![]() Well, actually, the evidence suggests that women are asking for pay raises as often as men-they’re just less likely to get them. They need to be taught to negotiate for pay raises. ![]() Many workplace initiatives aimed at closing gender-pay and promotion gaps focus on fixing the women, assuming that they, rather than systems that under-promote them, are the problem. ![]() It is simply the result of an everyday bias that affects pretty much all of us: when we say human, 9 times out of 10, we mean men.Įven when we try to fix gender disparities, we still often end up using men as the default-a tendency I have christened the Henry Higgins effect, after My Fair Lady’s leading man who memorably complains, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” The Henry Higgins effect was visible when an executive whose voice-recognition system failed to recognize women’s voices suggested that women should undergo hours of training to fix “the many issues with women’s voices,” rather than, you know, fixing the many issues with his voice-recognition software that doesn’t recognize the voices of half the human population.īut it’s also visible in more well-meaning attempts to address gender biases. But it’s hard because the gender data gap is not the product of a conspiracy by a group of misogynistic data scientists. It’s easy because it has a very simple solution: collect sex-disaggregated data. And if we want to design a world that works for the woman of the future as well as it works for the man of the present, we’re going to have to close it.Ĭlosing this data gap is both easy and hard. and only two women? Not finding any of these funny? Maybe that’s because they’re not jokes.įrom cars that are 71% less safe for women than men (because they’ve been designed using a 50th-percentile male dummy), to voice-recognition technology that is 70% less likely to accurately understand women than men (because many algorithms are trained on 70% male data sets), to medication that doesn’t work when a woman is on her period (because women weren’t included in the clinical trials), we are living in a world that has been designed for men because for the most part, we haven’t been collecting data on women. More worrying are Criado Perez's findings that have life-threatening implications for women.Did you hear the one about how aid workers rebuilt homes after a flood-and forgot to include kitchens? How about the entrepreneur whose product was dismissed by funders as too “niche”-but whose femtech company, Chiaro, is now on track for more than $100 million in 2020? Or the female sexual-dysfunction drug that was tested for its interaction with alcohol on 23 men. The author also points out reasons why women take up to 2.3 times longer to use the toilet – such as the fact that between 20 and 25 per cent of women are of childbearing age, so might need to change a tampon or sanitary pad.Ĭriado Perez also indicates that pregnant women may need to make more frequent trips to the bathroom and that women are more likely to be accompanied by children, as well as disabled and older people.Īlthough the idea of longer toilet queues is frustrating for women, it could still be seen as being an inconvenience. Women having to queue for public toilets is just one of the examples of gender bias that writer and campaigner Caroline Criado Perez uses to illustrate how everyday design continues to ignore the needs of women.Įven though a 50/50 division of floor space has been formalised in plumbing codes, Criado Perez says if a male bathroom has cubicles and urinals then the number of people who can relieve themselves is far higher per square foot than in a female bathroom.
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