The Importance of Diversity in Engineering

William A. Wulf

President

National Academy of Engineering

I want to share some thoughts with you from a talk I gave to the NAE

Annual Meeting about two years ago, in which I tried to explain why I believe we should

be deeply concerned about diversity in the engineering workforce. I feel very, very

deeply about this issue because I believe diversity in the engineering workforce is an

absolute necessity. It’s not just that it would be nice if we were more diverse; the issue is

much more important than that. I believe it is an issue of absolute necessity.

Many people talk about the need for diversity as an issue of equity, in

terms of fairness, and that is a potent argument. Americans are very sensitive to issues of

equity and fairness, so the fairness argument resonates with many people. But I will

make a different argument today.

A second argument for diversity has to do with numbers, the fact that

white males are becoming a minority in the population of the United States and that,

unless we include more women and underrepresented minorities in the engineering

workforce, we are simply not going to have the number of engineers we need to continue

to enjoy the wonderful lifestyle we have had for the last century or so. This, too, is a

potent argument, but it is not the one I am going to present today.

My argument is essentially that the quality of engineering is affected by

diversity (or the lack of it). To make that argument, I am going to share with you some

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very deep beliefs about the nature of engineering some of which run counter to

stereotypes of engineers and engineering.

The whole argument in a nutshell is this. It hinges on the notion that

engineering is a profoundly creative profession—not the stereotype, I know, but

something I believe deeply. The psychological literature tells us that creativity is not

something that just happens. It is the result of making unexpected connections between

things we already know. Hence, creativity depends on our life experiences. Without

diversity, the life experiences we bring to an engineering problem are limited. As a

consequence, we may not find the best engineering solution. We may not find the

elegant engineering solution.

As a consequence of a lack of diversity, we pay an opportunity cost, a cost

in designs not thought of, in solutions not produced. Opportunity costs are very real but

very hard to measure. The stereotype of engineering in this country does not include a

notion of creativity. Engineers are dull. They are nerds. Unfortunately, I think that is

part of the reason we have not achieved the level of diversity in our profession that we

have in the population. We need to break this negative feedback cycle. When I speak of

diversity, I mean the kind of inclusion you probably thought of instantly, that is,

appropriate representation of women and underrepresented minorities. But my idea of

diversity also includes the notion of “individual diversity”, that is, the breadth of

experience of a single individual.

When I made this argument to the NAE members a couple of years ago, I

had just seen some numbers about engineering enrollments. Undergraduate enrollment in

engineering has been dropping since the mid-1980s. It is down about 20 percent from

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that peak, and down about 3 percent since 1992. Graduate enrollment has been growing,

but largely because of an influx of non-U.S. students. In fact, the U.S. student

component of graduate enrollment is dropping, in spite of the fact that starting salaries for

engineering graduates are 50 to 100 percent higher than those of students graduating with

bachelor of arts degrees.

My friends who are economists keep telling me that this disparity in

salaries will eventually motivate more students to go into engineering. But that is not

what the data show. We need to stand back and ask ourselves why, in a society that is so

dependent on technology, in fact, in some ways is addicted to technological change, and

in a society with 50 to 100 percent disparities in salaries, engineering is not an attractive

discipline. Specifically, we must ask why it isn’t attractive to underrepresented

minorities and women. Traditionally, engineering was thought of as a way to higher

economic status. That was certainly true in my generation, but it seems not to be the case

now. We need to stand back and ask ourselves why.

Even more disturbing than the overall numbers are the numbers for

underrepresented minorities and women. I told you that overall enrollment has dropped 3

percent since 1992, but minority enrollment has dropped 9 percent! African-American

enrollment has dropped 17 percent!

The percentage of women has held steady, just a tad under 20 percent of

the entering freshman class, but those numbers, bad as they are, don't tell the full story.

At the same time the number of engineering students has been going down or holding

steady, the number of minorities entering universities has been going up, and the number

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of women entering universities has been going up. That means engineering is capturing a

smaller and smaller “market share” of the total enrollment.

The situation is different elsewhere in the world. There is something

uniquely Western (except for France) about these numbers. A few years ago I toured

Taiwanese universities, where 35 percent of the undergraduates are in engineering.

Forty-six percent of mainland Chinese undergraduates are engineers. At the ministerial

level in Taiwan, half have degrees in engineering. In this country, only a handful of

people in Congress are engineers.

Now let’s return to my argument, starting with creativity. My favorite

quick definition of engineering is “design under constraint.” We design solutions to

human problems, but not just any old solution will do. Our solutions have to satisfy the

constraints of cost, weight, size, ergonomics, environmental impact, reliability, safety,

manufacturability, repairability, power consumption, heat dissipation—the list goes on

and on. Finding an elegant solution that satisfies those constraints is one of the most

creative acts I know of. Let me dwell on the word "elegant" for just a minute. I believe

that all great engineering achievements, from the Golden Gate Bridge to Post-It notes, are

elegant. They are spare. To use Einstein's words, they are “as simple as possible, but no

simpler.” They are aesthetically pleasing. They appeal to our humanity. They are

humane.

Let me tell you a personal story about creativity and elegance. My father

and my uncles were engineers. So, in a sense, I was programmed to become an engineer.

I never seriously thought of pursuing anything else when I went to college. However, I

can tell you the exact moment I got “hooked” on engineering. Between my sophomore

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and junior years at the University of Illinois, Chicago, I was working for Teletype

Corporation as a draftsman. My job was doing inking on vellum, the most awful job in

the entire world! If there is any job that was designed specifically to turn people off to

engineering, it is inking on vellum. The team I was attached to, among other things, was

designing an automatic telephone dialing device. A little punched plastic card was

inserted into the phone with little mechanical feelers that came out and sensed where the

holes were and dialed a telephone number. Occasionally, when these cards went through

the reader the little fingers broke off.

I was hooked on engineering the moment I looked up from my drafting

table at the dialer and saw what the problem was. I suddenly understood, and I

understood the elegant solution to the problem. I mean, really, really elegant! I made a

mock up of the solution with a bit of cardboard and drafting tape, and it worked!

My boss then had some metal parts made, for a total cost of pennies. It

was really exciting. A bunch of more senior engineers who had been fiddling with this

problem for a long time praised me and I got a bonus in my paycheck. For years, I

thought about the fact that thousands of people around the world were using this dialer

with no problem with binding. They may have had other problems, but they didn't have a

problem with binding. That was all neat!

But what hooked me was the moment I looked up and saw the elegant

solution, that moment of creativity. Looking back on my career, I have been fortunate to

have had that experience a number of times. I can vividly recall each and every one of

them because that is what engineering is all about.

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 Sam Florman, a member of the NAE, wrote a book called The Existential

Pleasures of Engineering (St. Martin’s Press, 1976) that makes this same point. Florman

talks about the joy of creation, about the fact that creativity is what makes engineering an

interesting profession. He cites a psychological study that had been done a number of

years earlier that describes engineers as “intelligent, energetic, unassuming people who

seek interesting work.” Note that they seek “interesting work,” not dull, pocket-protector

stuff; interesting work, work that in some ways is more closely related to the work of our

colleagues in the arts than of our colleagues in the sciences. As Florman says, "The artist

is our cousin, our fellow creator." Bob Frosh, another NAE member and a former

administrator of NASA, sent me a quote from the editor of the codices of Leonard da

Vinci. Talking about the impact of editing the codices, he said, "At last people will start

believing me. da Vinci was an engineer who occasionally painted pictures when he was

broke.”

The point is that engineering and art are not opposite ends of a spectrum.

They are, in fact, closely related to each other. Indeed, a defining aspect of human beings

is the use of tools to modify the environment. That is what distinguishes us from the

great apes. So, in fact, engineering is the most humanistic of all activities. Obviously,

engineering also has an analytic side, maybe even a dull side that comes from an innate

conservatism. Just like medical doctors, the rule is “first, do no harm.” Our

conservatism and our creativity are always in tension. Indeed, the most original, most

creative design is the one about which we are the most skeptical. If you make small

incremental changes from previous designs, you don't meet much resistance. But the

really creative, far-out designs arouse the great concerns. That is why, immediately after

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our most creative moments, we always begin looking for flaws. We put on our skeptics’

hats and subject our idea to careful scrutiny, trying to ferret out the possible downsides,

all of the ways the design might fail.

In short, instead of celebrating our creation, we try to find its flaws. To

meet our responsibilities, that is exactly what we ought to do. Unfortunately, that is the

only side of engineering the public sees. To quote Florman again, “it is especially

dismaying to see engineers contributing to their own caricature.” I can easily get a laugh

out of an audience of engineers by describing them as white-socks, pocket-protector,

cubicle folks. It is unfortunate. I think that caricature is one of the biggest problems

keeping young people from pursuing careers in engineering, despite the fact that study

after study after study has shown that both women and underrepresented minorities are

attracted to professions in which they can contribute directly to the welfare of others.

That is why we find more parity in the legal profession and in the life

sciences. But, in fact, engineers have contributed more to the quality of life than any of

those other professions. No one seems to think of painters or artists as dull people. Think

about how long Michelangelo laid on his back painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,

the brute strength it took to plaster that ceiling while lying down—not a very exciting

activity.

A friend of mine who is an Emmy award-winning director set up a

weekend for me with a group of Hollywood film makers to see if we could convince

them to produce a show called “L.A. Engineer.” It turned out we could not, but one of

the things that I learned that weekend was just how dull it is to make movies! The actual

shooting time of the movie is very brief; but months and months are then spent in a dark

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studio editing this film. It is really, really dull. Every profession, whether painting the

Sistine Chapel or making “L.A. Law” or being an engineer, has its creative side and its

dull side. To increase our diversity we must make young people want to be engineers,

and to do that we must address the stereotype.

Now I want to turn to my second theme, diversity. I repeat the simple

truth that creativity is bounded by life experiences. The psychological literature is very

clear about this. Creativity is simply making unexpected connections between things we

already know. If engineers were as dull as they are in the popular stereotype, they

wouldn't be good engineers. They wouldn't have the life experiences they need to come

up with creative solutions to human problems. Let me repeat. If engineers were really as

dull as the stereotype, they wouldn't be good engineers!

As president of the NAE, whose members are among the most creative

engineers in the world, I can tell you they are really interesting and that is not a

happenstance. Collective diversity, what people usually mean by diversity, is essential to

good engineering at a very fundamental level. Men, women, people from different ethnic

backgrounds, the handicapped—each of them experiences a different world. Each of

them has had different life experiences.

I think of these life experiences as the “gene pool” out of which creativity

comes, out of which elegant engineering solutions come. The quality of engineering is

affected directly by the degree of diversity in the engineering team for that project. It

doesn't take a genius to see that, in a world of global commerce, we must design products

that are sensitive to many cultural taboos and for very different customers. But the need is

deeper than that. The range of possible solutions to an engineering problem will be

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smaller from a nondiverse design team, and the elegant solution to a human problem may

not be among them. That limitation can have substantial economic costs, but they are

opportunity costs, costs measured in terms of designs not considered.

Opportunity costs are very hard to measure, but they are very real. To

illustrate the problem, let me tell you something from my own experience. One of my

interests over the years has been computer security and until fairly recently, I still had

two graduate students at the University of Virginia. One of my students came to me with

a problem she wanted to solve. I told her not to waste her time, that it was an impossible

problem.

I will describe the problem very quickly. She wanted to be able to run an

application program and to know that either (1) the application had not been

compromised, and was, therefore, working correctly or (2) that it had been compromised

and should be ignored. But she wanted to run this program on a computer belonging to

the bad guys who own the computer and have access to everything, can pull the plug out

of the wall, can examine all of the software including the software my student wanted to

run, can make arbitrary modifications to the underlying operating system, can make

arbitrary modifications to the hardware, can modify the application my student wrote, and

so on. In addition, because the application has to run virtually forever, the bad guy has

all the time in the world to analyze the situation. I looked at that problem, and I said, “No

way. You can't do that!”

Well, my student found a solution; not just any old solution but a truly

elegant solution. I don't know whether it was because she is a woman or because of her

Chinese background, but her life experiences enabled her to see a solution I would never

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have seen. Once she explained it to me, I understood it, of course. In fact, I was able to

build a proof that it would work—a nice linear, male, left-brain proof.

Now let me bring the themes of creativity and diversity together. I believe

that a central factor in the declining enrollment in engineering, especially the declining

enrollment among women and underrepresented minorities, is the stereotypical image of

engineers. We know about a lot of other problems, of course—the need for mentoring,

the lack of family support, the absence of role models. We know about a long list of

problems. But to my mind, they don’t explain the declining enrollment. It must be that

these kids don't want to be engineers! There is something about engineering that is

vaguely repugnant to them, and we need to understand what that is. There may be

several things, but one of them is certainly the image. What really bothers me is that the

image is incorrect! Engineering is not dull. Engineering, in fact, is an enormously fun,

creative, rewarding profession that has had a profound impact on the quality of human

life.

The image of engineers is very different in some other places, in France,

for example, and China, both Taiwan and mainland China. In fact, the image is as

different in this country from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, when

engineers were celebrated as heroes in film, in poetry. Consider a few of the many

quotations about engineers: Walt Whitman, "Singing the great achievements of today,

singing the strong light works of engineers," or Robert Louis Stevenson who wrote about

the engineering of the transcontinental railroad, "If it be romance, if it be contrast, if it be

heroism we require, what was Troy to this?" I could cite dozens of other examples.

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 The nerdy image of engineers is not ordained. It is not ordained that the

contributions of engineers to our society will be discounted. It is not ordained that our

image will remain repulsive to the diverse students we must reach for excellence in

engineering. The NAE has initiated a number of programs to address these issues, and

this workshop is an essential component of those programs.

To sum up, I believe that diversity is essential to good engineering! In

addition to the issue of fairness and equity, in addition to the issue of numbers, there is an

issue of quality. For good engineering, we require a diverse engineering team. But for

some reason, engineering has become repugnant to young people. We need to face that

fact and try to change it. There is no silver bullet to fix the image. We are going to have

to work on it over a long period of time. But if we don't start working on it, we’re never

going to break out of this destructive, negative feedback cycle.

In the meantime, as we try to change the stereotype, we can do a great

deal. The organizations you represent have taken aggressive and visible taken actions to

address this problem. I believe we can make a start by sharing your experiences with

each other and with us.

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Article from the Guardian by Carolinie Criado-Perez

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/feb/23/truth-world-built-for-
men-car-crashes

The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to
car crashes

Crash-test dummies based on the ‘average’

male are just one example of design that
forgets about women – and puts lives at risk

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. “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. “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.”

Women have always tracked their periods. We’ve had

to. 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”. 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 It wasn’t until 2011 that the US started using a
those seven days are going to take place. Every female crash-test dummy. Photograph: Kellie
woman knows this, and Toksvig’s experience is a neat French/The Guardian
example of the difference a female perspective can
make, even to issues that seem entirely unrelated to gender.

For most of human history, though, that perspective has not been recorded. Going back to the
theory of Man the Hunter, the lives of men have been taken to represent those of humans
overall. When it comes to the other half of humanity, there is often nothing but silence. And
these silences are everywhere. 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”. This is the gender data gap.

These silences, these gaps, have consequences. They impact on women’s lives, every day. The
impact can be relatively minor – struggling to reach a top shelf set at a male height norm, for
example. Irritating, certainly. But not life-threatening. Not like crashing in a car whose safety
tests don’t account for women’s measurements. Not like dying from a stab wound because your
police body armour doesn’t fit you properly. For these women, the consequences of living in a
world built around male data can be deadly.
The gender data gap is both a cause and a consequence of the type of unthinking that conceives
of humanity as almost exclusively male. 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. “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” he grumbles.

When ‘women’s work’ is deadly

The formula to determine standard office temperature was developed in the 1960s around the
metabolic resting rate of the average man. 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. 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. This leads to the odd sight of female office workers wrapped in blankets in the summer,
while their male colleagues wander around in shorts.

Not only is this situation inequitable, it is bad business sense: an uncomfortable workforce is an
unproductive workforce. But workplace data gaps lead to a lot worse than simple discomfort and
inefficiency. Over the past 100 years, workplaces have, on the whole, got considerably safer. In
the early 1900s, about 4,400 people in the UK died at work every year. By 2016, that figure had
fallen to 135. But while serious injuries at work have been decreasing for men, there is
evidence that they have been increasing among women. The gender data gap is again implicated,
with occupational research traditionally focused on male-dominated industries.

Every year, 8,000 people in the UK die from work-related cancers. And although most research
in this area has been done on men, it’s far from clear that men are the most affected. 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. “We know everything about dust disease in miners,” Rory
O’Neill, professor of occupational and environmental policy research at the University of
Stirling, tells me. “You can’t say the same for exposures, physical or chemical, in ‘women’s
work’.”

Cancer is a long-latency disease, O’Neill says, so even if we started the studies now, it would take
a working generation before we had any usable data. But we aren’t starting the studies now.
Instead, we continue to rely on data from studies done on men as if they apply to women.
Specifically, Caucasian men aged 25 to 30, who weigh 70kg. This is “Reference Man” and his
superpower is being able to represent humanity as a whole. Of course, he does not.

Men and women have different immune systems and hormones, which can play a role in how
chemicals are absorbed. Women tend to be smaller than men and have thinner skin, both of
which can lower the level of toxins they can be safely exposed to. This lower tolerance threshold
is compounded by women’s higher percentage of body fat, in which some chemicals can
accumulate. Chemicals are still usually tested in isolation, and on the basis of a single exposure.
But this is not how women tend to encounter them.

In nail salons, where the workforce is almost exclusively female (and often migrant), workers
will be exposed on a daily basis to a huge range of chemicals that are “routinely found in the
polishes, removers, gels, shellacs, disinfectants and adhesives that are staples of their work”,
according to the Canadian researcher Anne Rochon Ford. Many of these chemicals have been
linked to cancer, miscarriages and lung diseases. Some may alter the body’s normal hormonal
functions. If these women then go home and begin a second unpaid shift cleaning their home,
they will be exposed to different chemicals that are ubiquitous in common products. The effects
of these mixing together are largely unknown.

Most of the research on chemicals has focused on their absorption through the skin. But many of
the ones used in nail salons are extremely volatile, which means that they evaporate at room
temperature and can be inhaled – along with the considerable amounts of dust produced when
acrylic nails are filed. The research on how this may impact on workers is virtually nonexistent.

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 more
onerous scale). But the data gap when it
comes to women in the workplace doesn’t
only arise in female-dominated industries.

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 that found 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
attribute at least some of the blame to
“standard” construction site equipment
being designed around the male body.

“A female police officer had to

have breast-reduction surgery
because of the health effects of
wearing her body armour”

Wendy Davis, ex-director of the

Women’s Design Service in the UK,
questions the standard size of a bag of
‘Serious injuries at work are increasing among women.’ cement. It’s a comfortable weight for a man
Model: Nina Trickey. Hair and makeup: Vale Von Der to lift – but it doesn’t actually have to be
Wehl using Laura Mercier and Kerastase. Assistant: that size, she points out. “If they were a bit
Bruce Horak. Dummies: courtesy of smaller, then women could lift them.”
Cellbond. Photograph: Kellie French/The Guardian 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?” 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.

NYCOSH similarly notes that “standard hand tools like wrenches tend to be too large for
women’s hands to grip tightly”.
In the UK, employers are legally required to provide well-maintained personal protective
equipment (PPE) – anything from goggles to full body suits – to workers who need it, free of
charge. But most PPE is based on the sizes and characteristics of male populations from Europe
and the US. The TUC found that employers often think that when it comes to female workers all
they need to do to comply with this legal requirement is to buy smaller sizes.

Differences in chests, hips and thighs can affect the way the straps fit on safety harnesses. The
use of a “standard” US male face shape for dust, hazard and eye masks means they don’t fit most
women (as well as a lot of black and minority ethnic men). A 2017 TUC report found that the
problem with ill-fitting PPE was worst in the emergency services, where only 5% of women said
that their PPE never hampered their work, with body armour, stab vests, hi-vis vests and jackets
all highlighted as unsuitable.

When it comes to frontline workers, poorly fitting PPE can prove fatal. In 1997, a British female
police officer was stabbed and killed while using a hydraulic ram to enter a flat. She had
removed her body armour because it was too difficult to use the ram while wearing it. Two years
later, a female police officer revealed that she had had to have breast-reduction surgery because
of the health effects of wearing her body armour. After this case was reported, another 700
officers in the same force came forward to complain about the standard-issue protective vest.

But although the complaints have been coming regularly over the past 20 years, little seems to
have been done. British female police officers report being bruised by their kit belts; a number
have had to have physiotherapy because of the way stab vests sit on their body; many complain
there is no space for their breasts. This is not only uncomfortable, it also results in stab vests
coming up too short, leaving women unprotected.

The tyranny of the toilet queue

In April 2017, the BBC journalist Samira Ahmed wanted to use a toilet. She was at a screening of
the James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro at London’s Barbican arts centre, and it
was the interval. Any woman who has ever been to the theatre knows what that means. This
evening, the queue was worse than usual. Far worse. Because in an almost comically blatant
display of not having thought about women at all, the Barbican had turned both the male and
female toilets gender neutral simply by replacing the “men” and “women” signage with “gender
neutral with urinals” and “gender neutral with cubicles”. The obvious happened. Only men were
using the supposedly “gender neutral with urinals” and everyone was using the “gender neutral
with cubicles”.

Rather than rendering the toilets genuinely gender neutral, they had simply increased the
provision for men. “Ah the irony of having to explain discrimination having just been to see I
Am Not Your Negro IN YOUR CINEMA”, Ahmed tweeted, suggesting that turning the gents
gender neutral would be sufficient: “There’s NEVER such a queue there & you know it.”

On the face of it, it may seem fair and equitable to accord male and female public toilets the
same amount of space – and historically, this is the way it has been done: 50/50 division of floor
space has even been formalised in plumbing codes. However, if a male toilet has both cubicles
and urinals, the number of people who can relieve themselves at once is far higher per square
foot of floor space in the male bathroom than in the female bathroom. Suddenly equal floor
space isn’t so equal.
But even if male and female toilets had an equal number of stalls, the issue wouldn’t be resolved,
because women take up to 2.3 times as long as men to use the toilet. Women make up the
majority of the elderly and disabled, two groups that will tend to need more time in the toilet.
Women are also more likely to be accompanied by children, as well as disabled and older people.
Then there’s the 20–25% of women of childbearing age who may be on their period at any one
time, and therefore need to change a tampon or a sanitary pad.

Women may also require more trips to the bathroom: pregnancy significantly reduces bladder
capacity, and women are eight times more likely to suffer from urinary-tract infections. In the
face of all these anatomical differences, it would surely take a formal equality dogmatist to
continue to argue that equal floor space between men and women is fair.

The gadgets built for one-size-fits-men

In 1998, a pianist called Christopher Donison wrote that “one can divide the world into roughly
two constituencies”: those with larger hands, and those with smaller hands. Donison was writing
as a male pianist who, due to his smaller than average hands, had struggled for years with
traditional keyboards, but he could equally have been writing as a woman. There is plenty of
data showing that women have, on average, smaller hands, and yet we continue to design
equipment around the average male hand as if one-size-fits-men is the same as one-size-fits-all.

The average smartphone size is now 5.5 inches. While the average man can fairly comfortably
use his device one-handed, the average woman’s hand is not much bigger than the handset
itself. This is obviously annoying – and foolish for a company like Apple, given that research
shows women are more likely to own an iPhone than men.

One woman found her car's voice-command system only listened to her husband, even though he was in
the passenger seat

The tech journalist and author James Ball has a theory for why the big-screen fixation persists:
because the received wisdom is that men drive high-end smartphone purchases. But if women
aren’t driving high-end smartphone purchases – at least for non-Apple products – is it because
women aren’t interested in smartphones? Or could it be because smartphones are designed
without women in mind? On the bright side, Ball reassured me that screens probably wouldn’t
be getting any bigger because “they’ve hit the limit of men’s hand size”.

Good news for men, then. But tough breaks for women like my friend Liz who owns a third-
generation Motorola Moto G. In response to one of my regular rants about handset sizes she
replied that she’d just been “complaining to a friend about how difficult it was to zoom on my
phone camera. He said it was easy on his. Turns out we have the same phone. I wondered if it
was a hand-size thing.”

When Zeynep Tufekci, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, was trying to document
tear gas use in the Gezi Park protests in Turkey in 2013, the size of her Google Nexus got in the
way. It was the evening of 9 June. Gezi Park was crowded. Parents were there with their
children. And then the canisters were fired. Because officials “often claimed that tear gas was
used only on vandals and violent protesters”, Tufekci wanted to document what was happening.
So she pulled out her phone. “And as my lungs, eyes and nose burned with the pain of the
lachrymatory agent released from multiple capsules that had fallen around me, I started
cursing.” Her phone was too big. She could not take a picture one-handed – “something I had
seen countless men with larger hands do all the time”. All Tufekci’s photos from the event were
unusable, she wrote, and “for one simple reason: good smartphones are designed for male
hands”.

Voice recognition could be one solution to a smartphone that doesn’t fit your hands, but voice-
recognition software is often hopelessly male-biased. In 2016, Rachael Tatman, a research fellow
in linguistics at the University of Washington, found that Google’s speech-recognition
software was 70% more likely to accurately recognise male speech.

Clearly, it is unfair for women to pay the same price as men for products that deliver an inferior
service. But there can also be serious safety implications. Voice-recognition software in cars, for
example, is meant to decrease distractions and make driving safer. But they can have the
opposite effect if they don’t work. An article on car website Autoblog quoted a woman who had
bought a 2012 Ford Focus, only to find that its voice-command system only listened to her
husband, even though he was in the passenger seat. Another woman called the manufacturer for
help when her Buick’s voice-activated phone system wouldn’t listen to her: “The guy told me
point-blank it wasn’t ever going to work for me. They told me to get a man to set it up.”

Immediately after writing this, I was with my mother in her Volvo Cross Country watching her
try and fail to get the voice-recognition system to call her sister. After five failed attempts I
suggested she tried lowering the pitch of her voice. It worked first time.

In the tech world, the implicit assumption that men are the default human remains king. When
Apple launched its health-monitoring system with much fanfare in 2014, it boasted a
“comprehensive” health tracker. It could track blood pressure; steps taken; blood alcohol level;
even molybdenum and copper intake. But as many women pointed out at the time, they forgot
one crucial detail: a period tracker.

When Apple launched their AI, Siri, users in the US found that she (ironically) could
find prostitutes and Viagra suppliers, but not abortion providers. Siri could help you if you’d had
a heart attack, but if you told her you’d been raped, she replied “I don’t know what you mean by
‘I was raped.’”

From smartwatches that are too big for women’s wrists, to map apps that fail to account for
women who may want to know the “safest” in addition to “fastest” routes; to “measure how good
you are at sex” apps called “iThrust” and “iBang” the tech industry is rife with other examples.
While there are an increasing number of female-led tech firms that do cater to women’s needs,
they are seen as a “niche” concern and often struggle to get funding.

One study of 12 of the most common fitness monitors found that they underestimated steps
during housework by up to 74% (that was the Omron, which was within 1% for normal walking
or running) and underestimated calories burned during housework by as much as 34%.
Meanwhile, Fitbit users have complained that the device fails to account for movement while
doing the extremely common female activity of pushing a pram (and, yes, men push prams, too;
but not as often as the women who do 75% of the world’s unpaid care).

How women are put at risk on the roads

Men are more likely than women to be involved in a car crash, which means they dominate the
numbers of those seriously injured in them. But when a woman is involved in a car crash, she is
47% more likely to be seriously injured, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured, even
when researchers control for factors such as height, weight, seatbelt usage, and crash
intensity. She is also 17% more likely to die. And it’s all to do with how the car is designed – and
for whom.

Women tend to sit further forward when driving. This is because we are on average shorter. Our
legs need to be closer to reach the pedals, and we need to sit more upright to see clearly over the
dashboard. This is not, however, the “standard seating position”, researchers have
noted. Women are “out of position” drivers. And our wilful deviation from the norm means that
we are at greater risk of internal injury on frontal collisions. The angle of our knees and hips as
our shorter legs reach for the pedals also makes our legs more vulnerable. Essentially, we’re
doing it all wrong.

Cars have been designed using car crash-test dummies based on the 'average' male

Women are also at higher risk in rear-end collisions. We have less muscle on our necks and
upper torso, which make us more vulnerable to whiplash (by up to three times), and car design
has amplified this vulnerability. Swedish research has shown that modern seats are too firm to
protect women against whiplash injuries: the seats throw women forward faster than men
because the back of the seat doesn’t give way for women’s on average lighter bodies. The reason
this has been allowed to happen is very simple: cars have been designed using car crash-test
dummies based on the “average” male.

Crash-test dummies were first introduced in the 1950s, and for decades they were based around
the 50th-percentile male. The most commonly used dummy is 1.77m tall and weighs 76kg
(significantly taller and heavier than an average woman); the dummy also has male muscle-
mass proportions and a male spinal column. In the early 1980s, researchers based at Michigan
University argued for the inclusion of a 50th-percentile female in regulatory tests, but this
advice was ignored by manufacturers and regulators. It wasn’t until 2011 that the US started
using a female crash-test dummy – although, as we’ll see, just how “female” these dummies are
is questionable.

In 2018, Astrid Linder, research director of traffic safety at the Swedish National Road and
Transport Research Institute, presented a paper at the Road Safety on Five Continents
Conference in South Korea, in which she ran through EU regulatory crash-test requirements. In
no test is an anthropometrically correct female crash-test dummy required. The seatbelt test,
one of the frontal-collision tests, and both lateral-collision tests all specify that a 50th-percentile
male dummy should be used. There is one EU regulatory test that requires what is called a 5th-
percentile female dummy, which is meant to represent the female population. Only 5% of
women will be shorter than this dummy. But there are a number of data gaps. For a start, this
dummy is only tested in the passenger seat, so we have no data at all for how a female driver
would be affected – something of an issue you would think, given women’s “out of position”
driving style. And secondly, this female dummy is not really female. It is just a scaled-down male
dummy.

Consumer tests can be slightly more stringent than regulatory ones. The 2011 introduction of
female crash-test dummies in the US sent cars’ star ratings plummeting. When I spoke to
EuroNCAP, a European organisation that provides car safety ratings for consumers, they said
that since 2015 they have used male and female dummies in both front-crash tests, and that they
base their female dummies on female anthropometric data – with the caveat that this is “where
data is available”. EuroNCAP acknowledged that “sometimes” they do just use scaled-down male
dummies. But women are not scaled-down men. We have different muscle mass distribution.
We have lower bone density. There are differences in vertebrae spacing. Even our body sway is
different. And these differences are all crucial when it comes to injury rates in car crashes.

The situation is even worse for pregnant women. Although a pregnant crash-test dummy was
created back in 1996, testing with it is still not government-mandated either in the US or in the
EU. In fact, even though car crashes are the No 1 cause of foetal death related to maternal
trauma, we haven’t yet developed a seatbelt that works for pregnant women. Research from
2004 suggests that pregnant women should use the standard seatbelt; but 62% of third-
trimester pregnant women don’t fit that design.

Linder has been working on what she says will be the first crash-test dummy to accurately
represent female bodies. Currently, it’s just a prototype, but she is calling on the EU to make
testing on such dummies a legal requirement. In fact, Linder argues that this already is a legal
requirement, technically speaking. Article 8 of the Treaty of the Functioning of the European
Union reads, “In all its activities, the Union shall aim to eliminate inequalities, and to promote
equality, between men and women.” Clearly, women being 47% more likely to be seriously
injured in a car crash is one hell of an inequality to overlook.

Designers may believe they are making products for everyone, but in reality they are mainly
making them for men. It’s time to start designing women in.

This is an edited extract from Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for
Men by Caroline Criado Perez (Chatto & Windus, £16.99). To order a copy go to
guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.