The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Won't you have a problem either way, then? Unless you can climate control individual offices based on biological sex of the occupant, you'll either have shivering women or sweaty men.
The consequence of this is that it's better to err to the cooler side.
But, if I have a choice of jobs, I'm not going to work at a place that keeps the heat blasting so that the coldest person in the building feels warm. And of course the same could be said of someone who's freezing in a building meant to keep the warmest person from overheating.
I guess the ideal solution would be some kind of advanced technology you could wear to insulate yourself from the cold of the environment, while also letting you take it off when it gets too warm. Startup idea?
All I need is a developer and we can launch in 3 months.
Yes now gimme my billion in VC funding.
I also find it hard to believe that offices are five degrees too cold for women. That feels too extreme.
Otherwise, women just have to wear borderline cold-weather clothing at the office because the men are already wearing the absolute minimum they can wear without being fired.
I don't understand how people keep writing about this issue where there are 2 or more people who collectively require 2 temperatures and the answer is to just... switch it.
Pretty much every office on Earth has come to the same obvious conclusion about how to set the thermostat. It turns out that people wearing coats is better than people drenched in sweat all day turning the place into a reeking locker room halfway through the day.
Who really thinks that people set the thermostat at the office to be in accordance with the formulaic "standard office temperature?" The powerful people in a particular office set it at the temperature comfortable for them. Duh. The oppression of women in this case comes at a much more local level, and if it is true that women prefer a warmer temperature than men (with the caveat of everything falling on a distribution, of course), any change in the thermostat is a zero-sum game where one party wins and the other loses. This means that touching the thermostat will always and forever be a political game.
Another strange one the article mentions: the size of bricks. 99% of bricklayers are men. I would be willing to bet that the 1% that are women are unusually large-handed women as well. If we decreased the size of bricks to accomodate small-handed women, the time and cost it takes to build a wall would increase in proportion. It isn't rocket science that the incentives line up with what is good for the majority of people here.
As a more general concept, construction materials that are intended to be hand-installed are generally made available in the largest unit that a construction worker can wield. Making these units smaller genuinely decreases productivity. If this has a tendency to select for large, brutish construction workers, I don't see any harm. Especially considering that brutish folks have been getting the shit kicked out of them economically for the last 20 years.
Only if there's a single temperature for each person. In reality, there's a range that most people are comfortable in. For example, I'm fine from about 68 to 78 F. If you prefer something in the 60 to 70 range, then there's overlap where we are both happy.
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On a scale of 1-10, please rate your happiness at each of the following temperatures. Please remember to represent incremental units of happiness consistent with the standardized hedonic unit (traceable to ANSI) and company's ISO procedure HAPPY-03.
67°F
68°F
69°F
70°F
71°F
72°F
73°F
74°F
75°F
How do you "[render] the toilets genuinely gender neutral?"
It seems to me the men started using both restrooms, but the women refused to use cubicles that shared the same space as urinals? Why?
I imagine the most efficient gender neutral restroom scheme would be something like:
Upright urination has one dedicated queue. Sitting down urination has another queue. Defecation has another queue.
You could then have just one huge restroom with LEDs above cubicles that designate an opening for a particular queue like a parking garage. That way cubicles can be dynamically allocated based on the size of defecation vs urination queues.
Kind of like how at work you have 2 microwaves - one for people who need to zap their food for less than a minute, one for people that need to cook their lunch for more than a minute.
I just don't understand why you'd wish access to this or would want your space turned into this.
> I've always been kind of baffled why women would want gender neutral bathrooms.
Ever seen a long line to the women's bathroom but no line for the men's bathroom?
Here's a great article from the Star that does a terrific job of discussing this idea. https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
Should I go on with the obvious hypocrisy of this headline?
Bunch of rightists..
Or, heck, even the second part of the headline.
In either case, there is nothing wrong with wanting attention, especially in a world where there are an awful lot of things telling you that you're inadequate, imperfect, less than other people.
Yes there is. It leads to narcissism and unwarranted feelings of self-importance.
If you think that modern social media isn't harming society by funneling straight to people's egos, thus causing the "in a world" situation we're in in the first place, then there's no point trying to debate anything else with you.
First thing you need to do for a productive debate is to make sure you're talking about the same thing.
The differences in male and female suicide rates (and methods) is not a product of the social media age; it goes back at least decades.
"wanting attention" does not define narcissism, and a cry for help in the form of a suicide attempt is not a demand to be the center of attention. Yes, it can be, and suicide among people with narcissistic personality disorder is a problem too. But there are also a lot of people who feel isolated, ignored, lost who look for any way to reach out. Dismissing those as "just wanting attention" serves no one.
Psychological treatment is critical in reducing suicide and gender statistics shows a clear bias against men when it come to medical care. That more women then men get medical help for psychological ailment is a systemic issue, and more equality would lower suicide rates for men.
> It wasn’t until 2011 that the US started using a female crash-test dummy
"The US started using" here is at best misleading metonymy for US regulatory tests. The standard 5th percentile female dummy mentioned in the article went into production in 1988 - by a US company, on North American measurements, for North American carmakers.
> For a start, this dummy is only tested in the passenger seat, so we have no data at all for how a female driver would be affected – something of an issue you would think, given women’s “out of position” driving style.
"Only tested in the passenger seat" is accurate only with regard to the linked regulatory tests. The 5th percentile female dummy is used in driver's seat testing, and was in fact upgraded back in 1997 specifically to provide more accurate data for "out of position" driver's seat testing. The claim that "we have no data at all" for female drivers is again accurate only for these specific EU-mandated tests; the general statement in the article is simply untrue.
> And secondly, this female dummy is not really female. It is just a scaled-down male dummy.
Again, this is flatly false.
Perhaps the writer was attempting to say that the dummy is not required to be specifically female, or that some of its unformalized ratios aren't proportional to women. But the standard Hybrid III 5th Female Dummy is not a scaled-down male dummy. The dummy's gross anatomy is visibly different and its formal technical specifications (e.g. height, chest circumference) are those of 5th percentile women. More importantly, it's been specifically designed (since 1991) to better assess gendered risks like 'submarining', where seatbelt force falls on soft tissues and causes injury.
Much of the rest of the crash-test discussion is similarly bad. A dummy of a pregnant woman was created in 1996, but the failure to mandate its use was based on the conclusion that the dummy was inaccurate and wouldn't provide valid data. The ongoing lack of a pregnant dummy is a problem, but it's a matter of insufficient data and unsolved design issues. A legal mandate passed today would optimize for the safety of dummies, not humans of any kind.
Gender bias in design, particularly in safety-critical settings like cars, is a topic that deserves more discussion. It's frustrating to see pieces on the topic choose emphasis at the price of systematically misleading readers.
On the point of nail salons, it is worth mentioning that cosmetics are tested for people who wear the dry product less than people who breathe the solvents all day. This is because the average consumer simply won't.
On the carpentry point, how is the equipment designed for men? I don't know if this is wrong or not, but would appreciate hearing more from some body who knows more.
Cement: it's more efficient to bag it in larger quantities; smaller bags will drive up costs. Also, if women will move less cement, I would be more likely to hire a man.
For bricks, it's also important for them to be thick enough. And again, it's not worth re-standardizing for people who may output less.
Architect stuff: A1 is a paper size; we would have to re-standardize paper to change this.
On PPE, it doesn't fit a lot of men either. I honestly think many of us are just less conscious about how stuff fits, for better or for worse. I'm very slim, so many things are ridiculously baggy.
On the bathrooms: I thought many people wanted "gender-neutral" bathrooms. Is this no longer the case? And if I'm trying to move as many people as possible, urinals are much, much faster. Equal floor space is just fine; the goal isn't necessarily to move the same number of people but many people.
Phones: not everybody likes these; I think it's a dumb design trend and will die out. The iPhone XS is smaller, as is the SE. The camera thing? My S7 has a moveable button. I don't think phone sizing is sexist.
On the voice recognition, this may be due to the way younger women in particular speak. Has this been broken down by age? Younger women tend to drop into "vocal fry", swing words up at the end, and other non-standard things that make speech irregular and harder to understand. I guess more training of models is needed, but there has been a significant shift in the way women speak in particular, arguably because they tend to speak in a more dynamic fashion any way. The anecdote of the Volvo is quite probably regression to the mean.
Siri: have you ever thought they are possibly avoiding "adult topics"? They probably don't want such things in her vocabulary so she can't be tricked into using them. It is possible they specifically excluded these, and the others were passed to google search.
Routing: how in the world are mapping companies supposed to measure safety? That would be a massive feature and would require aggregating huge amounts of data. It would be a massive undertaking.
Car crashes: women are on average smaller and more likely to have weaker bones (as noted by the article) (especially as they are more likely to have bone loss). This seems to be a likely reason. Does the article wish to change to a female-dominant alignment which puts men at a higher risk of injury? This is still a bad idea, as men are more likely to be in car crashes (as the article notes).
With that said, it's stupid not to have a crash test dummy that represents a lady.
Pregnant women are an edge case, and are less than 2 percent of the population at any given time.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2018/12/19/fatal-em...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25641425
[2] https://www.quora.com/How-many-women-are-pregnant-in-the-USA...
And this reminds me of a time when I built a work bench in the garage. My wife needed to use it for a project she was working on one weekend. She got aggravated and asked why I made it so tall.
I didn't have a real good answer for her so I just chuckled and went to work on something else.
Yes, which is why if you are building something you need a diverse viewpoint on your team.
> And this reminds me of a time when I built a work bench in the garage. My wife needed to use it for a project she was working on one weekend. She got aggravated and asked why I made it so tall.
In a professional environment this would be illegal
Why? Humans come in all shapes and sizes. You can't possibly accommodate everybody. I have a sister in law who is 4'7". I have a brother-in-law who is 6'7". Unless the entire workbench is on adjustable legs, it must accommodate one or the other. There is no possible way to accommodate both people comfortably.
That's why chairs with adjustable heights were invented.
The answer is simple: those of us who are more than one standard deviation from the mean will likely have to deal with the inconveniences that poses. Were there more women in said professional environment, things might change.
It's the same issue I have with representation-itis, where every body believes he needs his exact representation in media. "I am in a wheelchair; why aren't more movie characters in wheelchairs? People in wheelchairs can be cool too!". Fine, I'm not saying they can't, but if we did this with every possible person, there would be several billion characters.
Another analogy is how people are harmed by a disease and try to convince people to get tested. What they fail to realize is that were we all to be tested for all such things recommended by all such people, we would spend our entire lives in the doctors office.
How does this tie back to the issue at hand? Were we to try to accommodate every type of person, we would fail miserably and go broke in the process. Were we to only accommodate one, we would have a lot of unhappy people. So where do we draw the line? I think about one standard deviation (about 2/3 covered well enough) is about right.
https://www.dse-assessments.co.uk/dse-law-regulations-health...
This is self-fulfilling logic. You're claiming that if women avoid the environment because it's unpleasant, it's acceptable to make the environment unpleasant to women.
You say this as if it is inevitable and innocuous. Would you also be so cavalier about it if the axis were not gender but physical or mental disability?
This is exactly the problem. If you're an engineer, you need to consider how your users might differ from you, or else your creation will be unusable, if not something worse. Nobody's asking engineers to make their creations universally equitable: that is obviously an infeasible goal most of the time. But they are asking us to try, or even consider it. Even in our comparatively enlightened times there have been many instances of the inexcusable ignorance engineers have shown in the design of their products. Here are just a few examples:
- https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-da...
- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/technology/facial-recogni...
- https://www.wired.com/story/machines-taught-by-photos-learn-...
To be clear, when you were making your work bench at home, you were doing it in your personal life and not as an engineer, so I don't know if the same arguments might apply to that particular instance. But I do think you could have had a more thoughtful response to your wife.
> But I do think you could have had a more thoughtful response to your wife.
LOL! What are you, my marriage counselor?