The Male Default Bias

How the world systematically ignores women

Hello,

This is a Women’s Day Special, and I want you to read it from beginning to end because it’s about a major gap in the world that most of us aren’t even aware of.

Every year, we celebrate this day and remind ourselves that yes, a lot of work needs to be done so women can be treated fairly, receive their rights, and all that…only to go back to normal life.

But for women, many aspects of this “normal life” aren’t normal at all. To make things worse, men can’t even see these anomalies clearly.

Here’s the crux of the issue: the world we live in is designed for men and not for all shades of humanity. In thinking about our systems, policies, cultural ideas, and technologies, we endlessly resort to the male-default bias and completely forget to consider females and their unique needs.

Invisible Women (Credits: iStock)

There are 3 major themes where women-centricity is sorely missed, and where this male default causes the greatest amount of agony. These are related to:

a) How female bodies are different from male ones

b) The unpaid care work women do which goes unaccounted

c) The violence that women face

The reason these issues occur is that most of our systems- from transportation and offices to public utilities and healthcare are designed by men and for men. If more women are a part of this process, there’s a much higher likelihood their problems would be accounted for, and that all our policies and technologies would not be designed with only a male audience in mind.

But there’s much more to it, as you’ll soon find out.

Here’s the story of our systematic biases and how good design thinking can solve them, delivered in 5 succinct points:

1. Deep roots: Our male-default bias is built into our very language. To refer to a general person, we often say ‘he’, and very rarely do people use ‘she’. Many occupations have a male prefix, like ‘fireman’, ‘businessman’ etc, despite the presence of gender-neutral terms. Even emojis designed by social media companies resorted to the male-default bias and it took a while for them to design separate emojis for male and female runners, police officers, etc! As expected, the first renditions of these were male emojis only. Goes on to show how deeply the male-default idea is embedded in all of our minds. Kids have consistently been shown to draw a man when asked to draw a scientist or an astronomer- even if the girls were doing the drawings!
   

2. Female bodies: Women have very different bodies, but designers barely consider these. They have smaller hands but despite that, phone sizes aren’t suitable for them. Even the iPhone, which is arguably the best-designed phone in the world, is too big for most women’s hands! Women also find offices with centralized ACs much colder than men, and this happens because they have lesser muscle and lower metabolic rates, so they’re naturally not able to produce as much body heat. That’s why you can often see men in an office walking around with ease while women are putting on one sweater after another. If only someone considered their needs while designing these devices and systems!
   

3. Violence: Analysing the state of 2 public goods- toilets and transportation- reveals how little we have done to reduce the risk of violence and sexual harassment. To begin with, many countries don’t even have adequate public toilets for women, which is a major issue in itself. The lack of accessibility, especially in remote parts of the country, means that women have to walk long distances to relieve themselves. This sharply raises the chances of sexual violence that gets committed as the road to these toilets is often dark and lonely. Simply installing more toilets for women can do a lot to alleviate these issues. When it comes to work, many women can’t afford a car and have to take public transport- where cases of molestation and outright assault are very frequent. Governments have failed to reduce these occurrences, which would certainly be possible even with basic design interventions- more lighting at bus stops, clear instructions on where and how to report a sexual crime, and probably even some female officers at checkpoints. But none of this has happened at scale- probably because none of the decision-makers are female, and there’s little data because it nobody’s really thinking of collecting it.
   

4. Unpaid care work: One of the most paradoxical things about our world is that women end up doing as much work (if not more, in a lot of cases) as men but we tend to take their care work completely for granted. This has happened because when the idea of GDP was being formulated, it was decided after a lot of back and forth that women’s care work at home would not be included in that computation. But that doesn’t make complete sense. The work women do- raising kids, taking care of the elderly, cooking, cleaning, etc is absolutely critical. The world may continue if a lot of our jobs completely disappear but if women stop doing their care work, modern life would all but collapse. Even if you argue purely in economic terms, just consider the fact that if these women stopped doing these things and instead used services (like food-ordering apps, babysitters, and elderly care homes), it’d raise revenue for these companies and the GDP would shoot up! So why do we consider their work at home as a non-contribution to the GDP? Their care work, in purely business terms, is worth trillions, and it’s high time we stop taking it for granted.
   

5. The Solution: The reason the world is so biased against women is not just because the decision-makers in a lot of cases are mostly men- it’s also because we are suffering from a gender data gap. We need to start collecting sex-disaggregated data so the particular needs of women in various aspects of life can be understood. It’s only on the weight of this data that truly women-focused solutions can be designed, and stop building the world from a man’s-eye view. The more people start becoming aware of this issue, the more we’ll start collecting data, analyzing women’s needs, and start designing solutions that benefit not just half of humanity. That said, it’s not just the women- there are many other categories (like transgenders) whose unique needs need to be heard and considered in all walks of life.

For the first time in history, we have the tools to quantitatively verify the differing needs of different genders. It’s high time we put our intelligence to use, become aware of these issues, and design a world that’s truly equitable.

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Thanks for tuning in. This piece is inspired by Caroline Criado-Perez’s Invisible Women, and I’ll be coming back with another piece on this issue because this is indeed a very critical conversation.

Make sure you share this with people and open their eyes, especially people who believe that women’s issues are hyped up or exaggerated.

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