99% Invisible - 363- Invisible Women

Episode Date: July 24, 2019

Men are often the default subjects of design, which can have a huge impact on big and critical aspects of everyday life. Caroline Criado Perez is the author of Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, a book about how data from women is ignored and how this bakes in bias and discrimination in the things we design. Invisible Women

This is 99% invisible. I am Roman Mars. Today's show is about a design flaw that might be, and I'm not exaggerating here, the single most common design flaw in human history. It potentially affects everything we have ever built. Its consequences are felt by more than half of people worldwide, and most people don't even notice it. But that's changing, thanks in no small part to the work of one woman. My name's Caroline Criado-Perez. I am a writer and activist who has written an incredible book. My book is called Invisible Women Exposing Data Biasts. No, wait, sorry, that's the British title.

What the f*** is the American title? The copy I have is called Invisible Women, data bias in a world designed for men. I know that British people swam more than American people. Is this a non-swery podcast? Well, you can swear all you like. We will probably bleep it. OK, I'll try to keep it to a minimum. And honestly, Caroline Criado Perez has good reason to swear,

because this design flaw, in addition to being everywhere, is really annoying. But like so many of the worst design flaws, it can be hard to notice at first. To demonstrate just how hard Caroline started off by telling me a story that begins with a joke about gender. So basically, in this town called Costco, Goga and Sweden, they were doing a gender analysis of all their local town policies and someone said, well obviously, snow clearing won't have anything to do with gender. And it does sound on the face of it ridiculous, how can snow clearing have

anything to do with gender? After all, the city of Krollsgoga plowed its streets the way you'd think all cities would plow their streets, starting with the major arteries followed by local roads and sidewalks. It seemed about as genderless as you could get. But actually, it turned out this was heavily related to gender because male and female travel patterns are not the same. Men are far more likely to travel in a fairly simple way, using a car for a twice daily commute in and out of the city center.

You can see this in the way that most cities are laid out, with major arteries going in and out of downtown, in what's called an arterial system, which makes a lot of sense if you are a man, but it turns out the way many women travel is very different. Women have these more complicated travel patterns which are called trip chaining. So for example, a typical travel day for a woman might involve dropping the kids off at school before she goes to work, picking up some groceries on the way home, maybe dropping in on an elderly relative.

And so women are much more likely to be walking, and women are also much more likely to use public transport, going on these local roads rather than just directly to a commercial area. When Carl's Goga Snow Plowing Schedule was first designed, all this trip chaining done by women simply wasn't factored in, because it wasn't considered work. But actually, this work contributes hugely to GDP. In fact, they discovered that if you put all the unpaid care work travel together, it turned out that travel for those purposes was almost as much as travel for paid work. And suddenly, if you collect data in that way,

suddenly becomes a totally different proposition. Once the city planner started looking at the data through the lens of gender, suddenly the idea that the city of Krooskoga Sweden should plow its major arteries first didn't make intuitive sense. Because that's really, really great for getting in and out of downtown. But it's not very good for traveling between different suburbs, which is the kind of travel that women are much more likely to do. So the city council of K Carl Skokka, realizing that it's harder to push a buggy through three inches of snow than it is to drive a car, decided to flip their snow clearing policy

on its head. From now on, it would be the minor streets and sidewalks that were plowed first, followed by the major arteries. What they didn't expect was it would actually save the money because it turned out that it dramatically reduced the admissions into accident and emergency because they were right. It is much easier to drive a car a few three inches of snow than to push a buggy and pedestrians were massively dominating admissions into accident and emergency and women were dominating the pedestrians. And so by this simple thing of changing the ordering which they cleared the snow, they

had this dramatic effect on their health care bill. And that was not an insignificant cost. You know, one analysis found that it was three times the cost of the winter road maintenance. But the point of the story isn't that Carl's goga has saved money or even that women suffered fewer injuries. It's that the snow-cleaning policy had been poorly designed even though the city planners had started out with the best of intentions. You know, it's not like the travel planners thought, I know, let's make women fall over and fracture their pelvis. That'll be really funny. They just preceded along the presumption that what would have worked for them would just work for society.

You know, and when the snow clearing schedule was devised, you know, it would have been men coming up with that schedule and it did work for them. But they forgot, as happens so often in public policy, to remember that women exist. And this goes all the way back to the fact that, you know, this isn't just transport infrastructure. This is pretty much everything. Today I'm talking with Caroline Criado Perez about the largest and most persistent data gap in history, the failure to collect data on and from women when designing almost anything

and the consequences of that, not just for women, but for everyone. So, you talk about this a lot in your book, which is that at the root of almost all these design problems, which don't seem to take women to account, is the fallacy of the default male, the idea that when we picture a kind of default human, when we design something, whether we collect it or not, we picture a cis man. Were there times in your research where you discovered that you, yourself, were making a default male assumption?

Absolutely. I mean, that's kind of how I got into feminism in the first place, was realizing that I had this male default in my head, that whenever I pictured anyone and the gender wasn't specified, I was picturing a man. So, you know, a lawyer, a doctor, a journalist, a scientist, you know, anyone I was constantly picturing men. And that was really shocking to me because not only the fact that I was doing that, but also the fact that I hadn't noticed I was doing it, because it is really shocking. How would I not notice? I'm a woman. How would I not notice? There was always picturing the opposite sex. You know, that's just weird. And so we really are so used to seeing men as

the default that most people aren't aware that they are ignoring women. But for people who are developing tech, for people who are developing workplace policy, for people who are developing medical research, you know, I wrote this book to kind of try and wake those people up because research. You know, I wrote this book to kind of try and wake those people up because I don't think that they are bad people, but by not collecting sex-d disaggregated data, what they are doing is having really serious negative, potentially fatal results for women. Well, you mentioned medical research. How is the absence of women in data gathering effect medicine? So, basically, the vast majority of medical research, and therefore, the vast majority of knowledge we have is based on the male body.

So, for all sorts of diseases, you know, because the way we have researched them, the way we treat them, the way we diagnose them has been based on research on men. Women get misdiagnosed. So for example heart attacks, women are more likely to die following a heart attack than men. And that's for a whole host of reasons. First of which is that female heart attack symptoms are not the heart attack symptoms that we have always been taught. So certainly I had always been taught that if I was having chest pain and pain down my left arm, I was having a heart attack. And it turns out that actually those are not the typical heart attack symptoms for women. Women are more likely to experience breathless, nausea, fatigue, what feels like indigestion.

And so women don't realize they're having heart attack so they don't go to the doctor. But even if they do go to the doctor, doctors don't realize that women are having a heart attack. But see, not all doctors don't realize, but there is this higher rate of misdiagnosis and it's partly because female heart attack symptoms are seen as atypical,

even though they are very typical for women. And in fact, male heart attack symptoms are atypical for women. Only one in eight women will experience chest pain, for example. But we just, because of this way that we see men as the default, male heart attack symptoms are seen as the default. And female heart attack symptoms are seen as this kind of niche variant. I was just, was just stunning because if there was some kind of thing that affected, you know, 51% of the population, we wouldn't think that that is a niche problem. Yeah, but I mean, we do in all sorts of areas. I mean another area that that springs to mind is car crashes. So the car crash test dummy that has been used for decades

to test car safety has been based on a 50th percentile male. And obviously that is a problem. You know female bodies differ from male bodies in all sorts of ways. I mean we have fewer neck muscles, we have less upper body muscle mass. Our spinal columns are different, our pelvis is the different. You know, so these are all issues that need to be taken into account, but we've got this 50th percentile male dummy as if of course the 50th percentile male is the 50th percentile human. And actually what is quite in raging really is that when this was introduced

in the 1950s there was actually a debate about having a female crash test dummy, but as happens so often car manufacturers lobbied against it on the basis that it would be too expensive. In presumably, it doesn't just affect the safety data we collected, it actually affects the design of the car. Exactly. And the result is that cars just don't fit women very well. So for example, the seatbelt hasn't been designed to accommodate women's breasts.

We haven't developed a seatbelt that accounts for pregnancy. Similarly, women need to sit much further forward than men in order to reach the pedals, obviously quite an important part of being able to drive. But that moves women out of what's called the standard seating position, and it puts them at a much higher risk in a frontal collision. And all of this together means that women are 47% more likely to be seriously injured, and 17% more likely to die than a man if they're in a car crash. And so that is negligence, but I think it gets even worse, because sort of belatedly regulators have realized that women do exist. In 2011, the US

realized that women exist and in 2015, the EU realized that women existed. You mean they finally introduced female grass-stuffies? Yeah, but I mean, they haven't really realized that women exist because actually the car crash test dummy that they are using is not anthropometrically correct. It's a scaled down male dummy. Right. But even worse than that, in the EU, this scaled down male dummy is only used in one

out of the five regulatory tests, and only in the passenger seat. So basically all you can say based on those tests is that we have data on whether it's safe or not for scaled down men to sit in the passenger seat. So basically all you can say based on those tests is that we have data on whether it's safe or not for scaled down men to sit in the passenger seat. But we do have data on whether it's safe actual women to sit in the passenger seat and no data at all on what it's like for someone who might be slightly similar to a woman to drive. Things like snow plowing and medical protocols and car safety are just a few instances where there is a critical data gap Either because there is no data on women or the data that exists is not sex-desaggregated

Even something as innocuous as the width of a piano key has been designed only with male hand sizes in mind In militaries across the world in mind. In militaries across the world, marching regulations have been designed based solely on the average male stride length, with disastrous results for female recruits. Construction tools, safety equipment, building codes, smartphones, voice recognition software, all of it designed using a corpus of data in which women largely do not exist. But after this break, we'll look at another example that might just provide a blueprint for how to do things better in the future. I've been talking to Caroline Criado Perez about her book Invisible Women, and of all the stories of poor design based on the gender data gap that Caroline told me, perhaps the most instructive

was the case of the Three Stone Stove.. The three stone stove is a traditional form of cooking that's used by 80% of people in the developing world, and it is what it sounds like. Three stones arranged in a circle on the ground with a pot placed on top of them and a fire underneath. And the problem with this type of stove is that the fumes that are given off are incredibly toxic. And it's not just that the fumes are really toxic. It's how long women and children are exposed to the fumes,

because also the three stone stove is not very efficient. So they will be in a poorly ventilated room being exposed to, I think, one estimate with something like the equivalent of more than a hundred cigarettes per day. And this seems like something like we've had stovets and ovens for quite a long time. Why wasn't this fixed a long time ago? Did we even try? Yeah. So there have been attempts by development agencies to develop these clean stovets that don't require you to be hooked up to the national grid. But we still have this big problem that they aren't being adopted and the reason that they aren't being adopted is incredibly simple.

It's that they are being designed without anyone going and speaking to women and asking them what they need and what they want. How are they lacking the current designs? The issues, I mean they're just sort of hilariously basic. They keep developing stoves that for example increase cooking time. Now women are already cooking for five hours a day. They don't have more time to spend cooking. Also they often require more attending. And again, you know, when you're having to spend so long cooking, you need to be able to multitask. And again, this isn't something that has been factored in. One clean cook stove was developed and they, it required a certain amount of maintenance. And the designers just sort of assumed,

oh, well, the household will take care of that. But actually, maintenance in that way was a man's job. And the men didn't want to maintain these stoves because they thought, well, why do I need to, you know, she can just cook on the old style of stove. So why do I want to waste my time maintaining the stove? Another one was, you one was a similar issue that the stove was too small to just put bits of wooden.

You had to chop the wood up. Again, that was a man's job. They weren't doing it. So the women didn't get to use these stoves. There's all these really, really simple things that should have been caught at the design stage. If they had just gone and spoken to the women and said, you know, what do you need? And they would have

said, well, we need something that means that we don't have to spend more time cooking, that we can look after our kids while we're doing it, and that we don't need men to help us with because they won't. And so, program after program for year after year has failed for these really, really basic reasons. And how many years are we talking about? Well, decades. And the really frustrating thing is that often reports get produced that basically say that it's the women's fault, you know, the women are unwilling to learn how to use the staves or the women are choosing to cook in these dangerous toxic fumes. That one really is just insulting. Yeah, I mean, this reminds me of all this language in the crash tests that women are the out of position drivers. It really does, there's a moment where

And it really does, like there's a moment where designers and people studying this finally see women and that is trying to find someone to blame. Yeah, I mean, I sort of connect this to the default male because this position of, well, there must be something wrong with the women. We've got to fix the women. That never is actually something that we apply to men. And I think it becomes most clear when you are looking at things like, workplace initiatives where the idea is,

oh, well, we need to build up women's confidence. It's that women aren't confident enough that that's why they're not getting promoted. That's why they're not going for promotions. that's why they're not choosing XYZ subject. And yet, study after study has shown that actually women are pretty good at assessing their skill, their intelligence, and actually it's men who tend to overestimate their skill and intelligence. And so when you see that, then you sort of have to think, well, maybe it's not that the women rate themselves too low. It's the men rating themselves too

high. But just we just never think of it like that. You know, because the male is the default, it's assumed, well, that must be the right level. Right. And the women are wrong. So we got to fix the women. So did anyone bother to design a stove based primarily on the input of women and and if so what what did they create? They did. It has a happy ending. So yeah, a few years ago, research is an India instead of trying to create a whole stove. They created this this device that you can put on any cook stove and And basically, it cuts wood use and cuts smoke to comparable levels. It's very, very cheap. It's used with recycled metal material.

And it's being picked up not just in India. There have been studies in Kenya and Ghana with the same device with similarly positive results that women are adopting this. And basically, guess how they found out how to do this. They asked women. Went and they asked women. It's revolutionary.

So what these researchers did that was different was they started off from the basis of what do women actually need, what do women actually want, how can we provide that. And so the researchers went and asked the women, you know, what is the issue, rather than coming in from above and saying, you women, you know, are very silly and naughty, use the stove. I mean, when I read your book, it's kind of both satisfying and enraging about it is that the solution is pretty simple, you know. it's just talk to women, gather data, and think of that while you're making things or include women in the process the whole time.

Do you find yourself hopeful, just the spirited angry? Oh, I feel really angry. I am incredibly pissed off. Yeah. I am incredibly pissed off. Yeah, because it's so frustrating. And particularly when it comes to areas where I know that researchers know that there is a problem. Yeah.

And, you know, I mean, I often get asked, you know, what's the most shocking thing you found? And I understand why people ask that know, what's the most shocking thing you found? And I understand why people ask that question, it's an obvious question to ask, because there are so many shocking things. But because there are so many shocking things, it's quite difficult to pick on. You know, like a shot, yeah. And actually, also, after a while, you become sort of numb to it, because it's also awful. And, you know, women are dying in car crashes, women are dying from heart attacks, women are dying from unclean cook stoves. So after a while it's not the examples, it's the excuses that make you really angry. And to this day, I've had, let's say not entirely friendly exchanges on Twitter

with certain researchers who actually say, well, we can't test on women because they have periods. And that would complicate the results. And that's just in raging because they must know, as I know, that yes, periods do in fact have an impact on results. That's right, that's the whole thing. That's something that you need to know. And yet, you know, 2019, and I have medical researchers, you know, trying the, oh well, we'll start in men, and if we find anything interesting, then we'll include women. Which again, is positioning male as the default.

And I suppose one of the things that makes me most angry is that it's sort of thinking about how many drugs for women have we missed out on because they didn't work for men when we started testing them. Do you see the end of excuses or like, is this, I mean, are we reaching an end where you can no longer have these excuses or is this still just as bad as ever? Um, well, we're definitely not reaching an end. Um, yeah, I'm not trying to make you have a good view of this at all. Like, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do your pessimism.

Um, yeah, so I, I, I tell you what, you know, you asked me, how did I feel writing the book and writing the book, I felt absolutely despondent. Since the book has come out, I have felt more hope. And that has been because the response has been actually quite incredible from both men and women. Women, the main response and reaction has just been one of relief of, wow, the world suddenly makes sense. And I've realized that there isn't something wrong with me. I just have a body that hasn't been factored

into the design of pretty much anything. But also from men, I've had so many men get in touch telling me about how they are changing their hiring procedure and how they are changing their research procedure and how they are changing buildings that they're designing, incorporating what they have read in the book into the way that they work, projects what they have read in the book into the way that they work projects that they are involved in. So if you were to prescribe a solution, you know, to make this better, what are the specialties?

Oh, you know what my answer's going to be. Well, let's go for the answer. Collect, sex, disaggregated data. You know, because it really is that simple. It is that simple. It is that simple. And actually, an amazing thing that happened yesterday was, you know, and I think this is perhaps my biggest win to date, was that the Scottish government have started a working group on collecting sex and gender-disaggregated data as a result of the book. And that was,

I mean, that's just amazing. Oh yeah, God loves Scots. They are great and I'm going to have to move there because when we Brexit, Scotland is going to be the only safe haven. save haven. Caroline Criado Perez's book is called Invisible Women Data Bias in a World Design for Met. It's available wherever books are sold and I highly recommend you go out and buy a copy because it's filled with hundreds of other examples of gendered data bias that will have you questioning the default cis man design assumptions of the world around you. It's truly illuminating and infuriating and inspiring all at the same time. 99% Invisible's impact design coverage is supported by Autodesk. Autodesk

supports the design and creation of innovative solutions to the world's most pressing social and environmental challenges. Autodesk Foundation is a proud partner of 60 decibels. 60 decibels makes it easy to listen to the people who matter most. Their lean data approach turns customer voice into high value insights that help businesses grow and maximize their impact. They leverage the power of technology to communicate directly with marginalized communities, collecting high-quality impact data efficiently at a fraction of the time of traditional approaches. That means businesses providing everything from off-grid energy solutions to family health services

can better understand their customers, adapt to their needs, and do more good. To learn more, you can visit 60desibles.com or go to Autodesk.com slash Redshift to explore more on the future of making. to The rest of the team is Emmett Fitzgerald, senior editor-genilini hall, Sheree Fusef, Avery Troll from Envivian Lee, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. 99% of visible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI org, run Instagram and read it

too. But if you want to comment on your least favorite examples of gender bias and design, you can do that at 99pi.org. From PRX.