Because crash tests, medication and transport have long been calibrated to a male body. The crash-test dummy is almost never used to simulate a female driver, clinical trials still recruit mostly men, and a cardiac diagnosis takes longer to reach for women. Since 2015, EuroNCAP has also been testing female dummies, but the data gap behind the wheel remains just as wide.
Why does a car protect a woman less than it protects a man?
women are 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed after a heart attack
More often than not, the crash-test dummy is only tested in the passenger seat. At the driver's seat, there is almost no data on what actually happens to a woman's body in a crash. Seatbelts, airbags and body structures are therefore validated on a male body, leaving in the dark how a female driver really absorbs the force of an impact.
That's starting to change. Since 2015, EuroNCAP, the European body that rates car safety, has included both male and female dummies in its frontal-crash tests. It's a first step, but on its own it doesn't close the data gap that remains at the driver's seat, where most women's journeys actually happen.
Why do some medications work less well on women?
When a heart attack strikes, the diagnosis isn't always made at the same speed for a woman as it is for a man. British research cited by author Caroline Criado Perez shows that women are 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed after a heart attack, a gap that reportedly reaches nearly 60% for certain types of heart attacks. For a life-threatening emergency, a delayed diagnosis changes everything that follows.
Treatment itself is no exception to this imbalance. Criado Perez cites a 2011 study showing that low-dose aspirin, effective in men for preventing a second heart attack, proves ineffective, even potentially harmful, for most women. One drug, two possible outcomes, depending on the patient's sex.
Is public transport designed for the women who use it most?
The available mobility figures overturn a widespread assumption: women walk and use public transport more often than men. In France, two-thirds of public transport users are women. That's not a statistical footnote: women are, in practice, the population that relies on these networks the most, every day.
While women make up the majority of users, the question of whether the networks were designed with them in mind remains open. The available data measures ridership, not the choices behind how routes and timetables were planned. What’s missing is proof that women were factored into the design.
Why does care work count for nothing in the figures?
Care work (the feeding, washing, accompanying and watching over of others) appears in no official statistics. Yet according to estimates cited by journalist Caroline Criado Perez in Invisible Women (in the chapter "A Costless Resource to Exploit"), it could account for up to 50% of GDP in high-income countries, and up to 80% in low-income countries.
This lack of measurement has real consequences for careers. Again according to Criado Perez, family caregivers are nearly seven times more likely than men to shift from full-time to part-time work. This isn't a question of intent: it's a data gap that, by failing to count this work, ends up quietly deciding who cuts back on their career.
Cars, medication, everyday transport: the same gap repeats across all three, the absence of women from the data that shapes how objects and care are designed. The road is still measured from a man’s body behind the wheel, a drug is validated on a body that isn’t always the patient’s, a transport network is drawn up without women’s majority use ever being the starting point. Faced with a study, a clinical trial or an urban planning project, you’re entitled to ask a simple, legitimate question: was the data collected (and broken down) for both sexes?
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