“Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” asks Perez.
This is apparently the question that has befuddled politicians, economists, designers, researchers… and a whole host of other professions for decades. Perez tells us that, in the 1930s, Freud declared that “throughout history, people have knocked their heads against the riddle of femininity”. By “people”, he of course means “men”. But it’s the same thing, right? And men have been having their heads knocked ever since. Though I didn’t agree with all the arguments Perez outlines (I don’t believe that enforcing all-female candidacy shortlists, for example, is the best way to ensure female participation), I found this book illuminating and thought-provoking.
What she convincingly demonstrates is that women are being significantly impacted by a world that was not designed for them. In some cases, this leads to increased risk of injury and even death. There are too many interesting examples to outline in this post, but I’ll briefly discuss a few that particularly interested me.
Medical trials and drug development
According to Perez’s research, medicine often fails to take account of gender. One example is that doctors study based on the male body, and therefore are not always aware of how the female body may be different or respond differently. Ads raising awareness about heart attacks focus on chest pain, a classic symptom in men, but less likely to occur in women. The threshold for whether a certain drug will be useful for a health condition or not are based on male body norms, meaning some women miss out on potentially life saving drugs. In trials of drugs on animals, many of the initial rounds are conducted on males. Since sometimes drugs are useful in one gender and not another, drugs are discarded at early stages that could have been beneficial for women (but not for men).
Another common situation Perez describes is when women suffer because symptoms relating to typically female conditions (for example endometriosis, where tissue from the uterus grows in other parts of the body causing agonising pain) are dismissed or undiagnosed for years by doctors. I remember in my early twenties going to speak to an older, male doctor about recurrent UTI infections that left me bedridden. He looked at me as if I was making a fuss about nothing and said he didn’t really know much about it because he’d never personally experienced it and it just tended to be a ‘women’s problem’. I guess it’s a reflection of my privilege that I’d not really come across this kind of bias before, and I was so shocked by this reaction that I didn’t think to report it. I wonder if he’s personally experienced all the other health conditions from which his patients suffer.
Crash test dummies and car safety
When I get into my car, I assume its safety rating accurately reflects how safe I would be driving it. Because I’m a woman though, this is apparently not the case. Crash test dummies used in testing cars conform to male body types. It’s not known how much risk I face given my shorter female legs and the fact I’m therefore likely to be sitting much further forward (an ‘atypical’ driving position…). If a female dummy is used, often it is just a scaled down male dummy, rather than a dummy which accurately reflects a woman’s differing anatomy.
Oh and also the female dummy is only tested in the passenger seat, because if two people are in a car together the driver is statistically more likely to be the man. To test out different possibilities of who is in the driving seat is apparently too complex and awkward for those doing the tests. Perez does note that when standards were changed so that ‘female’ dummies were included, safety ratings in many major car models tanked, indicating they were significantly less safe for women.
What do we mean by work?
Perez goes into detail about the socio-economic factors that bias against and hold back women. One of the biggest ones she explores is the unpaid work that takes up a huge amount of women’s time, that is largely unpaid and unvalued. This is predominantly child and elder care, and housework (cooking, cleaning, farming land). Perez unpicks how our measurement of GDP, our tax system, and our urban planning consistently discriminates against women, for whom a large portion of their work is not considered to be ‘real’ work.
I have to say, though I consider myself a feminist (I believe men and women should have equality of opportunity), there were many factors in this book I had never considered before.
What I found particularly interesting was one of Perez’s parting thoughts – that what struck her throughout her research is the excuses she was met with for why women hadn’t been factored into planning or research across so many sectors of our society. The general feeling she found is that, whilst men and their habits and patterns are normal and straightforward, women’s patterns are erratic or confusing (how do you simply test the effectiveness of a drug in a woman when her hormones are constantly changing and impacting on that drug’s efficacy over the course of a month?).
Perez builds a convincing case in her book for why women should be included earlier: even if simplicity is desirable, it does not reflect reality for almost 50% of the world’s population.
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