Part of the failure to see the risks in traditionally female-dominated industries is because often these jobs are an extension of what women do in the home (although at a larger and therefore more onerous scale). But the data gap when it comes to women in the workplace doesn’t only arise in female-dominated industries. As we’ve seen, even when women worked in male-dominated industries, they were treated as ‘confounding factors’, and data on female workers went uncollected.
The result is that even in industries with a good historical health and safety record women are still being failed. In the US, where by 2007 there were nearly 1 million female farm operators, ‘virtually all tools and equipment on the US market have been designed either for men or for some “average” user whose size, weight, strength etc. were heavily influenced by the average man’.40 This has led to tools that are too heavy or long; hand tools that are not appropriately balanced; handles and grips that are not appropriately sized or placed (women’s hands are on average 0.8 inches shorter than men’s); and mechanised equipment that is too heavy or that is difficult to control (for example pedals on tractors being placed too far from the seat).
Little data exists on injuries to women in construction, but the New York Committee for Occupational Safety & Health (NYCOSH) points to a US study of union carpenters which found that women had higher rates of sprains/strains and nerve conditions of the wrist and forearm than men. Given the lack of data it’s hard to be sure exactly why this is, but it’s a safe bet to put at least some if not all of the higher injury rates amongst women down to ‘standard’ construction site equipment being designed around the male body.
Wendy Davis, ex-director of the Women’s Design Service in the UK, questions the standard size of a bag of cement. It’s a comfortable weight for a man to lift – but it doesn’t actually have to be that size, she points out. ‘If they were a bit smaller then women could lift them.’ Davis also takes issue with the standard brick size. ‘I’ve got photographs of my [adult] daughter holding a brick. She can’t get her hand round it. But [her husband] Danny’s hand fits perfectly comfortably. Why does a brick have to be that size? It doesn’t have to be that size.’ She also notes that the typical A1 architect’s portfolio fits nicely under most men’s arms while most women’s arms don’t reach round it – and again has photos of her daughter and her husband to prove it. NYCOSH similarly notes that ‘standard hand tools like wrenches tend to be too large for women’s hands to grip tightly’.41
Women in the military are also affected by equipment designed around the male body. In the course of my research I came across the impressively named tactile situation awareness system (TSAS): a vest designed for airforce pilots and fitted with thirty-two sensors that vibrate if the pilot needs to correct her position; pilots can sometimes lose track of where they are in space and cannot tell if they are heading up or down. I say her, because a review of ‘Tactile Sensitivity and Human Tactile Interfaces’ explained that ‘The TSAS allows the pilot to always know his orientation with respect to the ground’.42 The pronoun choice seems relevant given that the review later casually mentions that ‘[v]ibration is detected best on hairy, bony skin and is more difficult to detect on soft, fleshy areas of the body.’ Women make up 20% of the US airforce and given women have breasts and don’t tend to have particularly hairy chests, this sounds like it might be something of a problem for them.43
Failing to account for female bodies in the military doesn’t just result in equipment that doesn’t work for women: it can injure them too. Women in the British Army have been found to be up to seven times more likely than men to suffer from musculoskeletal injuries, even if they have ‘the same aerobic fitness and strength’. They are ten times more likely than men to suffer from hip and pelvic stress fractures.44
The higher rate of female pelvic stress fractures has been related to what I have christened the ‘Henry Higgins effect’. In the 1956 musical My Fair Lady, phoneticist Henry Higgins is baffled when, after enduring months of his hectoring put-downs, his protegee-cum-victim Eliza Doolittle finally bites back. ‘Why can’t a woman be more like a man?’ he grumbles. It’s a common complaint – and one for which the common solution is to fix the women. This is unsurprising in a world where what is male is seen as universal and what is female is seen as ‘atypical’.
And the leadership of the British armed forces have historically been a right bunch of Henry Higginses. Until 2013, when three RAF recruits (one of whom had been medically discharged after suffering four pelvic fractures45), challenged the practice in court, women in the British armed forces were forced to match male stride length (the average man’s stride is 9-10% longer than the average woman’s).46 Since the Australian Army reduced the required stride length for women from thirty inches to twenty-eight inches, pelvic stress fractures in women have fallen in number. And as an added bonus, not forcing women to march in time with men has not, as yet, led to the apocalypse.
The heavy loads soldiers are required to carry may be aggravating the
