Decades late, female crash-test dummies have finally arrived. But what about everything else designed with only men in mind?
Hear ye, hear ye! After decades of using crash test dummies designed to mimic the body of an average man from the 1970s, there’s a new dummy in town. And hold onto your seats… She’s a woman.
Miss THOR-05F is a crash-test dummy based on the physiology of a woman that has just been approved by the US Transportation Department.
If it’s incorporated into official safety testing, it could help improve car safety for women drivers, who are more likely to be hurt or killed in a car accident than men because of physical differences, like having wider pelvises and less muscle mass around the neck.
Crash test dummies are just one item on a laundry list of things designed for men, even though women outnumber men in countries like Aotearoa.
PPE and safety gear
Personal protective equipment (PPE) is worn by workers to keep them safe across fields like construction, healthcare and food production. It includes everything from goggles, masks and hardhats to protective suits and gloves. But a lot of that gear is designed to fit the bodies of American and European men, according to the International Council of Nurses.
International advocacy group Women in Global Health says because women make up around 70% of the global healthcare workforce, PPE in women’s sizes gets used up quickly. What’s left over is gear that is too big, bulky and loose, which doesn’t protect women workers as effectively and this became especially concerning during the Covid-19 pandemic peak.
In October this year, the BBC reported that a new British standard had been launched to move away from one-size-fits-all unisex PPE and provide inclusive gear that properly fits all workers. It only took a two-year long campaign led by construction worker Katy Robinson to make it happen. No word yet on whether other countries plan to follow suit.
Air con in the office
Shivering at the office while your male colleagues are sitting pretty? It might be because building thermostats were modelled to suit men’s bodies. A study published in Nature found these thermostats followed a “thermal comfort model” developed in the 1960s. A key variable is the resting metabolic rate of men – specifically how fast a 40-year-old man weighing 70kg can generate body heat.
But women go to work too! In offices! On hot and cold days! And we aren’t just smaller men, we have differences in physiology. Women typically have less muscle mass than men, which means we have a lower metabolic rate, produce less heat and therefore feel cold in the same offices men feel comfortable in.
A whole bunch of healthcare
Dr Lorenzo Garcia, a biomechanical engineering expert at AUT, says many medical devices, from orthopedic implants that support joints to cardiovascular stents that help blood flow, were historically designed based on the male body.
This has led to poorer outcomes for women, including higher rates of implant failures and complications with stents because women typically have smaller arteries, he says.
On a broader scale, women have been historically underrepresented in medical research to the point that they are twice as likely to have a bad reaction to medication or be overmedicated because dosage trials were conducted on men.
In 1977, the US Food and Drug Administration even advised excluding most women of reproductive age from early-stage clinical trials in order to reduce the risk of causing birth defects – even if they were on birth control, had a sterile partner or abstained from sex.
Chairs, shelves, bus handles, gym machines
New Zealand women are shorter than New Zealand men by 12-13cm on average yet a lot of the structures we encounter on a daily basis are better suited to bigger bodies. Women can end up trying to access shelves beyond their reach, sit at tables too high for comfort or desperately trying to comfortably hold gym machine or bus handles.
iPhones
With the rise of the phablet and the death of what I consider to be normal-sized phones, many people are struggling to operate their devices with one hand. But women can struggle more because our hands are around 2cm shorter on average than men’s hands.
In 2018, Apple was criticised for launching the iPhone XS Max, which was 6.5in (16.5cm) diagonally, while simultaneously discontinuing the iPhone SE which was 2in (5cm) smaller and could be more comfortable for women.
Apple would go on to launch the iPhone 16 Pro Max in 2024, which has an even larger display, despite some statistics showing women are more likely to own an iPhone than men. If that wasn’t annoying enough, combine it with the fact that a lot of women’s clothing seems to have no pockets or comically tiny ones, and iPhones can become burdens for women to operate and carry.
Is it all just sexism?
Lorenzo Garcia says the design bias against women isn’t simple sexism. It’s a more complex failure caused by things like the gender data gap, engineers oversimplifying women’s bodies, and fewer women than men becoming engineers.
He believes engineers should be designing inclusive products for bodies of all shapes, sizes, weights and abilities because “diversity always enhances products and quality of life”.
But if companies believe the market for specialised sizes isn’t large enough and they won’t be able to make back the cost of production, they often just make them in a “standard size,” he says. Guess what that “standard size” is? Yes, an average adult male size.
Garcia adds that noninclusive design doesn’t just impact people physically, it can also make them feel embarrassed or ashamed if a product works for others but not them.
As for the female crash test dummy, Garcia says it’s an important milestone, but only part of the solution. “Improving safety for women requires a holistic strategy – rethinking seat belt geometry, airbag deployment, and regulatory standards – not just adding one more dummy.”
If your stuff needs you to man-up in order for it to function properly, Garcia recommends writing to companies and demanding better, especially if there’s a risk of injury.
