of a time when I built a work bench in the garage. My wife needed to use it for a project she was working on one weekend. She got aggravated and asked why I made it so tall.

In a professional environment this would be illegal

umvi3• 7 years ago

In a professional environment this would be illegal

Why? Humans come in all shapes and sizes. You can't possibly accommodate everybody. I have a sister in law who is 4'7". I have a brother-in-law who is 6'7". Unless the entire workbench is on adjustable legs, it must accommodate one or the other. There is no possible way to accommodate both people comfortably.

That's why chairs with adjustable heights were invented.

grayed-down4• 7 years ago

Ha! Now you've inspired me. I, and I alone, would like to start manufacturing a line of 43" tall work benches for sale around the globe. I will soon consult my attorney about the legality of manufacturing to this height specification. One month later I will get a bill from her for 5 minutes of her time...spent laughing.

mises8• 7 years ago

Really? I get severe neck pain because of the desk height I have. I had to get a note from a doctor for them to let me elevate my monitor at no cost to them. Why don't they manufacture desks at a height comfortable for me?

The answer is simple: those of us who are more than one standard deviation from the mean will likely have to deal with the inconveniences that poses. Were there more women in said professional environment, things might change.

It's the same issue I have with representation-itis, where every body believes he needs his exact representation in media. "I am in a wheelchair; why aren't more movie characters in wheelchairs? People in wheelchairs can be cool too!". Fine, I'm not saying they can't, but if we did this with every possible person, there would be several billion characters.

Another analogy is how people are harmed by a disease and try to convince people to get tested. What they fail to realize is that were we all to be tested for all such things recommended by all such people, we would spend our entire lives in the doctors office.

How does this tie back to the issue at hand? Were we to try to accommodate every type of person, we would fail miserably and go broke in the process. Were we to only accommodate one, we would have a lot of unhappy people. So where do we draw the line? I think about one standard deviation (about 2/3 covered well enough) is about right.

TACIXAT• 7 years ago

I wish they made bathroom sinks taller. It would be nice to not hunch over to wash my hands. Desk height is super important. Extended work hunched over really messes with your back.

grayed-down4• 7 years ago

In the US, you can get pre-made bathroom vanities of varying height, or get some nice lumber and raise one yourself.

lgessler• 7 years ago

Interesting article, but don't men invent and build a lot of things, so they do so with a certain male frame of reference?

You say this as if it is inevitable and innocuous. Would you also be so cavalier about it if the axis were not gender but physical or mental disability?

This is exactly the problem. If you're an engineer, you need to consider how your users might differ from you, or else your creation will be unusable, if not something worse. Nobody's asking engineers to make their creations universally equitable: that is obviously an infeasible goal most of the time. But they are asking us to try, or even consider it. Even in our comparatively enlightened times there have been many instances of the inexcusable ignorance engineers have shown in the design of their products. Here are just a few examples:

- https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-da...

- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/technology/facial-recogni...

- https://www.wired.com/story/machines-taught-by-photos-learn-...

To be clear, when you were making your work bench at home, you were doing it in your personal life and not as an engineer, so I don't know if the same arguments might apply to that particular instance. But I do think you could have had a more thoughtful response to your wife.

grayed-down4• 7 years ago

I can see in your reply that you have a firm mastery of the obvious along with Engineering 101. I was simply pointing out that men have a different frame of reference than women.

But I do think you could have had a more thoughtful response to your wife.

LOL! What are you, my marriage counselor?

CompelTechnic2• 7 years ago

The formula to determine standard office temperature was developed in the 1960s around the metabolic resting rate of the average man. But a recent Dutch 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 activity [......] This leads to the odd sight of female office workers wrapped in blankets in the summer, while their male colleagues wander around in shorts.

Who really thinks that people set the thermostat at the office to be in accordance with the formulaic "standard office temperature?" The powerful people in a particular office set it at the temperature comfortable for them. Duh. The oppression of women in this case comes at a much more local level, and if it is true that women prefer a warmer temperature than men (with the caveat of everything falling on a distribution, of course), any change in the thermostat is a zero-sum game where one party wins and the other loses. This means that touching the thermostat will always and forever be a political game.

Another strange one the article mentions: the size of bricks. 99% of bricklayers are men. I would be willing to bet that the 1% that are women are unusually large-handed women as well. If we decreased the size of bricks to accomodate small-handed women, the time and cost it takes to build a wall would increase in proportion. It isn't rocket science that the incentives line up with what is good for the majority of people here.

As a more general concept, construction materials that are intended to be hand-installed are generally made available in the largest unit that a construction worker can wield. Making these units smaller genuinely decreases productivity. If this has a tendency to select for large, brutish construction workers, I don't see any harm. Especially considering that brutish folks have been getting the shit kicked out of them economically for the last 20 years.

criddell• 7 years ago

any change in the thermostat is a zero-sum game

Only if there's a single temperature for each person. In reality, there's a range that most people are comfortable in. For example, I'm fine from about 68 to 78 F. If you prefer something in the 60 to 70 range, then there's overlap where we are both happy.

CompelTechnic2• 7 years ago

Feeling a bit sardonic today... I suppose we should all submit a form documenting our utility payoffs with respect to temperature to corporate HQ.

-------------------------------------------------

On a scale of 1-10, please rate your happiness at each of the following temperatures. Please remember to represent incremental units of happiness consistent with the standardized hedonic unit (traceable to ANSI) and company's ISO procedure HAPPY-03.

67°F

68°F

69°F

70°F

71°F

72°F

73°F

74°F

75°F

mcguire• 7 years ago

Office temperature is a very poor example; blankets and shorts are exactly what you would expect if the temperature were set in the middle.

newswriter993• 7 years ago

" World built for men" where women regularly outlive men, where men statistically commit suicide more often, where more men than women are homeless, where men do more manual labor jobs than women, where women have the ability to say "rape" and be believed without question. . .

Should I go on with the obvious hypocrisy of this headline?

oysterfish• 7 years ago

Well... we should talk about how the world is safer for right handed people.

Bunch of rightists..

evilotto4• 7 years ago

Lefties have been evil for a long time: http://www.ancientpages.com/2018/06/29/being-left-handed-was...

pwinnski• 7 years ago

Given that there is an article article supporting the headline, I think responding to your own reading of the headline is counter-productive at best.

Or, heck, even the second part of the headline.

zaphod12• 7 years ago

Women actually attempt to commit suicide more often than men. However, men succeed more often (they tend to choose methods with a higher likelihood of success).

newswriter993• 7 years ago

And a popular conjecture of that is the women don't actually want to kill themselves as much as they want attention.

belorn2• 7 years ago

Women seek medical care for attempted suicide more then men, which is not the same as number of attempts.

Psychological treatment is critical in reducing suicide and gender statistics shows a clear bias against men when it come to medical care. That more women then men get medical help for psychological ailment is a systemic issue, and more equality would lower suicide rates for men.

umvi3• 7 years ago

Barbican had turned both the male and female toilets gender neutral simply by replacing the “men” and “women” signage with “gender neutral with urinals” and “gender neutral with cubicles”. The obvious happened. Only men were using the supposedly “gender neutral with urinals” and everyone was using the “gender neutral with cubicles”. Rather than rendering the toilets genuinely gender neutral, they had simply increased the provision for men.

How do you "[render] the toilets genuinely gender neutral?"

It seems to me the men started using both restrooms, but the women refused to use cubicles that shared the same space as urinals? Why?

I imagine the most efficient gender neutral restroom scheme would be something like:

Upright urination has one dedicated queue. Sitting down urination has another queue. Defecation has another queue.

You could then have just one huge restroom with LEDs above cubicles that designate an opening for a particular queue like a parking garage. That way cubicles can be dynamically allocated based on the size of defecation vs urination queues.

Kind of like how at work you have 2 microwaves - one for people who need to zap their food for less than a minute, one for people that need to cook their lunch for more than a minute.

grawprog• 7 years ago

I've always been kind of baffled why women would want gender neutral bathrooms. Men's bathrooms are fucking disgusting. The few times i've had to use a women's bathroom, they were always beautiful. They were clean, there wasn't shit smeared on the walls, there wasn't a dude standing next to me making conversation while staring at your dick. Not to mention, piss trenches. You've never had a real public bathroom experience until you've stood in a line of 20 dudes all pissing together into a trench built into the back wall of the bathroom.

I just don't understand why you'd wish access to this or would want your space turned into this.

ebog• 7 years ago

In this case it seems more like someone in charge, man or woman, thought they were making things better by letting all people access any restroom. Maybe they didn't think it through, or maybe it was a man trying to do the right thing but without consulting any women first. It's clear that women don't want this.

belorn2• 7 years ago

Public unisex bathrooms need to be cleaned, regularly. Fast food restaurants clean them several times each day, every second or third hour. Higher end restaurants clean them every hour. Gender bathrooms in more expensive locales get this treatment as well, as can be seen in airports. You don't have shit smeared on airports bathrooms. Bringing the hygiene standard up to a minimal is simply a good thing that benefit both women and men.

I've always been kind of baffled why women would want gender neutral bathrooms.

Ever seen a long line to the women's bathroom but no line for the men's bathroom?

mises8• 7 years ago

Men are about 10 times as likely to be injured n a workplace accident [0][1]. Maybe this has something to do with why safety equipment is built for men. Deaths are doubtless increasing in women due to the fact that they are only now entering these fields. The military also plays a role, I'm sure, as they design lots of safety gear and were some of the first to develop much of it.

On the point of nail salons, it is worth mentioning that cosmetics are tested for people who wear the dry product less than people who breathe the solvents all day. This is because the average consumer simply won't.

On the carpentry point, how is the equipment designed for men? I don't know if this is wrong or not, but would appreciate hearing more from some body who knows more.

Cement: it's more efficient to bag it in larger quantities; smaller bags will drive up costs. Also, if women will move less cement, I would be more likely to hire a man.

For bricks, it's also important for them to be thick enough. And again, it's not worth re-standardizing for people who may output less.

Architect stuff: A1 is a paper size; we would have to re-standardize paper to change this.

On PPE, it doesn't fit a lot of men either. I honestly think many of us are just less conscious about how stuff fits, for better or for worse. I'm very slim, so many things are ridiculously baggy.

On the bathrooms: I thought many people wanted "gender-neutral" bathrooms. Is this no longer the case? And if I'm trying to move as many people as possible, urinals are much, much faster. Equal floor space is just fine; the goal isn't necessarily to move the same number of people but many people.

Phones: not everybody likes these; I think it's a dumb design trend and will die out. The iPhone XS is smaller, as is the SE. The camera thing? My S7 has a moveable button. I don't think phone sizing is sexist.

On the voice recognition, this may be due to the way younger women in particular speak. Has this been broken down by age? Younger women tend to drop into "vocal fry", swing words up at the end, and other non-standard things that make speech irregular and harder to understand. I guess more training of models is needed, but there has been a significant shift in the way women speak in particular, arguably because they tend to speak in a more dynamic fashion any way. The anecdote of the Volvo is quite probably regression to the mean.

Siri: have you ever thought they are possibly avoiding "adult topics"? They probably don't want such things in her vocabulary so she can't be tricked into using them. It is possible they specifically excluded these, and the others were passed to google search.

Routing: how in the world are mapping companies supposed to measure safety? That would be a massive feature and would require aggregating huge amounts of data. It would be a massive undertaking.

Car crashes: women are on average smaller and more likely to have weaker bones (as noted by the article) (especially as they are more likely to have bone loss). This seems to be a likely reason. Does the article wish to change to a female-dominant alignment which puts men at a higher risk of injury? This is still a bad idea, as men are more likely to be in car crashes (as the article notes).

With that said, it's stupid not to have a crash test dummy that represents a lady.

Pregnant women are an edge case, and are less than 2 percent of the population at any given time.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2018/12/19/fatal-em...

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25641425

[2] https://www.quora.com/How-many-women-are-pregnant-in-the-USA...

api_or_ipa• 7 years ago

When I read the title, I got excited thinking that there would be a discussion about how the law of averages tends to fail to represent a diverse population of humans. It turns out that if you build around a set of average (statistical mean) measurement, you'll end up building a product that fits _nobody_.

Here's a great article from the Star that does a terrific job of discussing this idea. https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

Bartweiss• 7 years ago

It's nice to see an article like this provide a lot of source links, but it seems to be written to actively misrepresent a lot of that information. The crash test dummy section is badly misleading, and in places objectively false. The text is defensible rather than informative, so pervasively that it's hard to accept as accidental.

It wasn’t until 2011 that the US started using a female crash-test dummy

"The US started using" here is at best misleading metonymy for US regulatory tests. The standard 5th percentile female dummy mentioned in the article went into production in 1988 - by a US company, on North American measurements, for North American carmakers.

For a start, this dummy is only tested in the passenger seat, so we have no data at all for how a female driver would be affected – something of an issue you would think, given women’s “out of position” driving style.

"Only tested in the passenger seat" is accurate only with regard to the linked regulatory tests. The 5th percentile female dummy is used in driver's seat testing, and was in fact upgraded back in 1997 specifically to provide more accurate data for "out of position" driver's seat testing. The claim that "we have no data at all" for female drivers is again accurate only for these specific EU-mandated tests; the general statement in the article is simply untrue.

And secondly, this female dummy is not really female. It is just a scaled-down male dummy.

Again, this is flatly false.

Perhaps the writer was attempting to say that the dummy is not required to be specifically female, or that some of its unformalized ratios aren't proportional to women. But the standard Hybrid III 5th Female Dummy is not a scaled-down male dummy. The dummy's gross anatomy is visibly different and its formal technical specifications (e.g. height, chest circumference) are those of 5th percentile women. More importantly, it's been specifically designed (since 1991) to better assess gendered risks like 'submarining', where seatbelt force falls on soft tissues and causes injury.

Much of the rest of the crash-test discussion is similarly bad. A dummy of a pregnant woman was created in 1996, but the failure to mandate its use was based on the conclusion that the dummy was inaccurate and wouldn't provide valid data. The ongoing lack of a pregnant dummy is a problem, but it's a matter of insufficient data and unsolved design issues. A legal mandate passed today would optimize for the safety of dummies, not humans of any kind.

Gender bias in design, particularly in safety-critical settings like cars, is a topic that deserves more discussion. It's frustrating to see pieces on the topic choose emphasis at the price of systematically misleading readers.

The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes

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