Forget the glass ceiling, tall desks are a working woman’s biggest gripe

The task was simple: I needed to buy a desk. How hard could it be? I had worked out the required height and, for each option, checked the specifications. To my astonishment, as I scrolled from Argos to Ikea to specialist office furniture suppliers, every single one was too high. Sitting at them would require me to hold my shoulders in a permanent shrug and raise my forearms like a deskbound T-rex. I suppose I could simply have raised my seat and bought a footstool. But I fidget and move around; I don’t want to keep my feet fixed in place the whole morning.

For the record, I am slightly above the average female height. Women make up just over half the British workforce. Millions of us have to sit at desks. Yet no one in the great, globalised market of desk floggers had made a desk suited to a woman of normal size.

Mystified, I searched for heightadjustable desks. The listings were pure gadget porn. One had a “powerful dual motor system”, another was equipped with a “collision avoidance” system, another advertised a height adjustment speed of 2.5cm per second with “low noise while running”.

I found desks that were “durable, eco-friendly, wear-resistance, heatresistant, waterproof and easy to clean”. I found desks that had square edges or rounded edges, a walnut or a pine finish, and many advertising that they “satisfied International Industry Standards with Certification EPA/CARB”.

And every damn time I scrolled down the page to find the height range, I found that the minimum level these desks reached was 70cm or higher – too high for an average-sized woman to sit at comfortably. I began to feel enraged. Who was designing these things? Were they aware of the existence of women? Were they confused about how big we are? What was going on?

Globalisation might have obliterated eco-systems, hollowed out industries and homogenised cultures, but it was meant to bring consumers one great, liberating advantage: choice. In this instance, however, it has failed in such an inexplicable way that I can only conclude there is some conspiracy to force women back into the kitchen. There is just one problem with this theory, however: the modern kitchen’s counter-tops are simply too high.

I recently learnt that Ashkenazi Jews have such an elevated risk of breast cancer that the NHS will start offering routine genetic testing from next year. Unfortunately for my ethnic group, breast cancer is not the only disease we are prone to.

The list is alarmingly long: Bloom syndrome, Canavan disease, cystic fibrosis, Tay-sachs and so on. This is the effect of many centuries of endogamy. It is also a phenomenon so well known that for Orthodox arranged marriages, a genetic test has been part of the matchmaker’s package since the 1980s.

This is why it has always puzzled me that the NHS makes no effort to collect this data, even when it asks patients about race. Every time I have registered for an NHS service, I have been given a questionnaire with descriptive options: white (British, Irish or other), mixed (four categories), Asian (four categories), black (three categories), Chinese and other. I have always wavered over whether to just write “British” or give the more medically relevant category, which is “Ashkenazi Jewish”. There is, I’ll admit, a residual worry about the idea of officially telling the state to categorise me as a Jew.

Still, when pregnant, I did once tick “white – other” and write “Ashkenazi” in the box, thinking that it might result in some sort of genetic screening. Instead, the midwife regarded the form with bafflement and then filed it away without any queries.

We live in a society increasingly obsessed with race. Few people who are so obsessed would hesitate to point out all the “advantages” Jews enjoy. Yet in ways that really matter, our institutions are slow to make use of established ethnicity data to improve services. The test for breast cancer genes is welcome, but it underscores a problem: there is still so much other low-hanging fruit left unpicked.

Who was designing these things? Were they aware of the existence of women? Were they confused about how big we are?