Over the past 50 years, breast cancer rates in the industrialised world have risen significantly – but a failure to research female bodies, occupations and environments means that the data for exactly what is behind this rise is lacking. And although most research in this area has been done on men, it’s far from clear that men are the most affected. The gender data gap is again implicated, with occupational research traditionally focused on male-dominated industries.Įvery year, 8,000 people in the UK die from work-related cancers. But while serious injuries at work have been decreasing for men, there is evidence that they have been increasing among women. In the early 1900s, about 4,400 people in the UK died at work every year. Over the past 100 years, workplaces have, on the whole, got considerably safer. But workplace data gaps lead to a lot worse than simple discomfort and inefficiency. Not only is this situation inequitable, it is bad business sense: an uncomfortable workforce is an unproductive workforce. This leads to the odd sight of female office workers wrapped in blankets in the summer, while their male colleagues wander around in shorts. In fact, the formula may overestimate female metabolic rate by as much as 35%, meaning that current offices are on average five degrees too cold for women. But a recent Dutch study found that the metabolic rate of young adult females performing light office work is significantly lower than the standard values for men doing the same activity. The formula to determine standard office temperature was developed in the 1960s around the metabolic resting rate of the average man. “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” he grumbles. In the 1956 musical My Fair Lady, phoneticist Henry Higgins is baffled when, after enduring months of his hectoring put-downs, his protege-cum-victim Eliza Doolittle finally bites back. The gender data gap is both a cause and a consequence of the type of unthinking that conceives of humanity as almost exclusively male. For these women, the consequences of living in a world built around male data can be deadly. Not like dying from a stab wound because your police body armour doesn’t fit you properly. Not like crashing in a car whose safety tests don’t account for women’s measurements. The impact can be relatively minor – struggling to reach a top shelf set at a male height norm, for example. These silences, these gaps, have consequences. Films, news, literature, science, city planning, economics, the stories we tell ourselves about our past, present and future, are all marked – disfigured – by a female-shaped “absent presence”. When it comes to the other half of humanity, there is often nothing but silence. Going back to the theory of Man the Hunter, the lives of men have been taken to represent those of humans overall. Every woman knows this, and Toksvig’s experience is a neat example of the difference a female perspective can make, even to issues that seem entirely unrelated to gender.įor most of human history, though, that perspective has not been recorded. And then there’s the issue of the period itself: when you will be bleeding for up to seven days every month, it’s useful to know more or less when those seven days are going to take place. Since 2015, I’ve been reliant on a period tracker app, which reassures me that there’s a reason I’m welling up just thinking about Andy Murray’s “casual feminism”. “Tell me,” the professor continued, “what man needs to know when 28 days have passed? I suspect that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.” “This,” said the professor, “is alleged to be man’s first attempt at a calendar.” Toksvig and her fellow students looked at the bone in admiration. When broadcaster Sandi Toksvig was studying anthropology at university, one of her female professors held up a photograph of an antler bone with 28 markings on it.
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