Data prejudices women

DISCRIMINATION: MANY METRICS BASED ON THE AVERAGE MALE

Female symptons for heart attack markedly different to those for males.

London

A“gender data gap” is making the lives of women around the world more dangerous – from the misdiagnosis of heart attacks to ill-fitting protective equipment, according to a new book published this week in Britain.

Caroline Criado Perez, a British feminist campaigner and writer, has compiled a 411-page account of in-built sex discrimination that leads women to suffer, from the merely annoying to life-threatening.

In Invisible Women, the author sets out to show how from urban planning to politics, daily life to design, men are taken as the human default.

Criado Perez became prominent in Britain after successfully campaigning for a woman to be put on British banknotes and a statue of suffragist Millicent Fawcett to be erected opposite parliament.

Her new book stemmed from discovering doctors are more likely to misdiagnose women suffering a heart attack, in part because female symptoms – stomach pain, breathlessness, nausea, fatigue – differ from those of men and so are classified “atypical”.

Criado Perez found cars have been designed using crash-test dummies based on the “average” male, contributing to women being 47% more likely to be seriously injured in a car crash.

Frontline female emergency workers have been given protection gear like stab proof vests which are mostly based on the sizes and characteristics of males, with sometimes fatal consequences.

Even the formula for determining optimum office temperatures turns out to have been developed in the 1960s around the metabolic resting rate of an average man, often leaving workplaces feeling too cold for women.

Meanwhile, everyday consumer products are also prone to being male-centric, with voice recognition software far more likely to accurately recognise men’s speech.

Sarah Hawkes, who leads University College London’s Centre for Gender and Global Health, said Criado Perez’s conclusions struck a chord.

“The default in medicine for about the past 2 000 years has been male,” Hawkes said.

Helena Kennedy, an eminent barrister, welcomed the book’s “penetrating gaze on the absence of women from the creation of most social norms”. –

The default in medicine for 2 000 years has been men.