Treating half the global population as an afterthought results in less accurate research, ineffectual policy and welfare problems

The existence of “women’s issues” reflects the simple fact that we live in a man’s world. Over the course of centuries, research and policies focused on men became the default, whereas initiatives that account for women are “female-centered.”

Yet if men are treated as the default, virtually no aspect of women’s lives ends up being built or optimized for them. Research that excludes women is not simply “gender-neutral” — it is “incomplete.”

The consequences can be deadly. For example, women are 73 percent more likely to be injured and 17 percent more likely to die in vehicle crashes than men. One reason for this is that the crash-test dummies used in vehicle-safety trials are designed to mimic the body of an average man.

Illustration: Mountain People

“Female” dummies were not even developed until last year, and regulators still do not require that they be included in vehicle-safety research.

Personal protective equipment (PPE), such as that used by healthcare workers, is also optimized for male bodies, with dimensions staying the same even as items are scaled down for female users.

In a 2020 survey of British healthcare workers, 44.7 percent of women found PPE overalls ill-fitting, compared with just 15.3 percent of men, while a recent survey in Canada found that more than 80 percent of female respondents reported issues with PPE.

Similarly, the “unisex” body armor used by police officers is designed for men, leaving women uncomfortable and potentially more vulnerable to attack, especially around the armpit and neck. In the UK, where 50,000 women serve as police officers, female-specific body armor was not introduced until this year.

While women are no longer excluded from clinical drug trials, they continue to be underrepresented, particularly in the trials’ early phases. As a result, women still face a higher risk of adverse side effects from medication, not least because recommended doses are not optimized for them.

An analysis of studies in which women were given the same drug dosage as men showed that, in more than 90 percent of cases, women experienced stronger side effects and more adverse reactions.

That analysis arose from the observation that women taking Ambien, a sleep medication, were experiencing severe side effects, including a higher rate of traffic accidents the morning after.

Researchers found that the recommended dose produced much higher drug-elimination times and blood concentrations in women than in men, and the US Food and Drug Administration now recommends that women receive half the “standard” dose.

Making matters worse, when it comes to health issues that primarily affect women, research tends not to be funded at all. In nearly 75 percent of cases where a disease primarily affects one sex, the pattern favors men: “men’s diseases” are overfunded and “women’s diseases” are underfunded.

Women’s needs also take a backseat to men’s when it comes to tackling sexual violence. As women are overwhelmingly the victims of such crimes, preventing sexual violence is treated entirely as a “women’s issue” — one that has no consequences for men, even though they comprise the majority of perpetrators. Policies are so focused on the victims — for example, improving outdoor lighting, establishing helplines and creating “safe spaces” — that the source of the violence is never addressed.

Likewise, health-related data have been collected primarily from men, which poses serious risks as artificial intelligence (AI) trained on such data is applied in healthcare.

For example, if a man reports pain in his left arm and back, a medical app — trained on data establishing cardiovascular disease as a predominantly male issue — would recommend that he seek help for a potential heart attack. That same app might suggest that a woman is experiencing depression and thus does not need urgent care, even though women are hardly immune to heart attacks.

AI has the potential to harm women in other ways, too. In 2015, Amazon scrapped its AI recruiting tool for exhibiting bias against women. Having “learned” to assess applications by observing patterns in resumes submitted over the previous decade — resumes that had come overwhelmingly from men — the computer model rated male candidates more highly.

This should not be surprising, given that women account for only 12 percent of AI researchers and 6 percent of software developers.

Several other companies that continue to use AI software for recruitment do not monitor it for bias.

Despite considerable evidence showing that advances toward gender equality play an important role in driving economic progress, analysis focusing solely on macro aspects of growth disregards gender. Ignoring the fact that government spending, taxation and monetary policy have different consequences for men and women can lead to flawed economic assessments, undermining the effectiveness of policies and the accuracy of forecasts.

For example, women’s unpaid labor as primary caregivers is unaccounted for in macroeconomic policy. Tasks such as cooking, cleaning, fetching water, and caring for children and the elderly have substantial economic value, accounting for 10 to 60 percent of GDP.

As a result of gender-blind analysis, women are overworked and underpaid. Increasing the share of women in the workforce needs to be accompanied by policies that reduce and redistribute this unpaid labor.

Consider the debate over India’s economic prospects. With India having recently overtaken China in population, some analysts expect it to surpass China in economic growth.

However, as Ashoka University Department of Economics head Ashwini Deshpande and writer and researcher Akshi Chawla have said, this works only if the population increase is reflected in the workforce, and in India, low female labor force participation limits the effect.

Gender plays a crucial role in countless other policy areas, including the single biggest challenge the world is facing: climate change. Like most of the other issues addressed by the Sustainable Development Goals, the effects of global warming, including climate-related disasters, disproportionately affect women.

When half the global population is treated as an afterthought, research is less accurate, policy is less effective and human welfare is diminished. That will not change until accounting explicitly for women becomes the norm in every sphere of research, product design, tech and policy.

Navika Mehta is economist and editor at the International Economic Association (IEA), advocating for greater gender equality and representation in the field of economics through the Amplifying Women’s Voices project of the IEA Women in Economics Initiative.

Copyright: Project Syndicate