“The word ‘female,’ when inserted in front of something, is always with a note of surprise. Female COO, female pilot, female surgeon — as if the gender implies surprise … One day there won’t be female leaders. There will just be leaders” Tracy Chou.
In the film ‘My Fair Lady’ (1964) there is a song by the Henry Higgins character lamenting how difficult it was to work with a woman – ‘Why can’t a woman be more like a man.’ It’s no mystery that women are different in many ways from men. Even the ancient Greek philosophers lamented it as well. Yet, as I said in the last post, we continue to design everything in the world for the average man. If a spaceship were to land and women got out, we would have no problem accepting that the aliens (the women) would be different and probably wouldn’t keep trying to shoehorn them into a global system designed and run by men. We might even listen to them before and as we started designing anything which they would use. And I’m not talking about clothes fashion design either. It’s about every single aspect of our technology and society. For most situations there is little to no sex-disaggregated data to describe women, even though they are 50% of the human population, and do 75% of the world’s unpaid care.
For situations where we do have some data, let me start with a positive story of how a simple innovation positively affected some women (and also benefited the men) in the foothills of Nepal. While things are slowly changing, cooking, cleaning everywhere, and especially acquiring biomass fuel in developing countries, is considered non-paid female work. Ask any woman in the developed world and major responsibility for unpaid household chores (even if they work) is still the same despite decades of so-called female liberation. Men get the lawn, car washing and BBQ, which is considered equivalent apparently.
For centuries, women and children in the foothills of Nepal have gone out each day to find firewood for the next days cooking needs. As you probably surmise, these forests have been disappearing at an alarming rate. A major consequence of this is that during the Monsoons, the roots of the trees that stabilized the steep mountain soils, have been lost. Erosion during the monsoons has gotten so bad that it isn’t unusual to see whole villages washed down the mountainside. It isn’t unusual now for women and children to walk several hours (yes, hours) each day to find fuel. There is another problem with this, but that can wait until I finish this story. In an experiment, the government began a reforesting program, and also built cheap small-scale biodigestion systems to cut the need for fuel wood. All manure was placed in the anerobic biodigester. The result was a sludge that could be drained off, and methane gas that could be fed through a simple pipe to a single gas-ring within the home.
When interviewed, the men claimed that the sludge was twice as good as the raw manure in feeding their crops. The surprise came from the women who excitedly told how the gas ring created much more time for them during the day. For one, they didn’t have to go out to find wood. The second aspect was that after cooking, the women only had to clean the cookpots of food deposits. The heavy black soot on the outside of the pots often took them over an hour of hard scrubbing to clean. The methane ring produced no soot. With the extra time, the women had time to educate each other, their children, and even their male-folk if they would listen. The women also had time to produce arts and crafts to sell in the local markets to tourists down the mountain to make money to enhance their standard of living for their families. And the governments forestation program helped prevent erosion and begin rebuilding Nepal’s forests.
Sounds like a wonderful success story in the developing world, so now for the invisible woman darkside. In the 1970s the world bank began giving microloans to farmers in developing countries. When given to men to finance more technological farming (i.e. The Green Revolution), there was over 50% default, with suicide being high as they were societally shamed in their failure to provide. When women started getting microloans in the 1980s they paid back 95% of the time and spent the money on projects that benefitted the family and the community (and, unusually, we actually have data to show this). It’s not that the men are stupid. They were simply victims of a male-patriarchal mindset where being the provider was central to their identity as providers for the family, and an unforgiving global corporate farming system. The women’s identity, as subservient as it is, was tied to their roles within the family and community. Despite women being more likely to pay back loans, the ability of women to actually get a loan is still highly unlikely. This is as true in the developed world as it is in the developing world. Male dominated banking systems are still biased towards men. That is why the non-profit ‘Women’s World Bank’ is so successful (a story to be covered at a later date).
Women and female children in the developing world are much more likely to suffer and die from respiratory diseases caused by poorly ventilated cooking areas using biomass. Biodiesgters work to counter this, but the systems are not that cheap and without governments heavily subsidizing them, most farmers simply cannot afford them. In an effort to counter this severe health problem to women, engineers (usually male) created very low cost ‘High Efficiency Cookstoves (HECs)’ – they burned more efficiently and ventilated smoke much more effectively. The problem? One, was that men folk didn’t recognize the problem with the old cookstoves and many wouldn’t sanction getting the HECs, and two, the new design required wood to be cut into narrower length pieces that the women found hard and time consuming to do – so the women went back to the old cooking hearths. In a world where improved technology increases a woman’s unpaid workday from 15 hours to 16-17 hours, an extra hour can be debilitating. Talking to women might help engineers build a model that works for the women who use them.
This is just the minute tip of an enormous iceberg of the invisible woman problem. For any of my female readers who think that most problems are the plight of just the poverty-stricken world, let’s end today on a more pertinent example in the developed world – High end automobiles. Although the data are scant, what we do know is that women in any auto-collision fare significantly worse than a man in a similar accident or crash, even though men are more likely to be involved in crashes. Why? Cars are designed for the average male, but women because of their lighter bodies suffer more injuries such as whiplash.
Crash test dummies are designed (since the 1950s) around the average male skeleton and musculature, and cars designed for how a man drives a car. For the 15% of women who do not remotely fit within the frame of the average male – tough. Even though ‘female test dummies’ have been in use since 2011, it is really just a scaled down male-test dummy and it isn’t used in the driver’s seat, just the passenger seat. The average female skeleton and musculature can adapt to a point, but even then, simple things like car seat design and driving controls (e.g., steering wheel, pedals, column controls, gear stick shift) are all based on the average male. ‘Out-of-driving-position’ is a term car engineers use to describe how a woman drives a car as she adapts to it. Surprise, surprise, they know about it, but do nothing much about it. It’s not cost effective to build safer cars just for women, despite women have different muscle mass distribution, lower bone density, and different vertebrae spacing, and let’s not forget that seat belts are highly uncomfortable for women’s breasts, and inadequate, and even dangerous, for pregnant women and their fetuses.
To close this post, a personal observation about the seat headrest in a car. I recently visited one my adult granddaughters and rented a new mid-size car. In the passenger front seat, my granddaughter adjusted the seat as best as she could to fit her frame, but the headrest, the same one that that fit me in the driver’s seat, was not adjustable for her. It went up and down for height variation, but did not tilt back at all to accommodate her neck comfortably. I have heard many of my female friends and relatives complain of head rests being too-far-forward to be comfortable. The reason for the headrest of course is to prevent whiplash, and current ones seem to do it for male necks but not female necks. Crash ratings on a new car may sound great, but just so you know, it is with male data. With female data they score much lower – something the manufacturers don’t feel the need to tell you.
To Be Continued ………………
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