The World Is Designed For Middle Aged Men. Six Examples.

By Erica and Karen

When we started working, we noticed, and were annoyed by, the fact that acceptable work clothes for us were men’s suits slightly refashioned to be smaller and skirted.

We missed a lot of very much more important design issues.

• Health. We were utterly shocked when we were told that drug clinical trials were, until very recently, run only on male rats. Why? Female rats have hormones and that makes running trials on them expensive and complicated—and obviously you wouldn’t want to know how drugs interact with women’s hormones or the other parts of the female body that are totally different from the male body. When did this start to change? in 2016, after women who took the sleeping aid Ambien started having accidents. It turned out that the dosages, never tested on females, were dangerously high for women.

• Changes in Health Are Coming. Northwell Health, which is revolutionizing women’s health through its Katz Institute for Women’s Health, recently ran a campaign illustrated by Vitruvian Woman—not just a small version of Vetruvian Man, but an entirely different anatomical entity. The image, and the campaign, emphasize that women are not little men. Lots of medical issues, including heart attack, present differently in women, and these differences are not caused solely by size differences. Everything, right down to our cells, is different.

• Crash Dummies, Bathrooms—you name it. Then we read Invisible Women: Data Bias In A World Designed For Men. The author was as startled as we were when she learned of the medical bias, but then she discovered the same bias everywhere. If the default is men, things just don’t work right for women. Here is a recent interview of the author, where she observes that the usual excuse for why female humans are left out of the design equation is that they are too complicated. Like the female rats.

Women’s working lives are too complicated, our travel patterns are too complicated, our bodies are too complicated. And instead of engaging with that complexity, researchers prefer to just exclude half the world.

• Pink and Blue and Voice Recognition. Visual design can reinforce gender attitudes, like those reflected in pink and blue renderings for everything, which implicitly suggest if you were swaddled in pink as a baby you are not entitled to/interested in/capable of absorbing whatever is advertised in blue. Just like the idea that women are there to do stuff is reinforced by making Siri, Alexa and most of the AI voices you talk to for service female.

• Clothes. OK, our lawyer suit problem was soluble, and the market soon solved it, once they saw we were there and figured out that design for women who worked was a source of profit. But remember when two women astronauts could not go into space at the same time because NASA had only one suit for women? And speaking of flying, cockpits are sized for men, too. When Karen learned to fly she had to carry a big red cushion around to make sure she could see out the window.

• Air Conditioning. Over the years many women have experienced office air conditioning that is way too cold when it is hot outside and they were wearing a light dress and sandals. It turns out air conditioning is set based on the heat production of a 40 year old man weighing 154 pounds. And probably wearing a suit. Women in dresses just freeze.

We could go on. Read Invisible Women. But the point is—the world has been designed around men, but everything its changing. Hurray!

Next up, we hope, is design for older people. As Stefan Sagmeister, renowned graphic designer, said:

If you look at [design for] cruise ships, I mean it could not be worse. And so clearly somebody thinks, somehow magically that when people hit 60 they lose all taste, and they lose all sense of beauty and quality and are now into this ugliness. It’s amazing to me.

Others have made similar comments.

Our research shows that negative assumptions about aging held by the public lead them to disassociate themselves from aging and take the fatalistic stance that nothing can be done to improve aging outcomes.

What’s the connection? Good design requires that the designer see, really see, the people for whom the design is made. Women and older people who have been ignored for centuries are now coming into focus.

Hurray, again!