so the vast majority of information that we've collected in the world everything from medical data to economic data to urban planning data has been collected on men and the result of that is that most things just don't work very well for women [Music] [Music] in an optimal foreign [Music] so thank you very much for having me to come speak here i am baffled by this it's amazing um thank you very much for it um so i am here not to speak to you about my backdrop but about a bias that we all have that affects
me as well as you and the impact the very serious impact this bias has on how we collect and analyze data i know right it sounds fascinating it is fascinating and i'm going to tell you why so the vast majority of information that we've collected in the world and that we continue to collect everything from economic data to medical data to urban planning data has been collected on men so male bodies and typical male lifestyle patterns and that means that pretty much everything in the world from the place that you work to the transport you
use to get there to the phone that for some reason is not in any of your hands right now to the apps on that phone um have all been designed to work for men and that means that in everything from the workplace to the healthcare system things just don't work very well for women this is the gender data gap now the first rule of the gender data gap like fight club but less fun less dangerous no actually more dangerous more dangerous than fight club i'm going there um is that uh this is not done on
purpose this isn't a conspiracy right this isn't a group of evil misogynists who are like i know how we're going to really screw with women we're just not going to collect data on them and that'll be really funny let's see what happens um that is not what the gender data gap is it is simply the product of a way of thinking that goes back millennia and therefore as a way of thinking that we aren't aware that we're doing so this way of thinking is centered around a very good friend of mine called reference man reference
man is the worst superhero of all time his superpower which is to represent everyone he's very bad at this and this is because reference man is a man he's a caucasian man around 70 kilograms um and uh the result of reference man is that things work very well if you're a reference man not so much if you're not now reference man has been around for a very long time goes all the way back to aristotle who in the 4th century bc was writing a biological treatise called on the generation of animals and he said that
the first departure from type is indeed that the offspring should become female instead of male the female was a mutilated male body it was an aberration but he allowed that females should be allowed to exist because we need it for the procreation of the species so thank you very much aristotle it's very kind of you to allow us to exist this carried on through to the renaissance where there was an explosion of medical illustrations and again you had the female was the male turned inside inside out um the ovaries were the female testicles the uterus
was the female scrotum and basically the female was just the male gone slightly wrong and the reason the female was the male gone slightly wrong was that women lacked vital heat our bodies are too cold and that's why we have to have our reproductive organs up here safe inside our bodies whereas men because they're the right amount of heat get to have them drop down outside the bodies which is the proper way to have it the standard human way to have it um and of course you could look at this the other way and say
that maybe men have too much heat and that's why they have dropped down outside their body which is clearly an inferior place to have such sensitive organs i would suggest um but anyway that's not what they thought in the renaissance they thought that this was the this was the way to do things anyway this carried on through to the 20th century um and there was a very influential swiss architect architect called le corbusier and he came up with this radical revolution in architecture which was that we should design buildings around humans buildings are for humans
they should fit humans we should use humans the human scale to design buildings the problem with the human scale is that it was not the human scale it was the man scale specifically a six-foot british police detective he did specify this you know i know i'm british but this isn't me saying this this is le corbusier so take it up with him except of course he's dead but anyway he felt that the british police detective was who we should design buildings around someone did suggest to him at some point maybe you'd like to include women
female police detectives um but but he wasn't having any of that he rejected the female body as a source of proportional harmony and women are too unharmonious now i am sure that you're all thinking okay but this was a really long time ago now surely we've moved on we no longer think that women are too unharmonious to factor into design to collect data on um that's very sweet of you i appreciate that you think that that you think that my body is not too weird to measure unfortunately that opinion is not shared by most designers
and most medical researchers so for example car design is still designed around reference man so the car crash test dummy that we've used for decades has been based on the 50th percentile mail and of course that means that the car crash test dummy is too big and too heavy and different in all sorts of ways and doesn't really work for women very well and that is not the only problem there is also the issue of seat belts which haven't been designed to accommodate breasts for example you also have well this is because of the car
crash test dummy seats are too firm for most women this isn't a comfort thing this is that women get thrown further forward if they're in a car crash because it's not it's meant to be accommodating a weight that's much heavier women also tend to sit further forward in order to reach the pedals which i think is a very important part of driving but what that does is it puts them outside of what's called the standard seating position the seating position the reference man will be in and it puts them at a much higher risk in
a frontal collision plus of course they're being thrown forward by the seat the result of all of this is that women are 47 more likely to be seriously injured and 17 more likely to die if they're in a car crash than a man now the good news is that the eu belatedly realized that women exist in 2015 hooray unfortunately it wasn't quite that they realized that scaled down men exist they introduced a scaled-down male dummy um women are not scaled down men fyi um and and on top of that they still were using the 50th
percentile male dummy as the reference dummy so the scaled down male dummy was used in one or is used i should say in one out of the five regulatory tests not all five only one out of five it's for the weird people not the standard people and uh only in the passenger seat so what that means scaled-down men can now sit in the passenger seat and feel very confident about that that they probably should not drive because we haven't got any data on that reference man also still exists in healthcare now this really shocked me
when i found out you would think that scientific research on bodies would include female bodies um but you would be wrong because female bodies are seen as too complicated to measure and what i get told by medical researchers is that well the menstrual cycle will interfere with the results yes it will and that's why you want to study it so far we've found menstrual cycle effects for antihistamines antipsychotics antidepressants heart medication in fact women are more likely to experience drug induced heart rhythm abnormalities which is itself a result of not testing medication in women and
they're more likely to experience it during the first half of their menstrual cycle it's the kind of thing that you might want to study before you release a drug onto the market but apparently too complicated let's just pretend it doesn't happen reality is too complicated for medical science apparently so now as well as arguing that women are too complicated to measure what some medical researchers have said to try and shut me up is uh well okay we hear you what we'll do is we'll start off in men and then if we find anything interesting the
stan interesting in the standard people we'll add women later and see if it works in the weird people too now the problem with that is that sometimes things may not work in men that would have worked in women so for example there was a study done in cells now you may be aware that cells don't have a menstrual cycle so you can't really use that excuse for cells but for some reason we're still testing in male cells rather than female cells anyway this one study was testing in both male and female cells and they exposed
both the male and female cells to estrogen and then they exposed them to a virus the male cells were not able to use the estrogen to fight off the virus the female cells were you see the problem with if we start off in males and then if we find anything interesting we'll add females it doesn't work similarly if you aren't looking at male and female cells or bodies or animals or in any way separately what's called sex disaggregating your data you waste a lot of time and money because there may be differences and if you
don't know what the differences are you'll just think the cells are unpredictable and this is in fact what happened when researchers were looking at muscle-derived stem cells they were really confused these stem cells they just don't act rationally they are totally unpredictable turned out they're not unpredictable it's just that male cells don't promote regeneration and female cells do how much time and money did we waste looking at regeneration of stem cells when we could have just been realizing what was going on by sex disaggregating the data such a simple thing and we still don't do
it what i want to conclude with is basically a plan that we all going to enact everyone in the room here today is going to enact this plan and basically it's a murder don't worry it's only a reference man and he's a very bad guy um it's 2019 and reference man has been killing women for decades so i think it's time that we killed him off because i think he deserves it and i hope you all agree with me so thank you very much it's been great to be here [Music] now human
