Top Quotes: “Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men” — Caroline Criado-Perez

Introduction

“One of the most important things to say about the gender data gap is that it is not generally malicious, or even deliberate. Quite the opposite. It is simply the product of a way of thinking that has been around for millennia and is therefore a kind of not thinking. A double not thinking, even: men go without saying, and women don’t get said at all. Because when we say human, on the whole, we mean man.”

“This new context makes the need to close the gender data gap ever more urgent. Artificial intelligence that helps doctors with diagnoses, that scans through CVs, even that conducts interviews with potential job applicants, is already common. But Als have been trained on data sets that are riddled with data gaps – and because algorithms are often protected as proprietary software, we can’t even examine whether these gaps have been taken into account. On the available evidence, however, it certainly doesn’t look as if they have.”

“Battle-scarred skeletons of multiple women have been found across the Eurasian steppes from Bulgaria to Mongolia’ wrote Natalie Haynes in The Guardian. For people such as the ancient Scythians, who fought on horseback with bows and arrows, there was no innate male warrior advantage, and DNA testing of skeletons buried with weapons in more than 1,000 Scythian burial mounds from Ukraine to Central Asia have revealed that up to 37% of Scythian women and girls were active warriors.”

“When it comes to nouns that refer to people, while both male and female terms exist, the standard gender is always masculine. Try searching Google for ‘lawyer’ in German. It comes back ‘Anwalt’, which literally means male lawyer, but is also used generically as just ‘lawyer’. If you want to refer to a female lawyer specifically you would say ‘Anwältin’ (incidentally, the way female terms are often, as here, modified male terms is another subtle way we position the female as a deviation from male type – as, in de Beauvoir’s terms, ‘Other’).”

“In 2012, a World Economic Forum analysis found that countries with gender-inflected languages, which have strong ideas of masculine and feminine present in almost every utterance, are the most unequal in terms of gender. But here’s an interesting quirk: countries with genderless languages (such as Hungarian and Finnish) are not the most equal. Instead, that honour belongs to a third group, countries with ‘natural gender languages’ such as English. These languages allow gender to be marked (female teacher, male nurse) but largely don’t encode it into the words themselves. The study authors suggested that if you can’t mark gender in any way you can’t ‘correct’ the hidden bias in a language by emphasising ‘women’s presence in the world’. In short: because men go without saying, it matters when women literally can’t get said at all.

It’s tempting to think that the male bias that is embedded in language is simply a relic of more regressive times, but the evidence does not point that way. The world’s ‘fastest-growing language’, used by more than 90% of the world’s online population, is emoji. This language originated in Japan in the 1980s and women are its heaviest users: 78% of women versus 60% of men frequently use emoji. And yet, until 2016, the world of emojis was curiously male.

The emojis we have on our smartphones are chosen by the rather grand-sounding ‘Unicode Consortium’, a Silicon Valley- based group of organisations that work together to ensure universal, international software standards. If Unicode decides a particular emoji (say ‘spy’) should be added to the current stable, they will decide on the code that should be used. Each phone manufacturer (or platform such as Twitter and Facebook) will then design their own interpretation of what a ‘spy’ looks like. But they will all use the same code, so that when users communicate between different platforms, they are broadly all saying the same thing. An emoji face with heart eyes is an emoji face with heart eyes.

Unicode has not historically specified the gender for most emoji characters. The emoji that most platforms originally represented as a man running, was not called ‘man running’. It was just called ‘runner’. Similarly the original emoji for police officer was described by Unicode as ‘police officer’, not ‘policeman’. It was the individual platforms that all interpreted these gender-neutral terms as male.

In 2016, Unicode decided to do something about this. Abandoning their previously ‘neutral’ gender stance, they decided to explicitly gender all emojis that depicted people. So instead of ‘runner’ which had been universally represented as ‘male runner’, Unicode issued code for explicitly male runner and explicitly female runner. Male and female options now exist for all professions and athletes. It’s a small victory, but a significant one.”

“Its latest report, published in 2015, found that ‘women make up only 24% of the persons heard, read about or seen in newspaper, television and radio news, exactly as they did in 2010.”

“Working class [in our society] means white working-class men. Incidentally, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the coal mining industry, which during the 2016 election became the shibboleth for (implicitly male) working-class jobs, provides 53,420 jobs in total, at a median annual wage of $59,380,39 Compare this to the majority female 924,640-strong cleaning and housekeeper workforce, whose median annual income is $21,820.2 So who’s the real working class?”

Transportation

“It all started with a joke. It was 2011 and officials in the town of Karlskoga, in Sweden, were being hit with a gender-equality initiative that meant they had to re-evaluate all their policies through a gendered lens. As one after another of their policies were subjected to this harsh glare, one unfortunate official laughed that at least snow-clearing was something the ‘gender people’ would keep their noses out of. Unfortunately for him, his comment got the gender people thinking: is snow-clearing sexist?

At the time, in line with most administrations, snow-clearing in Karlskoga began with the major traffic arteries, and ended with pedestrian walkways and bicycle paths. But this was affecting men and women differently because men and women travel differently.

We lack consistent, sex-disaggregated data from every country, but the data we do have makes it clear that women are invariably more likely than men to walk and take public transport. In France, two-thirds of public transport passengers are women; in Philadelphia and Chicago in the US, the figure is 64% and 62% respectively. Meanwhile, men around the world are more likely to drive and if a household owns a car, it is the men who dominate access to it – even in the feminist utopia that is Sweden.

And the differences don’t stop at the mode of transport: it’s also about why men and women are travelling. Men are most likely to have a fairly simple travel pattern: a twice-daily commute in and out of town. But women’s travel patterns tend to be more complicated. Women do 75% of the world’s unpaid care work and this affects their travel needs. A typical female travel pattern involves, for example, dropping children off at school before going to work; taking an elderly relative to the doctor and doing the grocery shopping on the way home. This is called ‘trip-chaining’, a travel pattern of several small interconnected trips that has been observed in women around the world.

In London women are three times more likely than men to take a child to school and 25% more likely to trip-chain; this figure rises to 39% if there is a child older than nine in the household. The disparity in male/female trip-chaining is found across Europe, where women in dual-worker families are twice as likely as men to pick up and drop off children at school during their commute. It is most pronounced in households with young children: a working woman with a child under the age of five will increase her trip-chaining by 54%; a working man in the same position will only increase his by 19%.

What all these differences meant back in Karlskoga was that the apparently gender-neutral snow-clearing schedule was in fact not gender neutral at all, so the town councillors switched the order of snow-clearing to prioritise pedestrians and public-transport users. After all, they reasoned, it wouldn’t cost any nore money, and driving a car through three inches of snow is easier than pushing a buggy (or a wheelchair, or a bike) through three inches of snow.

What they didn’t realise was that it would actually end up saving them money. Since 1985, northern Sweden has been collecting data on hospital admissions for injuries. Their databases are dominated by pedestrians, who are injured three times more often than motorists in slippery or icy conditions and account for half the hospital time of all traffic-related injuries. And the majority of these pedestrians are women. A study of pedestrian injuries in the Swedish city area of Umeà found that 79% occurred during the winter months, and that women made up 69% of those who had been injured in single-person incidents (that is, those which didn’t involve anyone else). Two-thirds of injured pedestrians had slipped and fallen on icy or snowy surfaces, and 48% had moderate to serious injuries, with fractures and dislocations being the most common. Women’s injuries also tended to be more severe.”

“Even with a conservative estimate, the cost of pedestrian accidents in icy conditions was about twice the cost of winter road maintenance. In Solna, near Stockholm, it was three times the cost, and some studies reveal it’s even higher. Whatever the exact disparity, it is clear that preventing injuries by prioritising pedestrians in the snow-clearing schedule makes economic sense.”

“The original snow-clearing schedule in Karlskoga hadn’t been deliberately designed to benefit men at the expense of women. Like many of the examples in this book, it came about as a result of a gender data gap – in this instance, a gap in perspective. The men (and it would have been men) who originally devised the schedule knew how they travelled and they designed around their needs. They didn’t deliberately set out to exclude women. They just didn’t think about them. They didn’t think to consider if women’s needs might be different. And so this data gap was a result of not involving women in planning.”

“Men tend to travel on their own, but women travel encumbered – by shopping, by buggies, by children or elderly relatives they are caring for. A 2015 survey on travel in London found that women are ‘significantly less likely than men to be satisfied with the streets and pavements after their last journey by foot’, perhaps reflecting the reality that not only are women more likely to walk than men but also that women are more likely to be pushing prams and therefore be more affected by inadequate walkways. Rough, narrow and cracked pavements littered with ill-placed street furniture combine with narrow and steep steps at numerous transit locations to make travelling around a city with a buggy ‘extremely difficult’, says Sánchez de Madariaga, who estimates that it can take up to four times as long. ‘So what do young women with small kids do.’”

“Chicago for example, still charges for public transport connections.” These charges seem particularly egregious in light of a 2016 study which revealed quite how much Chicago’s transport system is biased against typical female travel patterns. The study, which compared Uberpool (the car-sharing version of the popular taxi app) with public transport in Chicago, revealed that for trips downtown, the difference in time between Uberpool and public transport was negligible – around six minutes on average. But for trips between neighbourhoods, i.e. the type of travel women are likely to be making for informal work or care-giving responsibilities, Uberpool took twenty-eight minutes to make a trip that took forty-seven minutes on public transport.

Given women’s time poverty (women’s paid and unpaid work combines into a longer working day than men’s), Uberpool might seem attractive. Except it costs around three times more than public transport and women are also cash poor compared to men: around the world women have less access to household finances than men.”

“When it comes to fixed infrastructure like subways and trains, Sánchez de Madariaga explains, there is not much you can easily or cheaply do to address this historical bias. ‘You can improve their accessibility; she says and that’s about it. Buses, on the other hand, are flexible and their routes and stops can and should be ‘moved and adjusted for need’, says Sánchez de Madariaga. This is, in fact, what Ada Colau has done in Barcelona, by introducing a new orthogonal bus route (a grid rather than a spiderweb, which is more useful for trip-chaining). Sánchez de Madariaga also argues that public transport needs to develop intermediate services, something between a car and a bus. In Mexico they have something called peseros, which are really small, like a mini mini minibus. And they have shared taxis. These have a lot of flexibility, and, I think, could and should be developed to support women’s mobility.’”

“When Vienna’s public officials decided to build a new housing complex in 1993, they first defined ‘the needs of the people using the space’ and then looked for technical solutions to meet those needs, explains Eva Kail. What this meant was collecting data, specifically sex-disaggregated data, because the ‘people’ this housing was intended to serve were women.

Surveys compiled at the time by Austria’s national statistics agency revealed that women spent more time per day than men on household chores and childcare. (According to the latest World Economic Forum figures Austrian women spend double the time men spend on unpaid work, and more time overall on paid and unpaid work combined.) And so, explains Kail, officials designed the housing complex Frauen-Werk-Stadt I (Women-Work-City I – there has since been a II and a III) to cater for women’s caring needs.

First came the location, which, Kail says, was carefully chosen to make it easier for women to carry out their caring responsibilities. The complex is right next to a tram stop, has a kindergarten on-site and is close to schools, meaning children can travel on their own from an early age (Sánchez de Madarlaga tells me that one of the biggest time drains for women is ‘escorting kids to school, to doctors, and to extracurricular activities’). A doctor’s practice, a pharmacy and commercial space for other shops are all included within the complex, and there is a large supermarket nearby. It is the ultimate in mixed-use design.

The design of FWS I is, in fact, rather like a purpose-built favela. It priorities community and shared space. Interconnected buildings with a maximum of four units per floor stand around a series of shared courtyards (complete with grassy areas and children’s play spaces) which are visible from any unit in the project. Meanwhile, transparent stairwells visible to the outdoors, high levels of lighting in public spaces, and well-lit car parking accessible only via flats, were all designed to promote a sense of safety. Another housing complex in Vienna (Autofreie Mustersiedlung) dispensed with parking spaces altogether, bypassing the zoning rule that specifies one car parking space per new apartment. They instead spent the money on communal rooms and additional play areas. The complex was not specifically aimed at women, but given women are less likely to drive and more likely to care for children than men, the out come is nevertheless one that caters to women’s housing and care needs.

Care work is also built into the interior of the open-floor plan FWS I flats. The kitchen is at the heart of each flat, its visible lines of sight to the rest of the home mirroring the outer courtyard design. This not only enables women to keep an eye on children while working in the kitchen, it also places housework at the heart of the house: a subtle challenge to the idea that housework is solely a woman’s responsibility. Compare this to the tendency a local official in Philadelphia revealed she had to repeatedly check in developers of putting kitchens up on a third floor with no elevator: ‘Do you want to carry your groceries and strollers up to the third floor?’ she points out.”

Toilets

“But even if male and female toilets had an equal number of stalls, the issue wouldn’t be resolved, because women take up to 2.3 times as long as men to use the toilet. Women make up the majority of the elderly and disabled, two groups that will tend to need more time in the toilet. Women are also more likely to be accompanied by children, as well as disabled and older people. Then there’s the 20–25% of women of childbearing age who may be on their period at any one time, and therefore need time to change a tampon or a sanitary pad.

Women may also in any case require more trips to the bathroom than men: pregnancy significantly reduces bladder capacity, and women are eight times more likely to suffer from urinary-tract infections than men which again increases the frequency with which a toilet visit is needed. In the face of all these anatomical differences, it would surely take a formal (rather than substantive) equality dogmatist to continue to argue that equal floor space between men and women is fair.”

“A 2016 study found that Indian women who use fields to relieve themselves are twice as likely to face non-partner sexual violence as women with a household toilet.”

Public Spaces

“In the mid-1990s, research by local officials in Vienna found that from the age of ten, girls’ presence in parks and public playgrounds ‘decreases significantly. But rather than simply shrugging their shoulders and deciding that the girls just needed to toughen up, city officials wondered if there was something wrong with the design of parks. And so they planned some pilot projects, and they started to collect data.

What they found was revealing. It turned out that single large open spaces were the problem, because these forced girls to compete with the boys for space. And girls didn’t have the confidence to compete with the boys (that’s social conditioning for you) so they tended to just let the boys have the space. But when they subdivided the parks into smaller areas, the female drop-off was reversed. They also addressed the parks’ sports facilities. Originally these spaces were encased by wire fencing on all sides, with only a single entrance area – around which groups of boys would congregate. And the girls, unwilling to run the gauntlet, simply weren’t going in. Enter, stage right, Vienna’s very own Leslie Knope, Claudia Prinz-Brandenburg, with a simple proposal: more and wider entrances. And like the grassy spaces, they also subdivided the sports courts. Formal sports like basketball were still provided for, but there was also now space for more informal activities – which girls are more likely to engage in. These were all subtle changes – but they worked. A year later, not only were there more girls in the park, the number of ‘informal activities’ had increased. And now all new parks in Vienna are designed along the same lines.

The city of Malmö, Sweden, discovered a similar male bias in the way they’d traditionally been planning ‘youth’ urban regeneration. The usual procedure was to create spaces for skating, climbing and painting grafitti. The trouble was, it wasn’t the ‘youth’ as a whole who were participating in these activities. It was almost exclusively the boys, with girls making up only 10–20% of those who used the city’s youth-directed leisure spaces and facilities. And again, rather than shrugging their shoulders and thinking there was something wrong with the girls for not wanting to use such spaces, officials turned instead to data collection.

In 2010, before they began work on their next regeneration project (converting a car park to a leisure area) city officials asked the girls what they wanted. The resulting area is well lit and, like the Viennese parks, split into a range of different-sized spaces on different levels.’ since then, Christian Resebo, the official from Malmö’s traffic department who was involved in the project, tells me, ‘Two more spaces have been developed with the intention of specifically targeting girls and younger women.’”

“When planners fail to account for gender, public spaces become male spaces by default. The reality is that half the global population has a female body. Half the global population has to deal on a daily basis with the sexualised menace that is visited on that body.”

Work

“By the end of the day, 24 October 1975 came to be known by Icelandic men as ‘the long Friday.’ Supermarkets sold out of sausages – ‘the favourite ready meal of the time’. Offices were suddenly flooded with children hopped up on the sweets they had been bribed with in an effort to make them behave. Schools, nurseries, fish factories all either shut down or ran at reduced capacity. And the women? Well, the women were having a Day Off.

1975 had been declared by the UN as a Women’s Year, and in Iceland women were determined to make it count. A committee was set up with representatives from Iceland’s five biggest women’s organisations. After some discussion they came up with the idea of a strike. On 24 October, no woman in Iceland would do a lick of work. No paid work, but also no cooking, no cleaning, no child care. Let the men of Iceland see how they coped without the invisible work women did every day to keep the country moving. Ninety per cent of Icelandic women took part in the strike.

Twenty-five thousand women gathered for a rally (the largest of more than twenty to take place throughout the country) in Reykjavik’s Downtown Square – a staggering figure in a country of then only 220,000 people. A year later, in 1976, Iceland passed the Gender Equality Act, which outlawed sex discrimination in workplaces and schools. Five years later, Vigdis Finnbogadöttir beat three men to become the world’s first democratically elected female head of state. And today, Iceland has the most gender-equal parliament in the world without a quota system. In 2017 the country topped the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index for the eighth year running.

Iceland has also been named by The Economist as the best country to be a working woman.”

“All this extra work is affecting women’s health. We have long known that women (in particular women under fifty-five) have worse outcomes than men following heart surgery. But it wasn’t until a Canadian study came out in 2016 that researchers were able to isolate women’s care burden as one of the factors behind this discrepancy. We have noticed that women who have bypass surgery tend to go right back into their caregiver roles, while men were more likely to have someone to look after them,’ explained lead researcher Colleen Norris.

This observation may go some way to explaining why a Finnish study found that single women recovered better from heart attacks than married women – particularly when put alongside a University of Michigan study which found that husbands create an extra seven hours of housework a week.”

“It starts with stress. In 2017 the UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) released a report on stress in the workplace which revealed that, in every age range, women had higher rates of work-related stress, anxiety and depression than men. Overall, women were 53% more stressed than men, but the difference was particularly dramatic in the age range thirty-five to forty-four: 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.

The HSE concluded that this disparity was a result of the sectors women work in (stress is more prevalent in public service industries, such as education, health and social care), as well as ‘cultural differences in attitudes and beliefs between males and females around the subject of stress’. These may well be part of the reason, but the HE’s analysis is sporting a pretty dramatic gender data gap.

Since 1930 the International Labour Organization (ILO) has stipulated that no one should exceed forty-eight hours a week at work, by which they meant paid work. Beyond this number of hours workers start incurring health costs. But there is a growing consensus that things may be a little bit more complicated than that.

A 2011 analysis of data collected on British civil servants between 1997 and 2004 found that working more than fifty-five hours per week significantly increased women’s risk of developing depression and anxiety – but did not have a statistically significant impact on men.?’ Even working forty-one to fifty-five hours seemed to increase the probability of mental health problems in women. This was in line with a 1999 Canadian study and a 2017 analysis of six years of data from the Household Income Labour Dynamics of Australia Survey, both of which found that women had to work far fewer hours than men before their mental health started to deteriorate.

But it’s not only about mental health. Swedish studies have found that moderate overtime work increases women’s hospitalisation and mortality rate, but has a protective effect for men. A 2016 US paper on the impact of long work hours over a thirty-two-year period found a similar gender disparity. Working moderately long hours (forty-one to fifty hours per week) was ‘associated with less risk of contracting heart disease, chronic lung disease, or depression’ in men. By contrast, such hours for female workers led to consistent and ‘alarming increases’ in life-threatening diseases, including heart disease and cancer. Women’s risk of developing these diseases started to rise when they worked more than forty hours per week. If they worked for an average of sixty hours per week for over thirty years, their risk of developing one of these diseases tripled.

So, what’s going on? Is this all proof that women are in fact the weaker sex?

Not exactly. In fact, the Australian study found that although the average man could work substantially longer hours than the average woman before his mental health was negatively impacted, there was one group of workers for whom the gender gap was much narrower. These workers are called the ‘unencumbered’, that is, workers with little to no care responsibilities. For the unencumbered, both men’s and women’s work-hour thresholds were much closer to the forty-eight hours stipulated by the ILO. The problem is, women aren’t unencumbered. It’s just that the work they do is invisible.”

“Over time, these pay gaps add up. In Germany a woman who has given birth to one child can expect to earn up to $285,000 less by the time she’s forty-five than a woman who has worked fulltime without interruption.”

“Largely on the advice of international financial institutions such as the World Bank, the last two decades have seen a increasing global shift from social insurance to (often privately managed) individual capital account schemes. The payment a pensioner receives are directly based on their past contributions and the number of years during which the person is expected to collect benefits. This means women are penalised for the following: having to take time out for unpaid care work; early retirement (still a legal requirement in certain countries and professions); and for living longer.”

“A counterpoint is provided by Brazil, Bolivia and Botswana which have achieved close to universal pension coverage and smaller gender gaps thanks to the introduction of widely available non-contributory pensions. , up to a maximum of three children. As a side benefit (and a more long-term solution to the problem of feminised poverty), pension credits for the main carer have also been found to encourage men to take on more of the unpaid care load. Which raises the question: is women’s unpaid work under valued because we don’t see it or is it invisible because we don’t value it?”

“If women aren’t given enough time off, there is a risk they will leave the paid labour force entirely, or transition to part-time work. When Google noticed that they were losing women who had just given birth at twice the rate of other employees, they increased their maternity leave from three months at partial pay to five months at full pay. The attrition rate dropped 50%.”

“A recent Australian analysis found that the optimum length of maternity leave for ensuring women’s continued participation in paid labor was between 7 months and a year, and there’s no country in the world that offers properly paid leave for that length of time.”

“Things are worse for women in the US, which is one of only four countries in the world that doesn’t guarantee at least some paid maternity leave. The Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees twelve weeks of unpaid leave – but, amongst other restrictions you are eligible only if you have worked for a business with at least 50 other employees for the past twelve months. As a result, even unpaid leave is only available to 60% of the workforce. There is nothing to prevent the remaining 40% of US women being fired. And of course the number of women who can afford to take unpaid leave is lower: one in four American mothers return to work within two weeks of giving birth.”

“Around 85% of US women have no form of paid leave.”

“US universities provide another example of how gender-blind leave policies can end up discriminating against women. US academics in the tenure-track system have seven years to receive tenure after getting their first academic job or they’re fired. This system is biased against women – especially women who want to have children, in part because the years between completing a PhD and receiving tenure (thirty to forty) coincide with the years these women are most likely to try for a baby. The result? Married mothers with young children are 35% less likely than married fathers of young children to get tenure-track jobs, and among tenured faculty 70% of men are married with children compared to 44% of women.

Universities have done little to address this – and even those that have tried, have often done so in gender-blind ways that may end up exacerbating the problem they were trying to solve. In the 1990s and early 2000s, a number of US universities adopted what was intended as a family-friendly policy: parents would receive an extra year per child to earn tenure. But it isn’t gender-neutral ‘parents’ who need this extra year. It is specifically mothers. As the University of Michigan’s Alison Davis-Blake drily noted in the New York Times, ‘giving birth is not a gender-neutral event’?’ While women may be (variously) throwing up, going to the toilet every five minutes, changing nappies or plugged into their breast pump during this extra year, men get to dedicate more time to their research. So instead of giving a leg up to parents, this policy gave a leg up to men, and at women’s expense: an analysis of assistant professors hired at the top fifty US economics departments between 1985 and 2004 found that the policies ultimately led to a 22% decline in women’s chances of gaining tenure at their first job. Meanwhile men’s chances increased by 19%.”

“This is not to say that paternity leave is not important. It certainly is. Beyond the simple matter of fairness (fathers should have the right to be involved in their children’s lives), the data we have shows that properly paid paternity leave has a positive impact on female employment. At close to 80% by 2016, Sweden has the highest female employment figures in the EU. It also has one of the highest levels of paternity-leave uptake in the world, with nine out of ten fathers taking an average of three to four months leave. This compares with a more typical OECD level of one in five fathers taking any parental leave at all – falling to one in fifty in Australia, the Czech Republic and Poland.

This disparity is unsurprising: Sweden has one of the most generous (and, when it was introduced, innovative) paternity leave policies in the world. Since 1995, Sweden has reserved a month of parental leave (paid at 90% of earnings) exclusively for fathers. This month cannot be transferred to the mother: the father must use this leave or the couple lose it from their overall leave allowance. In 2002, this increased to two months and in 2016 it was further increased to three months.

Prior to the introduction of the ‘use it or lose it’ leave for fathers, only about 6% of men in Sweden took paternity leave, despite the fact that it had been available for them since 1974. In other words, men didn’t take the leave on offer until forced to by the government. This pattern has been repeated in Iceland, where the introduction of a ‘daddy quota’ doubled the amount of leave taken by men, and in South Korea, where the number of men taking leave rose more than threefold following the introduction in 2007 of a father-specific entitlement.”

“Men who take paternity leave tend to be more involved in childcare in the future – perhaps explaining why a 2010 Swedish study found that a mother’s future earnings increase by an average of 7% for every month of leave taken by the father.”

“American Express will even pay for women to ship their breast milk home if they have to travel for work while they are breastfeeding.”

“Women’s unpaid workload is compounded in Japan by the two-track career options available in most big Japanese firms: career-track and non-career-track. The non-career-track option is mainly administrative, offers few opportunities for advancement, and is known informally as the ‘mommy’ track – because ‘mommies’ don’t fit into the kind of work-culture that is required for someone on the career-track. Combined with the impact having children has on a woman’s chances of promotion (dependent on her ability to demonstrate loyalty through consecutive years worked at a single company), it is unsurprising that 70% of Japanese women stop working for a decade or more after they have their first child, compared to 30% of American women, with many remaining out of the workforce forever.”

“For example: what counts as a work expense. This is not as objective or as gender neutral a decision as you might think. The expenses that a company will allow its employees to claim back will generally correspond to what that country’s government has decided counts as a work expense. And this in turn generally corresponds to the kinds of things men will need to claim. Uniforms and tools are in; emergency day care is out.

In the US, what is an allowable work expense is decided by the IRS, which explains that ‘Generally you cannot deduct personal, living, or family expenses. But what counts as a personal expense is debatable – which is where Dawn Bovasso comes in. Bovasso is one of the few female creative directors in US advertising. She is also a single mother. So when her firm announced that it was hosting a directors’ dinner, Bovasso had a decision to make: was this dinner worth the $200 it would cost her for a sitter and travel? Bovasso’s male colleagues on the whole had to do no such mental accounting: yes, men can be single parents, but they are a rare beast. In the UK, 90% of single parents are women. In the US the figure is over 80%. In Bovasso’s case, her male colleagues were able to just check their calendar and accept or decline. And most of them accepted. In fact not only did they accept, they also booked the hotel next to the restaurant, so they could drink. And unlike her sitter, this cost was claimable on company expenses.

The implicit bias is clear: expense codes are based on the assumption that the employee has a wife at home taking care of the home and the kids. This work doesn’t need paying for, because it’s women’s work, and women don’t get paid for it. Bovasso sums it up: ‘You can get $30 for takeout if you work late (because your wife isn’t there to cook you dinner) or $30 for Scotch if you want to drink your face off, but you can’t get $30 for a sitter (because your wife is at home with the kids).’ In the event, Bovasso was able to get her company to cover the cost of her childcare – but as she points out, ‘these have been exceptions I’ve had to ask for’. Which is women all over: always the exception, never the default.”

“A survey of US firms found that 95% used performance evaluations in 2002 (compared to 45% in 1971) and 90% had a merit-based pay plan in place.

The problem is, there is little evidence that these approaches actually work. In fact, there is strong evidence that they don’t. An analysis of 248 performance reviews collected from a variety of US-based tech companies found that women receive negative personality criticism that men simply don’t. Women are told to watch their tone, to step back. They are called bossy, abrasive, strident, aggressive, emotional and irrational. Out of all these words, only aggressive appeared in men’s reviews at all, twice with an exhortation to be more of it’ More damningly, several studies of performance-related bonuses or salary increases have found that white men are rewarded at a higher rate than equally performing women and ethnic minorities, with one study of a financial corporation uncovering a 25% difference in performance-based bonuses between women and men in the same job.”

“We teach brilliance bias to children trom an early age. A recent US study found that when girls start primary school at the age of five, they are as likely as five-year-old boys to think women could be ‘really really smart.’ But by the time they turn six, something changes. They start doubting their gender. So much so, in fact, that they start limiting themselves: if a game is presented to them as intended for ‘children who are really, really smart’, five-year-old girls are as likely to want to play it as boys – but six-year-old girls are suddenly uninterested. Schools are teaching little girls that brilliance doesn’t belong to them. No wonder that by the time they’re filling out university evaluation forms, students are primed to see their female teachers as less qualified.”

“A recent ‘draw a scientist’ meta-analysis was celebrated across the media as showing that finally we were becoming less sexist. Where in the 1960s only 1% of children drew female scientists, 28% do now. This is of course an improvement, but it is still far off reality. In the UK, women actually outnumber men in a huge range of science degrees: 86% of those studying polymers, 57% of those studying genetics, and 56% of those studying microbiology are female.

And in any case, the results are actually more complicated than the headlines suggest and still provide damning evidence that data gaps in school curriculums are teaching children biases. When children start school they draw roughly equal percentages of male and female scientists, averaged out across boys and girls. By the time children are seven or eight, male scientists significantly outnumber female scientists. By the age of fourteen, children are drawing four times as many male scientists as female scientists. So although more female scientists are being drawn, much of the increase has been in younger children because the education system teaches them data-gap-informed gender biases.

There was also a significant gender difference in the change. Between 1985–2016, the average percentage of female scientists drawn by girls rose from 33% to 58%. The respective figures for boys were 2.4% and 13%. This discrepancy may shed some light on the finding of a 2016 study which found that while female students ranked their peers according to actual ability, male biology students consistently ranked their fellow male students as more intelligent than better-performing female students. Brilliance bias is one hell of a drug.”

“The odd thing about framing an aptitude for computer science around typically male behaviour is that coding was originally seen as a woman’s game. In fact, women were the original ‘computers’, doing complex maths problems by hand for the military before the machine that took their name replaced them.

Even after they were replaced by a machine, it took years before they were replaced by men. ENIAC, the world’s first fully functional digital computer, was unveiled in 1946, having been programmed by six women. During the 1940s and 50s, women remained the dominant sex in programming, and in 1967 Cosmopolitan magazine published ‘The Computer Girls’, an article encouraging women into programming. It’s just like planning a dinner,’ explained computing pioneer Grace Hopper. ‘You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it’s ready when you need it. Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.’

But it was in fact around this time that employers were starting to realise that programming was not the low-skilled clerical job they had once thought. It wasn’t like typing or feeling. It required advanced problem-solving skills. And, brilliance bias being more powerful than objective reality (given women were already doing the programming, they clearly had these skills) industry leaders started training men. And then they developed hiring tools that seemed objective, but were actually covertly biased against women. Rather like the teaching evaluations in use in universities today, these tests have been criticised as telling employers ‘less about an applicant’s suitability for the job than his or her possession of frequently stereotyped characteristics.’”

“Quotas, contrary to popular misconception, were recently found by a London School of Economics study to ‘weed out incompetent men’ rather than promote unqualified women.”

“Then there’s the standard office temperature. The formula to determine standard office temperature was developed in the 1960s around the metabolic resting rate of the average forty-year-old, 70 kg man. But a recent 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 type of activity. In fact, the formula may overestimate female metabolic rate by as much as 35%, meaning that current offices are on average five degrees too cold for women. Which leads to the odd sight of female office workers wrapped up in is back in the 1990s. Messing also points to women’s reports of work-related musculoskeletal pain still being treated with scepticism despite accumulating reports that pain systems function differently among women and men. Meanwhile, we’ve only just noticed that nearly all pain studies have been done exclusively in male mice.”

“Men and women have different immune systems and different hormones, which can play a role in how chemicals are absorbed. Women tend to be smaller than men and have thinner skin, both of which can lower the level of toxins they can be safely exposed to. This lower tolerance threshold is compounded by women’s higher percentage of body fat, in which some chemicals can accumulate.

The result is that levels of radiation that are safe for Reference Man turn out to be anything but for women. Ditto for a whole range of commonly used chemicals. And yet the male-default one-level-to-rule-them-all approach persists. This is made worse by the way chemicals are tested. To start with, chemicals are still usually tested in isolation, and on the basis of a single exposure. But this is not how women tend to encounter them, either at home (in cleaning products and cosmetics), or in the workplace.

In nail salons, where the workforce is almost exclusively female (and often migrant), workers will be exposed on a daily basis to a huge range of chemicals that are ‘routinely found in the polishes, removers, gels, shellacs, disinfectants and adhesives that are staples of their work.’ Many of these chemicals have been linked to cancer, miscarriages and lung diseases. Some may alter the body’s normal hormonal functions. After a shift of paid work many of these women will then go home and begin a second unpaid shift, where they will be exposed to different chemicals that are ubiquitous in common cleaning products. The effects of these chemicals mixing together are largely unknown, although research does indicate that exposure to a mixture of chemicals can be much more toxic than exposure to chemicals on an individual basis.

Most of the research on chemicals has focused on their absorption through the skin. Leaving aside the problem that absorption through thicker male skin may not be the same as for women, skin is by no means the only way women working in nail salons will be absorbing these chemicals. Many of them are extremely volatile, which means that they evaporate into the air at room temperature and can be inhaled – along with the considerable amounts of dust produced when acrylic nails are filed. The research on how this may impact on workers is virtually non-existent.”

“Wendy Davis, ex-director of the Women’s Design Service in the UK, questions the standard size of a bag of cement. It’s a comfortable weight for a man to lift – but it doesn’t actually have to be that size, she points out. ‘If they were a bit smaller then women could lift them.’ Davis also takes issue with the standard brick size. ‘I’ve got photographs of my [adult] daughter holding a brick. She can’t get her hand round it. But (her husband] Danny’s hand fits perfectly comfortably. Why does a brick have to be that size? It doesn’t have to be that size.!’ She also notes that the typical Al architect’s portfolio fits nicely under most men’s arms while most women’s arms don’t reach round it – and again has photos of her daughter and her husband to prove it. NYCOSH similarly notes that ‘standard hand tools like wrenches tend to be too large for women’s hands to grip tightly!”

“If packs were created for women’s bodies, heavy loads might not be such a problem, but they haven’t been. Women are more likely to find that rucksacks (which ‘have been designed primarily based on the anthropometry of men’) are unstable, that pistol belts fit poorly, and that pack straps are uncomfortable. Studies suggest that a ‘well-padded hip belt allows a better transfer of the load to the hips’ so women can use their stronger leg muscles to carry the load – while men’s upper body strength is on average 50% higher than women’s, the average gap in lower body strength is about half that. Instead, women compensate for packs built around typically male upper body strength by hyperextending their necks and bringing their shoulders farther forward, leading to injury and a shorter stride length.

It’s not just packs that aren’t created to accommodate women’s bodies. It wasn’t until 2011, thirty-five years after women were first admitted to US military academies, that the first uniforms were designed that accounted for women’s hips and breasts. The uniforms also included repositioned knee pads to account for women’s generally shorter legs, and, perhaps most exciting of all for a general audience, a redesigned crotch: these uniforms reportedly abandoned the ‘universal’ zippered fly, instead being designed in such a way that women can pee without pulling down their trousers. But even though the existence of female bodies has finally been recognised by the US military, gaps remain: boots designed to accommodate women’s typically narrower feet and higher arches were not included in the uniform changes. According to the Washington Times, the US Army buys ‘different boot styles for hot and cold weather, mountain and desert warfare and the rain’, just not for the atypical sex.”

“But the story of BPA is not just about gender: it’s also about class. Or at least it’s about gendered class. Fearing a major consumer boycott, most baby-bottle manufacturers voluntarily removed BPA from their products, and while the official US line on BPA is that it is not toxic, the EU and Canada are on their way to banning its use altogether. But the legislation that we have exclusively concerns consumers: no regulatory standard has ever been set for workplace exposure. ‘It was ironic to me’ says occupational health researcher Jim Brophy, ‘that all this talk about the danger for pregnant women and women who had just given birth never extended to the women who were producing these bottles. Those women whose exposures far exceeded anything that you would have in the general environment. There was no talk about the pregnant worker who is on the machine that’s producing this thing.’”

Farming

“It was the Danish economist Ester Boserup who first came up with the plough hypothesis: that societies that had historically used the plough would be less gender equal than those that hadn’t. The theory is based on the relative female-friendliness of shifting agriculture (which is done using handheld tools like hoes or digging sticks) versus plough agriculture (usually driven by a powerful animal like a horse or an ox), the idea being that the former is more accessible to women.

This sex difference in accessibility is partly because of the differences between male and female bodies. Ploughing requires ‘significant upper body strength, grip strength, and bursts of power, which are needed to either pull the plough or control the animal that pulls it,’ and this privileges male bodies. Upper-body mass is approximately 75% greater in men because women’s lean body mass tends to be less concentrated in their upper body, and, as a result, men’s upper body strength is on average between 40–60%- higher than women’s (compared to lower-body strength which is on average only 25% higher in men). Women also have on average a 41% lower grip strength than men, and this is not a sex difference that changes with age: the typical seventy-year-old man has a stronger handgrip than the average twenty-five-year-old woman. It’s also not a sex difference that can be significantly trained away.”

“But the disparity in the relative female-friendliness of plough versus shifting agriculture is also a result of gendered social roles. Hoeing can be easily started and stopped, meaning that it can be combined with childcare. The same cannot be said for a heavy tool drawn by a powerful animal. Hoeing is also labour intensive, whereas ploughing is capital intensive, and women are more likely to have access to time rather than money as a resource. As result, argued Boserup, where the plough was used, men dominated agriculture and this resulted in unequal societies in which men had the power and the privilege.

According to a 2011 paper, Boserup’s hypothesis holds up to scrutiny. Researchers found that descendants of societies that traditionally practised plough agriculture held more sexist views even if they emigrated to other countries.”

“A 2014 study in Syria, for example, found while the introduction of mechanisation in farming did reduce demand for male labour, freeing men up to ‘pursue better-paying opportunities outside of agriculture’, it actually increased demand ‘for women’s labour- intensive tasks such as transplanting, weeding, harvesting and processing’ Conversely, when some agricultural tasks were mechanised in Turkey, women’s participation in the agricultural labour force decreased, ‘because of men’s appropriation of machinery’, and because women were reluctant to adopt it. This was in part due to lack of education and sociocultural norms, but also ‘because the machinery was not designed for use by women’!

It’s not just physical tools that can benefit men at the expense of women. Take what are called ‘extension services’ (educational programmes designed to teach farmers science-based practice so they can be more productive). Historically, extension services have not been female-friendly. According to a 1988–9 FAO survey (limited to those countries that actually had sex-disaggregated data) only 5% of all extension services were directed towards women. And while things have slightly improved since then, there are still plenty of contemporary examples of development initiatives that forget to include women. and therefore at best don’t help, and at worst actively disadvantage them.

A 2015 analysis by Data2x (a UN-backed organisation set up by Hillary Clinton that is lobbying to close the global gender data gap) found that many interventions simply don’t reach women in part because women are already overworked and don’t have time to spare for educational initiatives, no matter how beneficial they may end up being. Development planners also have to factor in women’s (lack of) mobility, in part because of their care responsibilities, but also because they are less likely to have access to transport and often face barriers to travelling alone.

Then there’s the language and literacy barrier: many programmes are conducted in the national language, which women are less likely than men to have been taught. Due to the low global levels of female education, women are also less likely to be able to read, so written materials don’t help either. These are all fairly basic concerns and shouldn’t be hard to account for, but there is plenty of evidence that they continue to be ignored.”

“A 2012 Gates Foundation document tells the story of an unnamed organisation that aimed to breed and distribute improved varieties of staple crops. But ‘improved’ is in the eye of the farmer, and when this organisation did its field-testing it spoke almost exclusively to men. Male farmers said that yield was the most important trait, and so that was the crop that the organisation bred. And then it was surprised when households didn’t adopt it.

The decision to talk only to men was bizarre. For all the gaps in our data we can at least say that women do a fair amount of farming: 79% of economically active women in the least developed countries, and 48% of economically active women in the world, report agriculture as their primary economic activity. And the female farmers in this area didn’t see yields as the most important thing. They cared about other factors like how much land preparation and weeding these crops required, because these are female jobs. And they cared about how long, ultimately, the crops would take to cook (another female job). The new, high-yield varieties increased the time the women had to spend on these other tasks, and so, unsurprisingly, they did not adopt these crops.”

“Humans (by which I mean mainly women) have been cooking with three-stone fires since the Neolithic era. These are exactly what they sound like: three stones on the ground on which to balance a pot, with fuel (wood or whatever else you can gather that will burn) placed in the middle. In South Asia, 75% of families are still using biomass fuels (wood and other organic matter) for energy, in Bangladesh, the figure is as high as 90%. In sub-Saharan Africa biomass fuels are the primary source of energy used for cooking for 753 million people. That’s 80% of the population.

The trouble with traditional stoves is that they give off extremely toxic fumes. A woman cooking on a traditional stove in an unventilated room is exposed to the equivalent of more than a hundred cigarettes a day. According to a 2016 paper, in countries from Peru to Nigeria, toxic fumes from stoves are between twenty and a hundred times above World Health Organization guideline limits, 34 and globally they cause three times more deaths (2.9 million) every year than malaria. This is all made worse by the inefficiency of traditional stoves: women who cook on them are exposed to these fumes for three to seven hours a day, meaning that, worldwide, indoor air pollution is the single largest environmental risk factor for female mortality and the leading killer of children under the age of five. Indoor air pollution is also the eighth-leading contributor to the overall global disease burden, causing respiratory and cardiovascular damage, as well as increased susceptibility to infectious illnesses such as tuberculosis and lung cancer.” However, as is so often the case with health problems that mainly affect women, ‘these adverse health effects have not been studied in an integrated and scientifically rigorous manner’.”

“Women are still being blamed in the twenty-first century. A 2013 WASHplus-and USAID-funded report on user experiences of five stoves in Bangladesh repeatedly acknowledged that all five stoves increased cooking time and required more attend ing. This prevented women from multitasking as they would with a traditional stove, and forced them to change the way they cooked – again increasing their workload. Nevertheless, the main and repeated recommendation of the report was to fix the women, rather than the stoves. The women needed to be educated on how great the ‘improved’ stoves were, rather than stove designers needing to be educated on how not to increase women’s already fifteen-hour average working day.

Despite what academics, NGOs and expatriate technicians seem to think, the problem is not the women. It is the stoves: developers have consistently prioritised technical parameters such as fuel efficiency over the needs of the stove user, frequently leading users to reject them, explains Crewe. And although the low adoption rate is a problem going back decades, development agencies have yet to crack the problem, for the very simple reason that they still haven’t got the hang of consulting women and then designing a product rather than enforcing a centralised design on them from above.

One Indian programme failed because while the new stove worked well in the lab, it required more maintenance than traditional stoves – maintenance the designers had simply assumed the ‘household’ would take care of. But structural repairs in Orissa are traditionally the responsibility of men, who didn’t see fixing the new stoves as a priority, because their wives could still prepare meals using the traditional stoves. So the women went back to using the toxic fume-producing traditional stoves, while the new stoves gathered dust in corners.”

Products

“There is plenty of data showing that women have, on average, smaller hands than men, and yet we continue to design equipment around the average male hand as if one-size-fits-men is the same as one-size-fits-all.

This one-size-fits-men approach to supposedly gender-neutral products is disadvantaging women. The average female handspan is between seven and eight inches, which makes the standard forty-eight-inch keyboard something of a challenge. Octaves on a standard keyboard are 7.4 inches wide, and one study found that this keyboard disadvantages 87% of adult female pianists. Meanwhile, a 2015 study which compared the handspan of 473 adult pianists to their ‘level of acclaim’ found that all twelve of the pianists considered to be of international renown had spans of 8.8 inches or above. 4 of the two women who made it into this exalted group, one had a handspan of nine inches and the other had a handspan of 9.5 inches.

The standard piano keyboard doesn’t just make it harder for female pianists to match the level of acclaim reached by their male colleagues: it also affects their health. A range of studies carried out on instrumentalists during the 1980s and 90s found that female musicians suffered ‘disproportionately’ from work-related injuries, and that keyboard players were among those ‘most at risk’. Several studies have found that female pianists run an approximately 50% higher risk of pain and injury than male pianists; in one study 78% of women compared to 47% of men had developed RSI.”

“What if it wasn’t that his hands were too small, but that the standard keyboard was too large? The result of this thought was the 7/8 DS keyboard, which, Donison claimed, transformed his playing. ‘I could finally use the correct fingerings. Broken-chord formations could be played on one hand position, instead of two. [. . .] Wide, sweeping, left-hand arpeggiated figures so prevalent in Romantic music become possible, and I could actually get on with the business of cultivating the right sound, rather than repeatedly practicing the same passage:” Donison’s experience is backed up by numerous studies which have also found that a 7/8 keyboard dispels the professional and health disadvantages imposed by the conventional keyboard. And yet there remains a strange (that is, if you don’t accept that sexism is at play here) reluctance in the piano world to adapt.

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 phonemeasuring 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, 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.”

“Google’s speech-recognition software was 70% more likely to accurately recognise male speech than female speech – and it’s currently the best on the market.

Clearly, it is unfair for women to pay the same price as men for products that deliver an inferior service to them. But there can also be serious safety implications. Voice-recognition software in cars, for example, is meant to decrease distractions and make driving safer. But they can have the opposite effect if they don’t work – and often, they don’t work, at least for women. An article on car website Autoblog quoted a woman who had bought a 2012 Ford Focus, only to find that its voice-command system only listened to her husband, even though he was in the passenger seat. Another woman called the manufacturer for help when her Buick’s voice-activated phone system wouldn’t listen to her: ‘The guy told me point-blank it wasn’t ever going to work for me. They told me to get a man to set it up.’”

“Speech-recognition technology is trained on large databases of voice recordings, called corpora. And these corpora are dominated by recordings of male voices.”

“Voice corpora are not the only male-biased databases we’re using to produce what turn out to be male-biased algorithms. Text corpora (made up of a wide variety of texts from novels, to newspaper articles, to legal textbooks) are used to train translation software, CV-scanning software, and web search algorithms. And they are riddled with gendered data gaps. Searching the BNC34 (100 million words from a wide range of late twentieth-century texts) I found that female pronouns consistently appeared at around half the rate of male pronouns. The 520-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) also has a 2:1 male to female pronoun ratio despite including texts as recent as 2015. Algorithms trained on these gap-ridden corpora are being left with the impression that the world actually is dominated by men.

Image datasets also seem to have a gender data gap problem: a 2017 analysis of two commonly used datasets containing ‘more than 100,000 images of complex scenes drawn from the web, labeled with descriptions’ found that images of men greatly outnumber images of women.” A University of Washington study similarly found that women were under-represented on Google Images across the forty-five professions they tested, with CEO being the most divergent result: 27% of CEOs in the US are female, but women made up only 11% of the Google Image search results. Searching for ‘author’ also delivered an imbalanced result, with only 25% of the Google Image results for the term being female compared to 56% of actual US authors, and the study also found that, at least in the short term, this discrepancy did affect people’s views of a field’s gender proportions. For algorithms, of course, the impact will be more long term.

As well as under-representing women, these datasets are misrepresenting them. A 2017 analysis of common text corpora found that female names and words (‘woman’, ‘girl’, etc.) were more associated with family than career; it was the opposite for men. A 2016 analysis of a popular publicly available dataset based on Google News found that the top occupation linked to women was ‘homemaker’ and the top occupation linked to men was ‘Maestro.’ Also included in the top ten gender-linked occupations were philosopher, socialite, captain, receptionist, architect and nanny – I’ll leave it to you to guess which were male and which were female. The 2017 image dataset analysis also found that the activities and objects included in the images showed a ‘significant’ gender bias. One of the researchers, Mark Yatskar, saw a future where a robot trained on these datasets who is unsure of what someone is doing in the kitchen ‘offers a man a beer and a woman help washing dishes’.

These cultural stereotypes can be found in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies already in widespread use. For example, when Londa Schiebinger, a professor at Stanford University, used translation software to translate a newspaper interview with her from Spanish into English, both Google Translate and Systran repeatedly used male pronouns to refer to her, despite the presence of clearly gendered terms like ‘profesora’ (female professor). Google Translate will also convert Turkish sentences with gender-neutral pronouns into English stereotypes. ‘O bir doktor,’ which means ‘S/he is a doctor’ is translated into English as ‘He is a doctor’, while ‘O bir hemsire (which means ‘S/he is a nurse’) is rendered ‘She is a nurse’. Researchers have found the same behaviour for translations into English from Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and Persian.

The good news is that we now have this data – but whether or not coders will use it to fix their male-biased algorithms remains to be seen. We have to hope that they will, because machines aren’t just reflecting our biases. Sometimes they are amplifying them and by a significant amount. In the 2017 images study, pictures of cooking were over 33% more likely to involve women than men, but algorithms trained on this dataset connected pictures of kitchens with women 68% of the time. The paper also found that the higher the original bias, the stronger the amplification effect, which perhaps explains how the algorithm came to label a photo of a portly balding man standing in front of a stove as female. Kitchen > male pattern baldness.

James Zou, assistant professor of biomedical science at Stanford, explains why this matters. He gives the example of someone searching for ‘computer programmer’ on a program trained on a dataset that associates that term more closely with a man than a woman. The algorithm could deem a male programmer’s website more relevant than a female programmer’s ‘even if the two websites are identical except for the names and gender pronouns’. So a male-biased algorithm trained on corpora marked by a gender data gap could literally do a woman out of a job.”

“One company, Medela, has pretty much cornered the market. According to the New Yorker, ‘Eighty per cent of hospitals in the United States and the United Kingdom stock Medela’s pumps, and its sales increased thirty-four per cent in the two years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which mandated coverage of lactation services, including pumps. But the Medela pump is just not very good. Writing for the New Yorker Jessica Winter described it as a ‘hard, ill-fitting breast shield with a bottle dangling from it’, which, as it sucks milk out of a woman’s breast ‘pulls and stretches the breast like it’s taffy, except that taffy doesn’t have nerve endings. And athough some women manage to make it work hands-free most can’t because it doesn’t fit well enough. So they just have to sit and hold their personal milking contraptions to their breasts, for twenty minutes a time, several times a day.”

“The problem is that 93% of VCs are men, and, ‘men hack men.’”

“Research published in 2018 by Boston Consulting Group found that although on aver age female business owners receive less than half the level of investment their male counterparts get, they produce more than twice the revenue.’ For every dollar of funding, female-owned start-ups generate seventy-eight cents, compared to male-owned start-ups which generate thirty-one cents. They also perform better over time, ‘generating 10% more in cumulative revenue over a five-year period’.

This may be partly because women are ‘better suited for leadership than men.’ That was the conclusion of a study conducted by BI Norwegian Business School, which identified the five key traits (emotional stability, extraversion, openness to new experiences, agreeableness and conscientiousness) of a successful leader. Women scored higher than men in four out of the five.”

“It all feels rather catch-22ish. In a field where women are at a disadvantage specifically because they are women (and therefore can’t hope to fit a stereotypically male ‘pattern’), data will be particularly crucial for female entrepreneurs. And yet it’s the female entrepreneurs who are less likely to have it, because they are more likely to be trying to make products for women. For whom we lack data.”

“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 (nope, me neither) and copper intake. But as many women pointed out at the time, they forgot one crucial detail: a period tracker.

This was not to be the only time Apple completely forgot about at least 50% of their users. When Apple launched their Al, 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; to ‘measure how good you at sex’ apps called ‘Thrust’ and ‘iBang’ (and yes the in-built assumptions of what constitutes good sex are exactly what the names imply), the tech industry is rife with examples of tech that forget about women. Virtual reality (VR) headsets that are too big for the average woman’s head; a ‘haptic jacket’ (a jacket that simulates touch) that fits snugly on a male body, but on a female reviewer’s body ‘could have fit over a puffy winter coat’; augmented-reality glasses whose lenses are too far apart for a woman to focus on the image, ‘or whose frames immediately fall off my face’. Or, as I know from my experience of going on TV and giving public lectures, mic packs that require either a waistband or substantial pockets to attach to. Out goes pretty much every dress ever designed.

Defaulting to male seems particularly endemic in sports tech. Starting with the most basic, the calorie count on treadmills is perfect for practically no one, but it will be more accurate for your average man because its calculations are based on the average male weight (the default setting for calorie count on most exercise machines is for a person who weighs eleven stone). And although you can change the weight setting, that still leaves a calculation based on an average male calorie burn. Women generally have a higher fat and lower muscle distribution than men as well as different ratios of various muscle fibres. What this means at a basic level is that even after accounting for weight difference, men on average will burn 8% more calories than a woman of the same weight. The treadmill does not account for this.

There’s no reason to think that things improved much with the advent of wearables, either. One study of twelve of the most common fitness monitors found that these underestimated steps during housework by up to 74% (that was the Omron, which was within 1% for normal walking or running) and underestimated calories burned during housework by as much as 34%. Anecdotally, Fitbits apparently fail to account for movement while doing the extremely common female activity of pushing a pram.”

“Contrast these examples to the virtual-reality headset trialled by tech journalist Adi Robertson. The headset was meant to track her eyes, but it didn’t work for her – until an employee asked if she was wearing mascara.’‘When it got recalibrated perfectly a few minutes later, I was surprised – not by the fact that it worked, but by the fact that anyone had thought to troubleshoot make-up.”

“When author and gamer Jordan Belamire tried the VR game Ouivr in multiplayer mode, she was sexually assaulted by another user called BigBro4. ‘Virtual’ makes it sound like it isn’t real – but it felt real to Belamire. And no wonder. VR is meant to feel real, and it can be so successful at tricking your brain that it is being explored as a treatment for PTSD, phobias, even phantom-limb syndrome.

To be fair to the male designers of QuiVr, they had an excellent and proactive response to Belamire’s blog. They immediately redesigned their ‘Personal Bubble’ setting (in which other player’s hands disappear if they come close to your face) to cover the entire body and so make such groping impossible. But as they themselves noted, while they had thought ‘of the possibility of some silly person trying to block your view with their hands and ruining the game’, they hadn’t thought of extending the fading function to the rest of the body.”

“Men are more likely than women to be involved in a car crash, which means they dominate the numbers of those seriously injured in car accidents. But when a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured than a man, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured, even when researchers control for factors such as height, weight, seat-belt usage, and crash intensity. She is also 17% more likely to die. And it’s all to do with how the car is designed – and for whom.

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 reach 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 ‘out of position’ drivers. And our wilful deviation from the norm means that we are at greater risk of internal injury on frontal collisions.” The angle of our knees and hips as our shorter legs reach for the pedals also makes our legs more vulnerable. Essentially, we’re doing it all wrong.

Women are also at higher risk in rear-end collisions. Women have less muscle on our necks and upper torso than men, which make us more vulnerable to whiplash (by up to three times), and car design has amplified this vulnerability. Swedish research has shown that modern seats are too firm to protect women against whiplash injuries: the seats throw women forward faster than men because the back of the seat doesn’t give way for women’s on average lighter bodies. The reason this has been allowed to happen is very simple: cars have been designed using car-crash test dummies based on the ‘average’ male.

Crash-test dummies were first introduced in the 1950s, and for decades they were based around the fiftieth percentile male. The most commonly used dummy is 1.77 m tall and weighs 76 kg (significantly taller and heavier than an average woman), and the dummy also has male muscle-mass proportions and a male spinal column. In the early 1980s, researchers argued for the inclusion of a fiftieth percentile female in regulatory tests, but this advice was ignored.” It wasn’t until 2011 that the US started using a female crash-test dummy, although, as we’ll see, just how ‘female’ these dummies are is questionable.”

“EuroNCAP acknowledged that ‘sometimes’ they do just use scaled-down male dummies. But women are not scaled-down men. We have different muscle-mass distribution. We have lower bone density. There are sex differences in vertebrae spacing. As Stoffregen has noted, even our body sway is different. And these differences are all crucial when it comes to injury rates in car crashes.

The situation is even worse for pregnant women. Although a pregnant crash-test dummy was created back in 1996, testing with it is still not government-mandated either in the US or in the EU. In fact, 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. A three-point seat belt can also ride up on women who carry low, which a 1996 study found can treble or quadruple force transmission to the abdomen compared to when the belt is worn below the uterus, ‘with a corresponding increased risk of fetal injury.’ 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).”

Health

“Sex differences can be substantial. Researchers have found sex differences in every tissue and organ system in the human body, as well as in the ‘prevalence, course and severity’ of the majority of common human diseases. There are sex differences in the fundamental mechanical workings of the heart. There are sex differences in lung capacity, even when these values are normalised to height (perhaps related is the fact that among men and women who smoke the same number of cigarettes, women are 20–70% more likely to develop lung cancer).

Autoimmune diseases affect about 8% of the population, but women are three times more likely to develop one, making up about 80% of those affected. We don’t fully know why, but researchers think it might be down to women being the child-bearing sex: the theory is that females ‘evolved a particularly fast and strong immune response to protect developing fetuses and newborn babies’ meaning that sometimes it overreacts and attacks the body. The immune system is also thought to be behind sex-specific responses to vaccines: women develop higher antibody responses and have more frequent and severe adverse reactions to vaccines, and a 2014 paper proposed deeloping male and female versions of influenza vaccines.

Sex differences appear even in our cells: in blood-serum biomarkers for autism; in proteins; in immune cells used to convey pain signals; in how cells die following a stroke. A recent study also found a significant sex difference in the ‘expression of a gene found to be important for drug metabolism.’ Sex differences in the presentation and outcome of Parkinson’s disease, stroke and brain ischemia (insufficient blood flow to the brain) have also been tracked all the way to our cells, and there is growing evidence of a sex difference in the ageing of the blood vessels, ‘with inevitable implications for health problems, examination and treatment. In a 2013 Nature article, Dr Elizabeth Pollitzer points to research showing that male and female mice cells have been found to respond differently to stress; that male and female human cells ‘exhibit wildly different concentrations of many metabolites’; and to ‘mounting evidence’ that ‘cells differ according to sex irrespective of their history of exposure to sex hormones’”

“Some antidepressants have been found to affect women differently at different times of their cycle, meaning that dosage may be too high at some points and too low at others. Women are also more likely to experience drug-induced heart-rhythm abnormalities’ and the risk is highest during the first half of a woman’s cycle. This can, of course, be fatal.”

“Together with her team, she conducted a study which found that the time of day you have a heart attack affects your chances of survival. A heart attack that hits during the day triggers, among other things, a greater immune response. In particular, it triggers a greater neutrophil response (neutrophils are a type of white blood cell that are usually first on the scene in response to any injury), and this response correlates with a better chance of survival. This finding has been replicated many times over many years with many different animals, becoming, explained Martino, the ‘gold standard for survivorship in the literature’.

So Martino and her team were ‘quite surprised’ when in 2016 another group of researchers released a paper which also found that daytime heart attacks triggered a greater neutrophil response – but that this correlated with a worse chance of survival. After a substantial amount of head-scratching, they realised there was one basic difference between the historic studies and this one new study: the old studies had all used male mice, while this new paper had used female mice. Different sex: totally opposite result.”

“A doctor I spoke to described CRT-Ds as ‘symptom control.’ They aren’t a cure, but they prevent many early deaths, and if your heart takes 150 milliseconds or longer to complete a full electrical wave, you should have one implanted. If your heart completes a full circuit in under that time, you wouldn’t benefit from one.

Unless, the meta-analysis found, you happened to be female. While the 150 milliseconds threshold worked for men, it was twenty milliseconds too high for women. This may not sound like much, but the meta-analysis found that women with an electrical wave of between 130–49 milliseconds had a 76% reduction in heart failure or death and a 76% reduction in death alone from having the advanced pacemaker implanted. But these women would not be given the device under the guidelines. And so because the trials treated male bodies as the default, and women as a side-show, they had condemned hundreds of women to avoidable heart failure and death.”

“Women (who ingest approximately 80% of pharmaceuticals in the Us!) are dying. Some drugs used to break up blood clots immediately after a heart attack can cause ‘significant bleeding problems in women. Other drugs that are commonly prescribed to treat high blood pressure have been found to lower men’s mortality from heart attack – but to increase cardiac-related deaths among women. Statins, which are regularly prescribed around the world as a preventative measure for heart disease have mainly been tested in men and recent research from Australia suggests that women taking statins at higher dosages may face an increased diabetes risk – which in turn is a higher risk factor for cardiovascular disease in women than in men.”

“In 2014, the FDA released a database of adverse drug reaction (ADR) reports between 2004–13 which showed that women are far more likely than men to experience an ADR: more than 2 million were recorded for women compared to less than 1.3 million for men. Although around the same numbers of men and women die from an ADR, death is ninth on the list of most common ADRs for women, compared to first on the list for men.”

“Despite obvious sex differences, the vast majority of drugs, including anaesthetics and chemotherapeutics, continue with gender-neutral dosages, which puts women at risk of overdose. At a most basic level, women tend to have a higher body-fat percentage than men, which, along with the fact that blood flow to fat tissue is greater in women (for men it’s greater to skeletal muscle) can affect how they metabolise certain drugs. Acetaminophen (an ingredient in many pain relievers), for example, is eliminated by the female body at approximately 60% of the rate documented in men.”

“A recent analysis of data from 22 million people from North America, Europe, Asia and Australia found that women from lower socio-economic backgrounds are 25% more likely to suffer a heart attack than men in the same income bracket.

Since 1989, cardiovascular disease has been the leading cause of death in US women and, following a heart attack, women are more likely to die than men. This disparity in deaths has been the case since 1984, and young women appear to be particularly at risk: in 2016 the British Medical Journal reported that young women were almost twice as likely as men to die in hospital.”

“Failing to account for female socialisation can also lead to women living for decades with undiagnosed behavioural disorders. For years we have thought that autism is four times more common in boys than in girls, and that when girls have it, they are more seriously affected. But new research suggests that in fact female socialisation may help girls mask their symptoms better than boys and that there are far more girls living with autism than we previously realised. This historical failure is partly a result of the criteria for diagnosing autism having been based on data ‘derived almost entirely’ from studies of boys, with a 2016 Maltese study concluding that a significant cause of misdiagnosis in girls was ‘a general male-bias in diagnostic methods and clinical expectations’. There is also emerging evidence that some girls with anorexia may in fact be suffering from autism, but because it’s not a typical male symptom it’s been missed. Sarah Wild, head of Limpsfield Grange, the UK’s only state-funded residential school for girls with special needs, told the Guardian that ‘the diagnostic checklists and tests have been developed for boys and men, while girls and women present completely differently. Meanwhile, a recently published draft of new NHS guidance on autism made no mention of women’s differing needs.

There are similar diagnostic problems when it comes to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and Asperger’s. A 2012 survey by the UK’s National Autistic Society found that just 8% of girls with Asperger’s syndrome were diagnosed before the age of six, compared with 25% of boys; by the age of eleven the figures were 21% and 52%, respectively. Up to three-quarters of girls with ADHD are estimated to be undiagnosed – a gap which Dr Ellen Littman, the author of Understanding Girls with ADHD, puts down to the early clinical studies of ADHD having been done on ‘really hyperactive young white boys’. Girls tend to present less as hyperactive and more as disorganised, scattered and introverted.

More broadly, researchers suggest that because women are socialised to ‘take turns in conversation, to downplay their own status, and to demonstrate behaviors that communicate more accessibility and friendliness’, the traditional medical interview model may be unsuccessful in getting the information from women that is needed to diagnose them effectively.”

“Rachael was eventually diagnosed with endometriosis, a disease where womb tissue grows elsewhere in the body, causing extreme pain and sometimes infertility. It takes an average of eight years to diagnose in the UK, an average of ten years to diagnose in the US, and there is currently no cure. And although the disease is thought to affect one in ten women (176 million worldwide), it took until 2017 for England’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence to release its first ever guidance to doctors for dealing with it. The main recommendation? ‘Listen to women.’

This may be easier said than done, because failing to listen to female expressions of pain runs deep, and it starts early. A 2016 study from the University of Sussex played a series of cries to parents (twenty-five fathers and twenty-seven mothers) of three-month-old babies. They found that although babies’ cries aren’t differentiated by sex (sex-based pitch differences don’t occur until puberty) lower cries were perceived as male and higher cries perceived as female. They also found that when male parents were told that a lower-pitched cry belonged to a boy, they rated the baby as in more discomfort than when the cry was labelled female.”

“One possible explanation for at least part of the disparity is that women are being prescribed antidepressants when they are not in fact depressed. Women’s physical pain is far more likely to be dismissed as ‘emotional’ or ‘psychosomatic’. The Swedish study which found that men are more likely to report depression also found that women who have not reported depression are twice as likely as men to be prescribed antidepressants.”

“It seems that Yentl syndrome may be at play again here: it is striking that so many of the stories women tell of undiagnosed and untreated pain turn out to have physical causes that are either exclusively female diseases, or are more common in women than in men. Women are almost twice as likely to have irritable bowel syndrome as men and three times more likely to experience migraines (a condition about which we know very little despite it being chronic, often deeply debilitating and affecting 37 million Americans and one in eight people in the UK).”

“In Sweden a woman suffering from a heart attack will wait one hour longer than a man from the onset of pain to arrival at a hospital, will get lower priority when waiting for an ambulance, and will wait twenty minutes longer to be seen at the hospital.

The reality that female bodies are simply not afforded the same level of medical attention as male bodies is often brushed aside with the riposte that, on average, women enjoy more years of life than men. But while it is true that female life expectancy remains a few years longer than male life expectancy (although that gap is narrowing as women’s lives have become less prescriptive and occupational safety in male-dominated jobs has become more stringent), there is evidence to suggest that the female mortality advantage isn’t exactly secure.

A 2013 paper that examined trends in US mortality from 1992–2006 in 3,140 counties reported that even as mortality decreased in most counties, female mortality increased in 42.8% of them. And while men’s years of good health have increased in line with their longevity, both women’s longevity and active years have increased at a much lower rate: thirty years of US health data showed that, while women live on average five years longer than men (in Europe it is 3.5 years), those years are spent in ill health and disability.

The result is that US women no longer have more active years than men, despite their longer lives, and while women account for 57% of US citizens aged over sixty-five, they make up 68% of those who need daily assistance. In 1982 both men and women who lived to eighty-five could expect two and a half further years of active healthy life. For women, that figure hasn’t changed, but an eighty-five-year-old man alive now can expect to be active and healthy until he’s eighty-nine. The trend of increasing longevity and good health amongst men can also be found in Belgium and Japan.”

“Premenstrual syndrome (PMS) is a collection of symptoms that can include among other things: mood swings, anxiety, breast tenderness, bloating, acne, headaches, stomach pain and sleep problems. PMS affects 90% of women, but is chronically under-studied: one research round-up found five times as many studies on erectile dysfunction than on PMS. And yet while a range of medication exists to treat erectile dysfunction there is very little available for women, to the extent that over 40% of women who have PMS don’t respond to treatments currently available.”

Unpaid Work

“Measuring GDP is, she says, ‘not like measuring how high the mountain is’. When you see headlines proclaiming that ‘GDP went up 0.3% this quarter’, she cautions, you should remember that that 0.3% ‘is dwarfed by the amount of uncertainty in the figures.’

Compounding this uncertainty are glaring gaps in the data used to compile the figures. There are plenty of goods and services that GDP simply doesn’t account for. And the decision over which to include is somewhat arbitrary. Until the 1930s we didn’t really measure the economy with any seriousness. But that changed in the wake of the Great Depression. In order to address the economic meltdown, governments needed to know more precisely what was going on, and in 1934 a statistician called Simon Kuznets produced the United States’ first national accounts. This was the birth of GDP.

Then the Second World War came along, and it was during this period, explains Coyle, that the frame we use now was established. It was designed to suit the needs of the war economy, she tells me. ‘The main aim was to understand how much output could be produced and what consumption needed to be sacrificed to make sure there was enough available to support the war effort.’ To do this they counted everything produced by government and businesses and so ‘what governments do and what businesses do came to be seen as the definition of the economy’. But there was one major aspect of production that was excluded from what came to be the ‘international convention about how you think about and measure the economy’, and that was the contribution of unpaid household work, like cooking, cleaning and childcare. ‘Everyone acknowledges that there is economic value in that work, it’s just not part of ‘the economy’, says Coyle.

This was not a mere oversight: it was a deliberate decision, following a fairly vigorous debate. ‘The omission of unpaid services of housewives from national income computation distorts the picture’, wrote economist Paul Studenski in his classic 1958 text The Income of Nations. In principle, he concluded, ‘unpaid work in the home should be included in GDP’. But principles are man-made, and so ‘after a bit of to-ing and fro-ing’, and much debate over how you would measure and value unpaid household services “it was decided’, says Coyle, that this would be too big a task in terms of collecting the data’.

Like so many of the decisions to exclude women in the interests of simplicity, from architecture to medical research, this conclusion could only be reached in a culture that conceives of men as the default human and women as a niche aberration. To distort a reality you are supposedly trying to measure makes sense only if you don’t see women as essential. It makes sense only if you see women as an added extra, a complicating factor. It doesn’t make sense if you’re talking about half of the human race. It doesn’t make sense if you care about accurate data.

And excluding women does warp the figures. Coyle points to the post-war period up to about the mid-1970s. This ‘now looks like a kind of golden era of productivity growth’, Coyle says, but this was to some extent a chimera. A large aspect of what was actually happening was that women were going out to work, and the things that they used to do in the home – which weren’t counted – were now being substituted by market goods and services. ‘For example buying pre-prepared food from the supermarket rather than making it from scratch at home. Buying clothes rather than making clothes at home.’ Productivity hadn’t actually gone up. It had just shifted, from the invisibility of the feminised private sphere, to the sphere that counts: the male-dominated public sphere.”

“In 2015, unpaid care and domestic work in Mexico was valued at 21% – ‘higher than manufacturing, commerce, real estate, mining, construction and transportation and storage.’ And an Australian study found that unpaid childcare should in fact be regarded as Australia’s largest industry generating (in 2011 terms) $345 billion, or ‘almost three times the financial and insurance services industry, the largest industry in the formal economy.’ Financial and insurance services didn’t even make second place in this analysis; they were shunted into a lowly third place by ‘other unpaid household services’.”

“There are still further gains that could be made. There is a 12% employment gap between men and women across the EU (the figure varies between 1.6% in Latvia and 27.7% in Malta); a 13% gap in the US; and a 27% gap worldwide. The WEF has calculated that closing this gap ‘would have massive economic implications for developed economies, boosting US GDP by as much as 9% and eurozone GDP by as much as 13%’ 37 In 2015 McKinsey estimated that global GDP would grow by $12 trillion were women able to engage in the paid labour force at the same rate as men.

But they aren’t, because they simply don’t have the time. Both the OECD and McKinsey have uncovered a ‘strong negative correlation’ between time spent in unpaid care work and women’s paid labour-force participation rates. In the EU, 25% of women cite care work as their reason for not being in the paid labour force. This compares to 3% of men.

In the UK, women with young children are employed for shorter hours than those without children, while for men it is the other way around.”

“The best job-creation programme could simply be the introduction of universal childcare in every country in the world.”

“A more dramatic government intervention than the introduction of paid parental leave would be to invest in social infrastructure. The term infrastructure is generally understood to mean the physical structures that underpin the functioning of a modern society: roads, railways, water pipes, power supplies. It doesn’t tend to include the public services that similarly underpin the functioning of a modern society like child and elder care.

The Women’s Budget Group argues that it should. Because, like physical infrastructure, what the WBG calls social infrastructure ‘yields returns to the economy and society well into the future in the form of a better educated, healthier and better cared for population’. Arguably then, this exclusion of care services from the general concept of ‘infrastructure’ is just another unquestioned male bias in how we structure our economy.

Take early childhood education (ECE) and high-quality formal childcare including for very young toddlers and infants. Investment in these can actually reduce overall education spend because it lowers the level of investment required in remedial education. It also improves cognitive development, educational achievement and health outcomes for children (particularly socio-economically disadvantaged children). All of which increases productivity in the long run.”

“The report concluded that investing in ECE had a greater positive impact on long-term economic growth than business subsidies, and would lead to an extra 3.5% growth in GDP by 2080.”

“The WBG found that investing 2% of GDP in public care services in the UK, US, Germany and Australia ‘would create almost as many jobs for men as investing in construction industries but would create up to four times as many jobs for women’.”

“Recent research from the UK’s Department for Education found that 54% of mothers who don’t work outside the home said they would like to ‘if they could obtain convenient, reliable, and affordable childcare.”

“Transferring childcare from a mainly unpaid feminised and invisible form of labour to the formal paid workplace is a virtuous circle: an increase of 300,000 more women with children under five working full-time would raise an estimated additional £1.5 billion in tax. The WBG estimates that the increased tax revenue (together with the reduced spending on social security benefits) would recoup between 95% and 89% of the annual childcare investment.

This is likely to be a conservative estimate, because it’s based on current wages — and like properly paid paternity leave, publicly funded childcare has also been shown to lower the gender pay gap. In Denmark where all children are entitled to a full-time childcare place from the age of twenty-six weeks to six years, the gender wage gap in 2012 was around 7%, and had been falling for years. In the US, where childcare is not publicly provided until age five in most places, the pay gap in 2012 was almost double this and has stalled.”

“The UK’s Marriage Allowance gives the main wage earner (usually the man) a tax break in couples where the lower earner is on €11,500 or less. This bolsters the gender pay gap on two fronts: supplementing male income, while also creating a perverse incentive for women to work fewer paid hours. Japan has a similarly male-biased married-couples tax break. Since 1961, the ‘head of household’ (normally a man) has been able to ‘claim a tax deduction of ¥380,000 ($3,700) as long as his spouse’s in come does not exceed Y1.03m (around $10,000)’. A 2011 survey by Japan’s labour ministry found that ‘more than a third of married women who worked part time and deliberately curtailed their hours did so to keep the tax deduction.’ In a slightly different example of a hidden gendered bias, Argentina’s tax system provides a rebate almost four times higher for employees than for the self-employed. Gender comes into it because men are more likely to be employed in the formal economy, while women are more likely to be self-employed in the informal economy so the tax system is essentially covertly giving a higher rebate to men than to women.”

Politics

“The OECD study also found that women’s words translated into action. As female political representation increased in Greece, Portugal and Switzerland, these countries experienced an increase in educational investment. Conversely, as the proportion of female legislators in Ireland, Italy and Norway decreased in the late 1990s, those countries experienced “a comparable drop in educational expenditures as a percentage of GDP.” As little as a single percentage point rise in female legislators was found to increase the ratio of educational expenditure. Similarly, a 2004 Indian study of local councils in West Bengal and Rajasthan found that reserving one-third of the seats for women increased investment in infrastructure related to women’s needs. A 2007 paper looking at female representation in India between 1967 and 2001 also found that a 10% increase in female political representation resulted in a 6% increase in the probability that an individual attains primary education in an urban area.

In short, decades of evidence demonstrate that the presence of women in politics makes a tangible difference to the laws that get passed. And in that case, maybe, just maybe, when Bernie Sanders said, ‘It is not good enough for someone to say, “I’m a woman! Vote for me!”, he was wrong. The problem isn’t that anyone thinks that’s good enough. The problem is that no one does.”

“In a stereotypically ‘male’ context (car mechanic, Wall Street, president of the United States) a woman is judged to behave more assertively than a man saying exactly the same as her. And while it was OK if a bit odd for men to be assertive in a “female’ context (choosing curtains, planning a child’s birthday party), it was definitely not OK for a woman to be assertive in any context. Assertive women are bossy.”

“As of December 2017, women made up an average of 23.5% of the world’s parliamentarians, although this figure hides significant regional variation: Nordic parliaments are on average 41.4% female while Arab parliaments are on average 18.3% female. Women account for 10% or less of parliamentarians in thirty-one countries, including four countries that have no female parliamentarians at all. And in most countries precious little is being done to remedy this.”

“Evidence from around the world shows that political gender quotas don’t lead to the monstrous regiment of incompetent women. In fact, in line with the LSF study on workplace quotas, studies on political quotas have found that if anything, they increase the competence of the political class in general. This being the case, gender quotas are nothing more than a corrective to a hidden male bias, and it is the current system that is anti-democratic.”

“In Sweden, a party list is used. In this system, each constituency is represented by a group of MPs allocated under proportional representation (PR). Every party draws up a list of candidates per constituency, with candidates set down in order of preference. The more votes a party receives, the more candidates from its list are elected to represent that constituency. The lower a candidate is listed, the less likely she is to win a seat.

In 1971, only 14% of Swedish parliamentarians were female. The Social Democratic Party (SDP) decided to try to address this discrepancy, first with a recommendation in 1972 that party districts should place ‘more women’ on electoral lists. By 1978, this had evolved into a recommendation that lists reflect the proportion of female party members, and in 1987 a 40% minimum target was introduced. None of these measures had a significant effect on the number of female MPs elected: you could have a 50% female list, but if all the women were down at the bottom, they weren’t likely to win a seat.

So in 1993 the SDP introduced what is known as a ‘zipper’ quota. Two lists must be produced: one of male candidates and one of female candidates. These two lists are then ‘zipped’ together, so you end up with a list that alternates male and female candidates. In the 1994 election that followed, female representation leapt eight points and has never dipped below 40% since (although the proportion of women in parliament has been slipping as Sweden has increasingly been voting for more right-wing parties that don’t operate gender quotas).”

“Sometimes it’s not ‘just’ threats. More than one in five female parliamentarians surveyed by the IP had been ‘subjected to one or more acts of sexual violence’, while a third had witnessed sexual violence being committed against a female colleague. During the 2010 elections in Afghanistan, nearly all of the female candidates received threatening phone calls and some female MPs in the country require round-the-clock protection. ‘Almost every day I fear for my life,’ Afghan MP Fawzia Koofi told the Guardian in 2014. A year later one of her female colleagues died in a car bomb – the second deadly attack on a female politician in Afghanistan in the space of three months.”

“Further research from the US and Argentina has shown that having large numbers of female legislators is ‘tied to both women’s diminished success in passing legislation and reduced chances of being appointed to “masculine” and “powerful” committees.”

“Others simply stand down. Violence against female politicians in Asia and Latin America has been shown to make them less likely to stand for re-election and more likely to leave after fewer terms compared to male politicians. ‘I don’t know if I will be a candidate in the next elections, one Asian MP told the IPU, ‘because I need to think about not causing too much harm to my family.’”

“Simple adjustments like monitoring interruptions and more formally allocating a set amount of time for each person to speak have both been shown to attenuate male dominance of debates. This is in fact what Glen Mazarra, a showrunner at FX TV drama The Shield, did when he noticed that female writers weren’t speaking up in the writer’s room – or that when they did, they were interrupted and their ideas overtaken. He instituted a no-interruption policy while writers (male or female) were pitching. It worked – and, he says, ‘it made the entire team more effective.’”

“Some countries have attempted to legislate against the more extreme ways in which women’s voices are shut out from power. Since 2012, Bolivia has made political violence against a woman elected to or holding public office a criminal offence; in 2016 they also passed a law preventing anyone with a background of violence against women from running for political office.”

Disasters

“Most former tenants of New Orleans public housing wanted to – and assumed they would return to their former homes after the clean-up. After all, ‘the Bricks’, as the four large housing projects within the city of New Orleans are known, were still standing. More than this, according to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, they were structurally sound. and would be habitable after cleaning. But it was not to be. Even as ‘affordable and structurally sound homes in New Orleans remained in high demand’, funding was announced for the buildings to be demolished. They would be replaced with mixed-income housing which included only 706 public housing units compared to the 4,534 that had existed before.

Like ‘We Will Rebuild’ in Miami before them, the planners seemed to place business interests above the needs of ‘the now permanently displaced thousands of individuals, all low-income and the majority black women’. In their legal response to a 2007 lawsuit, the Housing Authority of New Orleans claimed that they had surveyed former tenants and the majority had said that they did not want to return to New Orleans. This is the opposite of what IWPR found, leaving many with the suspicion that ‘the decision to destroy the buildings may have been less about repairing disaster damage, or responding to the needs of those who had suffered losses and experienced traumas, and more about opportunistic urban redevelopment.’

Residents wanted to return to the Bricks because, like Brazil’s favelas, these public housing projects provided more than shelter: they provided a social infrastructure, filling in the gaps left by a laissez-faire state.”

“Even where women are included, they remain in the minority and excluded from positions of power, and in some areas, we have even regressed: in 2016 only half of that year’s signed peace agreements contained gender-specific provisions, compared to 70% of signed peace agreements in 2015. In the June 2017 Afghanistan peace talks, women made up 6% of negotiators, 0% of mediators, and 0% of signatories.

Causal data for the sudden reversal between 2016 and 2017 is not available, but a clue comes courtesy of a participant at an off-the-record round table on women, peace and security at the International Peace Institute in New York in 2014. ‘The UN and other powerbrokers succumb to requests not to have women in the room,’ the participant claimed. ‘When the local government says “We don’t want women,” the international community compromises and says “OK.” As in post-disaster contexts, the reasoning given varies (cultural sensitivities; including women would delay the negotiations; women can be included after an agreement has been reached) but they all boil down to the same line that’s been used to fob women off for centuries: we’ll get to you after the revolution.

It’s a rationale that is clearly a function of sexism, a symptom of a world that believes women’s lives are less important than ‘human’ lives, where ‘human’ means male. But the ease with which international agencies toss UNSCR out of the window is not just sexist. It’s foolish. The presence of women at the negotiating table not only makes it more likely that an agreement will be reached, it also makes it more likely that the peace will last. Analysis of 182 peace agreements signed between 1989 and 2011 demonstrated that when women are included in peace processes there is a 20% increase in the probability of an agreement lasting at least two years, and a 35% increase in the probability of an agreement lasting at least fifteen years.

This isn’t necessarily a matter of women being better at negotiating: it’s at least in part what they negotiate for. Clare Castillejo, the specialist in governance and rights in fragile states, points out that ‘women frequently bring important issues to the peace-building agenda that male elites tend to overlook’, such as the inclusivity and accessibility of processes and institutions and the importance of local and informal spheres.”

“In the breakdown of social order that follows war, women are also more severely affected than men. Levels of rape and domestic violence remain high in so-called post-conflict settings, as demobilized fighters primed to use force confront transformed gender roles at home or the frustrations of unemployment. Before the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the average age for marriage for a girl was between twenty and twenty-five years; in the refugee camps during and after the genocide, the average age for marriage was fifteen years.

Women are also more likely than men to die from the indirect effects of war. More than half of the world’s maternal deaths occur in conflict-affected and fragile states, and the ten worst-performing countries on maternal mortality are all either conflict or post-conflict countries. Here, maternal mortality is on average 2.5 times higher, and this is partly because post conflict and disaster relief efforts too often forget to account for women’s specific healthcare needs.”

“Women’s caretaking responsibilities also have more deadly consequences for women in pandemics. Women do the majority of care for the sick at home. They also make up the majority of traditional birth attendants, nurses and the cleaners and laundry workers in hospitals, where there is risk of exposure, particularly given these kinds of workers do not get the same support and protection as doctors, who are predominantly men. Women are also those who prepare a body for a funeral, and traditional funeral rites lead many to be infected. In Liberia, during the 2014 Ebola epidemic, women were estimated to make up 75% of those who died from the disease; in Sierra Leone, the ‘epicentre’ of the outbreak, UNICEF estimated that up to 60% of those who died were women.

A 2016 paper also found that in the recent Ebola and Zika epidemics international health advice did not ‘take into account women’s limited capacity to protect themselves from infection.”

“Between 2000 and 2010 there were 3,496 natural disasters from floods, storms, droughts and heat waves, compared to 743 natural disasters in the 1970s. And beyond analyses that suggest climate change can be a factor in the outbreak of conflict” and pandemic, climate change itself is causing deaths. A 2017 report in the journal Lancet Planetary Health predicted that weather-related disasters will cause 152,000 deaths a year in Europe between 2071 and 2100. This compares to 3,000 deaths a year between 1981 and 2010. And, as we will see, women tend to dominate the figures of those who die in natural disasters as well.

We didn’t have firm data on the sex disparity in natural-disaster mortality until 2007, when the first systematic, quantitative analysis was published. This examination of the data from 141 countries between 1981 to 2002 revealed that women are considerably more likely to die than men in natural disasters, and that the greater the number of people killed relative to population size, the greater the sex disparity in life expectance. Significantly, the higher the socio-economic status of women in a country, the lower the sex gap in deaths.

It’s not the disaster that kills them, explains Maureen Fordham. It’s gender — and a society that fails to account for how it restricts women’s lives. Indian men have been found to be more likely to survive earthquakes that hit at night ‘because they would sleep outside and on rooftops during warm nights, a behavior impossible for most women.’ In Sri Lanka, swimming and tree climbing are ‘predominantly’ taught to men and boys; as a result, when the December 2004 tsunami hit (which killed up to four times as many women as men) they were better able to survive the floodwaters. There is also a social prejudice against women learning to swim in Bangladesh, ‘drastically’ reducing their chances of surviving flooding, and this socially created vulnerability is compounded by women not being allowed to leave their home without a male relative.’ As a result, when cyclones hit, women lose precious evacuation time waiting for a male relative to come and take them to a safe place.

They also lose time waiting for a man to come and tell them there’s a cyclone coming in the first place. Cyclone warnings are broadcast in public spaces like the market, or in the mosque, explains Fordham. But women don’t go to these public spaces. ‘They’re at home. So they’re totally reliant on a male coming back to tell them they need to evacuate.’ Many women simply never get the message.”

“’It’s embedded in Bangladeshi culture that women cannot mix with men and boys outside of their family males,’ explains Fordham, for fear of bringing shame on the family. Any woman mixing with those males ‘is just fair game for any kind of sexual harassment and worse. So the women won’t go to the shelters.’ The result is that women die at much higher rates (following the 1991 cyclone and flood the death rate was almost five times as high for women as for men) simply for want of sex-segregated provision.”

“In 2016 New York City became the first US city to provide free tampons and pads in public schools, homeless shelters and correctional facilities.”