#reference man

The gadgets built for one-size-fits-men

In 1998, a pianist called Christopher Donison wrote that “one can divide the world into roughly two constituencies”: those with larger hands, and those with smaller hands. Donison was writing as a male pianist who, due to his smaller than average hands, had struggled for years with traditional keyboards, but he could equally have been writing as a woman. There is plenty of data showing that women have, on average, smaller hands, and yet we continue to design equipment around the average male hand as if one-size-fits-men is the same as one-size-fits-all.

The average smartphone size is now 5.5 inches. While the average man can fairly comfortably use his device one-handed, the average woman’s hand is not much bigger than the handset itself. This is obviously annoying – and foolish for a company like Apple, given that research shows women are more likely to own an iPhone than men.

The tech journalist and author James Ball has a theory for why the big-screen fixation persists: because the received wisdom is that men drive high-end smartphone purchases. But if women aren’t driving high-end smartphone purchases – at least for non-Apple products – is it because women aren’t interested in smartphones? Or could it be because smartphones are designed without women in mind? On the bright side, Ball reassured me that screens probably wouldn’t be getting any bigger because “they’ve hit the limit of men’s hand size”.

Good news for men, then. But tough breaks for women like my friend Liz who owns a third-generation Motorola Moto G. In response to one of my regular rants about handset sizes she replied that she’d just been “complaining to a friend about how difficult it was to zoom on my phone camera. He said it was easy on his. Turns out we have the same phone. I wondered if it was a hand-size thing.”

When Zeynep Tufekci, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, was trying to document tear gas use in the Gezi Park protests in Turkey in 2013, the size of her Google Nexus got in the way. It was the evening of 9 June. Gezi Park was crowded. Parents were there with their children. And then the canisters were fired. Because officials “often claimed that tear gas was used only on vandals and violent protesters”, Tufekci wanted to document what was happening. So she pulled out her phone. “And as my lungs, eyes and nose burned with the pain of the lachrymatory agent released from multiple capsules that had fallen around me, I started cursing.” Her phone was too big. She could not take a picture one-handed – “something I had seen countless men with larger hands do all the time”. All Tufekci’s photos from the event were unusable, she wrote, and “for one simple reason: good smartphones are designed for male hands”.

Voice recognition could be one solution to a smartphone that doesn’t fit your hands, but voice-recognition software is often hopelessly male-biased. In 2016, Rachael Tatman, a research fellow in linguistics at the University of Washington, found that Google’s speech-recognition software was 70% more likely to accurately recognise male speech.

Clearly, it is unfair for women to pay the same price as men for products that deliver an inferior service. But there can also be serious safety implications. Voice-recognition software in cars, for example, is meant to decrease distractions and make driving safer. But they can have the opposite effect if they don’t work. An article on car website Autoblog quoted a woman who had bought a 2012 Ford Focus, only to find that its voice-command system only listened to her husband, even though he was in the passenger seat. Another woman called the manufacturer for help when her Buick’s voice-activated phone system wouldn’t listen to her: “The guy told me point-blank it wasn’t ever going to work for me. They told me to get a man to set it up.”

How women are put at risk on the roads

Men are more likely than women to be involved in a car crash, which means they dominate the numbers of those seriously injured in them. But when a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured, even when researchers control for factors such as height, weight, seatbelt usage, and crash intensity. She is also 17% more likely to die. And it’s all to do with how the car is designed – and for whom.

Women tend to sit further forward when driving. This is because we are on average shorter. Our legs need to be closer to reach the pedals, and we need to sit more upright to see clearly over the dashboard. This is not, however, the “standard seating position”, researchers have noted. Women are “out of position” drivers. And our wilful deviation from the norm means that we are at greater risk of internal injury on frontal collisions. The angle of our knees and hips as our shorter legs reach for the pedals also makes our legs more vulnerable. Essentially, we’re doing it all wrong.

“Standard Man,” from whom “Reference Individual” metamorphosed, was born at a moment when the promise of atomic power appeared limitless and the protection of reactor workers and civilians imperative. It was this latter urgency in particular that confirmed the obviousness of offering male figures (and particularly the 70kg weight), since men were most likely to be placed at risk by occupational irradiation. But that selection mattered, since the weight of a “standard woman” at the time of Chalk River was closer to 56kg. Because permissible doses are determined partly by mass, what was safe for “Standard Man” could be hazardous for many women.

This exclusion was not, as far as available records show, a malignant oversight. Rather, we might view “standard man” as an example of what historian and philosopher Sarah Richardson has called“gender valences” in science; that is, particular moments when scientific concepts are inflected by gendered assumptions without being so explicitly noticed. “Gender valences” are neither “bad” nor “good,” notes Richardson, but when unacknowledged they may yield distortions in scientific assumptions and reasoning. According to experts, reactor workers were men, even if the biological data that constructed “Standard Man” was put together by men and women who worked at nuclear plants.

“Standard Man,” then, was a scientific gender valence with long-lasting ramifications. Though the gendering of “Standard Man” could appear to be a relatively trivial oversight, it is worth noting that these figures determined radioactive safety standards around the world for decades to come. Geographer Shannon Cram has shown that the Hanford Site in Washington (often described as “the most radioactive place in the Western hemisphere”) draws upon “Standard Man” data for its radioactive cleanup efforts. And as the California EPA’s Catherine Caraway notes, the 70kg datum is still standard for toxicity calculations in many places, even though Makhijani and others have repeatedly called its appropriateness into question. Standards, after all, have a tendency to stick.

There is no evidence that Cook was present at Chalk River, though Karl Z. Morgan presented her work to the assembled delegates. In the years that followed, the figures for “Standard Man” were more frequently credited to a report by scientist Hermann Lisco, in part because his data was published while Cook’s was not. One could easily imagine other reasons for her omission.

Yet the afterlife of Cook’s work is ongoing: research she carried out collaboratively with University of Tennessee physics professor Isabel H. Tipton for many years on trace elements in human tissue is still frequently cited to this day. Though Tipton, now deceased, was recently honored by Tennessee with a memorial scholarship that highlights women in physics, surprisingly little can be found about Cook beyond scattered references in scientific journals. When we spoke over the phone recently, Tipton’s daughter, lighting designer Jennifer Tipton, remembered Cook’s name but nothing more.

In this sense, Cook was not entirely exemplary; hundreds of women worked as research assistants, data collectors, tabulators, secretaries and more at each of the major American nuclear laboratories. As physicists Ruth H. Howes and Caroline L. Herzenberg have shown, few of them ever received major accolades or significant public recognition. Like Harriet Brooks, the brilliant student of Ernest Rutherford who left physics altogether when she married, hardly any left accounts of their visions for science more broadly.”