Author says gender bias risking lives of women
Campaigning author Caroline Criado-perez has detailed an alarming gap in health care and medical research between men and woman.
In her book, Invisible Women, she argues health care – and almost all other aspects of society – have been steered by men for men.
She says she first came across the gender gap in medicine in 2014 when she discovered doctors were less likely to diagnose women with heart attacks because their symptoms were different to men.
“I was so shocked doctors were misdiagnosing women as the symptoms of our heart attacks don’t confirm to those of men. And that women were more likely to die and more likely to be misdiagnosed.
“I also found out we don’t tend to involve female human or animal cells in medical trials. The result of that is women have less effective treatment and more side effects.”
The bias against women spreads towards even car safety design, she adds.
Research into car safety was pioneered on male crash test dummies. Only later were female-shaped ones used.
“Women are 47% more seriously injured and 17% more likely to die in a car crash,” she added. “The seats are not designed for our height or weight distribution.”
Meanwhile, the average smartphone is 5.5 inches long and too big for most women’s hands or their pockets.
What worries her most are the algorithms, the rules to be followed in calculations or problem-solving operations, especially by computers. She believes they are based on skewed male data sets.
“There doesn’t seem to be much understanding amongst the people who are coding these algorithms about the issues with the data they are training them on,” she adds.