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May 4 - May 22, 2021
latest report, published in 2015, found that ‘women make up only 24% of the persons heard, read about or seen in newspaper, television and radio news, exactly as they did in 2010’.47
Thirty years of language and grammar textbook studies in countries including Germany, the US, Australia, and Spain have found that men far outnumber women in example sentences (on average by about 3:1).
only 3.3%54 of the games spotlighted at press conferences during 2016’s E3 (the world’s largest annual gaming expo) starred female protagonists.
It is why a 2015 study of multiple language Wikipedias found that articles about women include words like ‘woman’, ‘female’ or ‘lady’, but articles about men don’t contain words like ‘man’, ‘masculine’ or ‘gentleman’ (because the male sex goes without saying).
In 2013, British tennis player Andy Murray was lauded across the media for ending Britain’s ‘77-year wait’ to win Wimbledon, when in fact Virginia Wade had won it in 1977. Three years later, Murray was informed by a sports reporter that he was ‘the first person ever to win two Olympic tennis gold medals’ (Murray correctly replied that ‘Venus and Serena have won about four each’).61 In the US it is a truth universally acknowledged that its soccer team has never won the World Cup or even reached the final – except it has. Its women’s team has won three times.
fact is that worth is a matter of opinion, and opinion is informed by culture. And if that culture is as male-biased as ours is, it can’t help but be biased against women. By default.
For him, the way he saw the world was universal, while feminism – seeing the world from a female perspective – was niche. Ideological.
Globally women do three times the amount of unpaid care work men do;
twice as much childcare and four times as much housework.
In Katebe, a town in central Uganda, the World Bank found that after spending nearly fifteen hours on a combination of housework, childcare, digging, preparing food, collecting fuel and water, women were unsurprisingly left with only around thirty minutes of leisure time per day.
By contrast, men, who spent an hour less than women per day digging, negligible amounts of time on housework and childcare, and no time at all on collecting fuel and water, managed to find about four hours per day to spend on leisure. The home ma...
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India, where 60% of the population does not have access to a toilet,9 90% of surface water is contaminated
They applied their model to Khayelitsha, a township in South Africa, which has an estimated 5,600 toilets for a population of 2.4 million, resulting, the authors claimed, in 635 sexual assaults at a cost of $40 million each year. Increasing the number of toilets to 11,300, at a direct cost of $12 million, would almost half the average distance to a toilet and result in a 30% decrease in sexual assault. According to the mathematical model, the reduced
similarly, research shows that the chances of streptococcal toxic shock syndrome from sanitary protection are increased ‘if there are no toilets available to change tampons during menstruation’.
A UK Department for Transport study highlighted the stark difference between male and female perceptions of danger, finding that 62% of women are scared walking in multistorey car parks, 60% are scared waiting on train platforms, 49% are scared waiting at the bus stop, and 59% are scared walking home from a bus stop or station.
The figures for men are 31%, 25%, 20%
reporting rate is even lower in New York City, with an estimated 96% of sexual harassment and 86% of sexual assaults in the subway system going unreported, while in London, where a fifth of women have reportedly been physically assaulted while using public transport, a 2017 study found that ‘around 90% of people who experience unwanted sexual behaviour would not report it’.49 An NGO survey of female metro users in Baku, Azerbaijan found that none of the women who said they had been sexually harassed reported it to the appropriate authority.
A 2016 study found that 90% of French women had been victims of sexual harassment on public transport;
women were three times more likely than men to face harassment on public transport.
Of course, the funding is meant to benefit everyone equally. But when city officials examined the data, they found that it wasn’t.
More unexpected, perhaps, is the claim that investing in girls’ sport could reduce the health cost of fractures due to osteoporosis.
When planners fail to account for gender, public spaces become male spaces by default.
Women have an equal right to public resources: we must stop excluding them by design.
Globally, 75% of unpaid work is done by women,
clear. In Korea, women work for thirty-four minutes longer than men per day, in Portugal it’s ninety minutes, in China it’s forty-four minutes, and in South Africa it’s forty-eight minutes.
In India, 66% of women’s work time is spent on unpaid labour, while only 12% of men’s work is unpaid. In Italy, 61% of women’s work is unpaid compared to 23% of men’s. In France, 57% of their work is unpaid compared to 38% of men’s.
All this extra work is affecting women’s health.
When Google noticed that they were losing women who had just given birth at twice the rate of other employees, they increased their maternity leave from three months at partial pay to five months at full pay. The attrition rate dropped 50%.
Campbell Soup offers on-site after-school classes and summer programmes for employees’ children.104 Google offers a stipend for takeout meals in the first three months after a baby is born, subsidised childcare, and has included conveniences like dry cleaners on its campus, so employees can do their errands during the workday.105 Sony Ericsson and Evernote go further, paying for their employees to have their houses cleaned.106 Workplaces in the US increasingly provide dedicated spaces for new mothers to breast-pump.107 American Express will even pay for women to ship their breastmilk home if
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truth is that around the world, women continue to be disadvantaged by a working culture that is based on the ideological belief that male needs are universal.
ENIAC, the world’s first fully functional digital computer, was unveiled in 1946, having been programmed by six women.
The formula to determine standard office temperature was developed in the 1960s around the metabolic resting rate of the average forty-year-old, 70 kg man.
an uncomfortable workforce is an unproductive workforce.
When Always menstrual pads were tested in 2014 they were found to include ‘a number of chemicals – including styrene, chloroform and acetone – that have been identified as either carcinogens or reproductive and developmental toxins’.34
It’s clear that we need more and better data about women’s exposure to chemicals.
likely to find that rucksacks (which ‘have been
women’s work, paid and unpaid, is the backbone of our society and our economy. It’s about time we started valuing it.
In sub-Saharan Africa biomass fuels are the primary source of energy used for cooking for 753 million people.32 That’s 80% of the population.
prevented women from multitasking as they would with a traditional stove,
but let’s face it, based on the available evidence, it seems unlikely.
female needs men won’t think to cater for because they relate to experiences that men simply won’t have. And it’s not always easy to convince someone a need exists if they don’t have that need themselves.
woman-blind tech industry and funded by woman-blind investors?
substantial chunk of tech start-ups are backed by venture capitalists (VCs) because they can take risks where banks can’t.7 The problem is that 93% of VCs are men,
2018 by Boston Consulting Group found that although on average female business owners receive less than half the level of investment their male counterparts get, they produce more than twice the revenue.
‘There’s never been much innovation in consumer electronics for women,’ she says. ‘It’s always focused on a very superficial aesthetic level: turn something pink, or turn something into a piece of jewellery, rather than taking account of the fact that technology can solve real problems for women.’
And when Boler was first researching the issue, that data simply didn’t exist. ‘We were trying to design a product which fits in the vagina, and so we needed to answer simple questions like, what size, how does it vary by age, by race, after children – all the usual questions. And there just was no data there at all.
Feminists might argue that the solution is, instead, to challenge male sexual entitlement.
2011 Toyota Sienna, based primarily on its four-star safety rating.64 But all was not as it seemed. The passenger seat, which Milito says she is likely to be sitting in when they are ‘out and about as a family’, had a two-star rating. In the previous year’s model, the front passenger seat (tested on a male dummy) had earned a top five-star rating. But the shift to female dummies revealed that in a front collision at 35 mph a female passenger had a 20–40% risk of being killed or seriously injured. The average risk of death for that class of vehicle, explains the Washington Post, is 15%.
This male-default bias goes back at least to the ancient Greeks, who kicked off the trend of seeing the female body as a ‘mutilated male’ body (thanks, Aristotle). The female was the male ‘turned outside in’. Ovaries were female testicles
given their own name until the seventeenth century) and the uterus was the female scrotum.
