Since we are all quarantined I have had a lot of downtime and as a result have been reading a lot and one book that I’ve just finished is the book, Invisible women by Caroline Criado Perez which reminded me that as a society we are not equal, not yet anyway, and the book does a really great job of shocking you out of complacency with some frankly terrifying statistics.
One of the most interesting topics was the disparities between the medical treatment of men and women. And this is the result of the absence of women in medical research and medical trials. Medical trials are really important when working out the effects of a drug and the optimum dosage but are conducted ‘almost exclusively’ in young adult males and a 2007 paper found that 90% of pharmacological articles described male-only studies. By not testing the effects on female participants this means women are less likely to recover from illness and disease as the dosage may not be optimum for them as the biology between men and women is different.
And It’s not just drugs that are favoured towards men but almost every aspect of our society. Keyboards and screen sizes are are all designed on the average male hand size. A study discovered that Google’s speech recognition software was 70% more likely to recognise male speech than female speech.
The problem is there isn’t a simple solution, if it’s not average male hand span used then using the average female hand span is just as bad. The solution to this is closing the female representation gap by involving women in decision-making in research to ensure that every-one is equally represented in society.
Amy Turner
