Crash-test dummies based on the āaverageā male are just one example of design that forgets about women ā and puts lives at risk
The gadgets built for one-size-fits-men
In 1998, a pianist called Christopher Donison wrote that āone can divide the world into roughly two constituenciesā: 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 womanās hand is not much bigger than the handset itself. This is obviously annoying ā 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 arenāt driving high-end smartphone purchases ā at least for non-Apple products ā is it because women arenāt 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 wouldnāt be getting any bigger because ātheyāve hit the limit of menās hand sizeā.
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 sheād just been ācomplaining 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.ā
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 āoften claimed that tear gas was used only on vandals and violent protestersā, Tufekci wanted to document what was happening. So she pulled out her phone. āAnd 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.ā Her phone was too big. She could not take a picture one-handed ā āsomething I had seen countless men with larger hands do all the timeā. All Tufekciās photos from the event were unusable, she wrote, and āfor one simple reason: good smartphones are designed for male handsā.
Voice recognition could be one solution to a smartphone that doesnāt 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 Googleās 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 donāt 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 Buickās voice-activated phone system wouldnāt listen to her: āThe guy told me point-blank it wasnāt ever going to work for me. They told me to get a man to set it up.ā
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 itās all to do with how the car is designed ā 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 āstandard seating positionā, researchers have noted. Women are āout of positionā 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, weāre doing it all wrong.
