Huge data gaps have dominated most of human history since records began. Chroniclers leave little room for the role of women in human evolution. Instead, the lives of men are used to represent the lives of all humanity. The gender data gap affects women's lives every day. The effect can be relatively small. For example, women shiver in offices because the air conditioning is set to a man's body temperature; Women struggle to reach items at the top of the shelves, which are designed for men's height. But these things are not life-threatening yet. Unless you are in an accident and the car's safety measures happen not to have been designed with a woman's figure in mind; Or your heart disease goes undiagnosed because the symptoms are considered "atypical." For these women, living in a world based on men's data, the consequences can be deadly. Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote in 1949: "Man is male, man defines woman not in terms of woman as such, but relative to man, and woman is not seen as an autonomous being... The man is the subject, the absolute, and the woman is the other." Why is there always a queue for women's toilets? It seems fair and reasonable to give equal square footage to men's and women's toilets -- historically, that's how it's always been done. The 50/50 allocation of floor space has even been written into the relevant regulations of pipeline laying. However, if a men's toilet has both stalls and urinals, far more people can use the toilet at the same time per square metre than a women's toilet. And women spend 2.3 times as much time in the toilet as men. Women make up the majority among the elderly and disabled, and both groups tend to take longer to go to the bathroom. Women are also more likely to accompany children, the disabled and the elderly to the toilet. In any case, women are likely to go to the bathroom more often than men: pregnancy dramatically compresses bladder capacity, and women are eight times more likely to have a urinary tract infection than men, which increases the frequency with which women go to the bathroom. In addition, one-third of the world's population simply does not have adequate toilet facilities. The problem is especially acute for women -- largely because men are expected to "go anywhere" and there is a stigma attached to women being seen urinating. Whether by design or lack of consideration, at least in the design of public toilets, women are not given priority. The standard temperature formula for offices was developed in the 1960s. The criteria are based on the resting metabolic rate (the energy needed to maintain basic physiological functions at rest) of men with an average age of 40 and an average weight of 70 kilograms. But a recent study found that young adult women who performed light physical work in an office had significantly lower metabolic rates than the norm for the same type of activity. In other words, this formula may overestimate women's metabolic rate by 35 percent, which means that the current office temperature standard is, on average, 5℃ lower for women. This has led to a strange summer phenomenon in the office: women in thick blankets surrounded by men in summer clothes. The modern workplace is full of male-oriented design. Like heavy doors that average sized women struggle to push open, or glass floors or even staircases where everyone can look up at skirts, or cracks in the floor just big enough to catch the heels of high heels... These design methods that ignore women's needs will not only bring physical discomfort and inefficiency to women, but also lead to chronic diseases and even cost women their lives. When a woman is in a car accident, she is 47 percent more likely to be seriously injured, 71 percent more likely to be slightly injured, and 17 percent more likely to die. It's all about how cars are designed and for whom. When driving, women tend to sit further forward than men. This is because women are shorter in general and need to move their legs closer together to reach the pedals and sit up straighter to see the dashboard. This forces women to deviate from the "standard seat position" and force them to be drivers with "incorrect seat positions", which means a greater risk of internal injury in a head-on collision. The Angle of the knees and hips also makes women's legs more vulnerable to injury when their relatively short legs are trying to reach the pedals. Women, too, are at greater risk from rear-end collisions. They have fewer muscles in the neck and upper body than men, making them more vulnerable to cervical spine injury. Car design amplifies this vulnerability. A Swedish study showed that car seats were too stiff to protect women's cervical vertebrae from injury, while women in car seats were thrown forward faster than men because of their lower body weight, and the back of the seat gave them less cushion. The reason all this makes women more vulnerable with their hands on the steering wheel is actually quite simple -- the cars are designed with crash test dummies based on "average" men. Crash test dummies were first used in the 1950s and, for decades, have been built on the body of a man who is 1.77m tall and weighs 76kg (significantly higher than the average female height and weight). The dummies even have the muscle mass ratio and spine features of men. It wasn't until 2011 that female crash test dummies were used in the United States. Cars often have to pass five tests before they reach the market: one seatbelt test, two frontal crash tests and two side crash tests. However, none of the tests required the use of anthropometric female crash-test dummies. In other tests, the dummies were reduced in height. However, women were not reduced men. Women's bone density was lower and bone spacing was different from men's... These seemingly small differences matter when it comes to injury rates in car crashes. The miniature male dummy, meanwhile, did not even have a raised chest, and the women were strapped in "incorrectly" to avoid the discomfort caused by the seat belt pressing down on their chest, which increased the risk of injury. So most product designers think they're designing for everyone, but in reality, they're designing primarily for men. In 1998, pianist Christopher Donison noted that "one can roughly divide the world into two camps -- the camp of the big hands and the camp of the small hands." Donnison wrote this as a male pianist, who for years suffered from playing a traditional piano because of his smaller-than-average hands, but his words could be applied equally to female pianists. A piano keyboard designed to fit all men, with an octave of 18.8cm wide and an average female hand length of 18cm to 20cm, is not favorable to 87 percent of adult female pianists. In 2015, a study compared the hand length of 473 adult pianists with their "popularity" -- 12 pianists considered internationally known all had hands longer than 22cm. Among the top 12, only two were women, and one was 23cm long and the other 24cm long, much longer than the average female hand. Not only does a standard keyboard make it harder for female pianists to match the prestige of their male counterparts, it also affects their health. A series of studies of instrumentalists in the 1980s and 1990s found that female pianists were about 50 percent more at risk of pain and injury than male pianists. It is common to design only products that fit in a man's palm, such as smartphones. When smart phones or full-screen phones did not appear, various sizes and models of mobile phones can meet the needs of different groups of people. However, with the development of smartphones, the bigger the screen, the better. The average smartphone size is now 5.5 inches. Like a standard piano keyboard, a phone that seems to fit in the palm of a man's hand can also affect a woman's hand and arm health. The solution to this problem seems obvious: design smaller phones. However, a smaller phone usually means poorer performance and specs. When speech recognition software was first introduced, it was also supposed to solve some of the physical strain caused by smartphones, but that didn't solve women's problems because speech recognition software is often skewed towards men. Google's voice recognition software, for example, is 70 per cent more likely to correctly identify male voices than female ones -- still the best on the market. Apparently, women pay the same price as men for products and receive less service. Why heart disease goes undiagnosed. Historically, there was no fundamental difference between male and female bodies other than body size and reproductive function. As a result, medical education for many years has focused on the "standard" of men, and anything beyond that has been identified as "atypical" and even "abnormal." In 2014, a review of trials of cardiac resynchronization therapy devices (CRT-D - essentially a more complex pacemaker) found that women made up about 20 percent of trial participants. The number of women in each study was so small that breaking out the data for men and women did not show any statistically significant difference. But when the review authors combined all the trial results with data broken down by sex, they found something shocking. CRT-D is used to correct delays in the heart's electrical signals. They're implanted into a heart that's already failing, and the D stands for defibrillator. The defibrillator performs a kind of hard reset on the heart, jolting out irregular rhythms so that it can restart at the correct rhythm. It can't cure disease, but it can prevent many people from dying prematurely. If it takes 150 milliseconds or more for your heart to complete a full wave (QRS), you should implant one. And if your heart can complete a full cycle in that time, you won't need it. If you happen to be a woman, the results are different. While the 150 millisecond threshold works for men, it's 20 milliseconds longer for women. That may not sound like much, but women with QRS between 130 and 149 milliseconds who had an advanced pacemaker implanted had a 76 percent lower chance of heart failure or death, as well as a 76 percent lower chance of death alone. But under current guidelines, these women would not be able to get the device at all. As a result, hundreds of women suffer avoidable heart failure and death because these trials treat the male body as the default and women as incidental. CRT-D is far from the only medical technology not intended for women. A 2014 analysis found that only 14% of approved medical device studies included gender as a key outcome measure, and only 4% included subgroup analyses of female participants; In 2013, a supposedly revolutionary artificial heart was developed, but it was too big for a woman. It's all very well and good that its designers are working on a smaller version, but it's shocking that, like other artificial hearts, the female version is coming many years after the default male version. Jeffrey Mogill, a neuroscientist at McGill University, told the Gender Differences Research group that failing to include both sexes "at the very beginning" of a study is "not only a lack of scientific nous and a waste of money, but also a moral issue," and he's right. The solution to the gender and gender data gap is clear: we must close the gap of under-representation of women, ensure that women are not forgotten in decision-making, research and knowledge production, and ensure that women's lives and perspectives are brought out of the shadows. It's good for women everywhere. The answer was there all along. All people had to do was ask women questions.

Huge data gaps have dominated most of human history since records began. Chroniclers leave little room for the role of women in human evolution. Instead, the lives of men are used to represent the lives of all humanity. The gender data gap affects women's lives every day. The effect can be relatively small. For example, women shiver in offices because the air conditioning is set to a man's body temperature; Women struggle to reach items at the top of the shelves, which are designed for men's height. But these things are not life-threatening yet. Unless you are in an accident and the car's safety measures happen not to have been designed with a woman's figure in mind; Or your heart disease goes undiagnosed because the symptoms are considered "atypical." For these women, living in a world based on men's data, the consequences can be deadly. Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote in 1949: "Man is male, man defines woman not in terms of woman as such, but relative to man, and woman is not seen as an autonomous being... The man is the subject, the absolute, and the woman is the other." Why is there always a queue for women's toilets? It seems fair and reasonable to give equal square footage to men's and women's toilets -- historically, that's how it's always been done. The 50/50 allocation of floor space has even been written into the relevant regulations of pipeline laying. However, if a men's toilet has both stalls and urinals, far more people can use the toilet at the same time per square metre than a women's toilet. And women spend 2.3 times as much time in the toilet as men. Women make up the majority among the elderly and disabled, and both groups tend to take longer to go to the bathroom. Women are also more likely to accompany children, the disabled and the elderly to the toilet. In any case, women are likely to go to the bathroom more often than men: pregnancy dramatically compresses bladder capacity, and women are eight times more likely to have a urinary tract infection than men, which increases the frequency with which women go to the bathroom. In addition, one-third of the world's population simply does not have adequate toilet facilities. The problem is especially acute for women -- largely because men are expected to "go anywhere" and there is a stigma attached to women being seen urinating. Whether by design or lack of consideration, at least in the design of public toilets, women are not given priority. The standard temperature formula for offices was developed in the 1960s. The criteria are based on the resting metabolic rate (the energy needed to maintain basic physiological functions at rest) of men with an average age of 40 and an average weight of 70 kilograms. But a recent study found that young adult women who performed light physical work in an office had significantly lower metabolic rates than the norm for the same type of activity. In other words, this formula may overestimate women's metabolic rate by 35 percent, which means that the current office temperature standard is, on average, 5℃ lower for women. This has led to a strange summer phenomenon in the office: women in thick blankets surrounded by men in summer clothes. The modern workplace is full of male-oriented design. Like heavy doors that average sized women struggle to push open, or glass floors or even staircases where everyone can look up at skirts, or cracks in the floor just big enough to catch the heels of high heels... These design methods that ignore women's needs will not only bring physical discomfort and inefficiency to women, but also lead to chronic diseases and even cost women their lives. When a woman is in a car accident, she is 47 percent more likely to be seriously injured, 71 percent more likely to be slightly injured, and 17 percent more likely to die. It's all about how cars are designed and for whom. When driving, women tend to sit further forward than men. This is because women are shorter in general and need to move their legs closer together to reach the pedals and sit up straighter to see the dashboard. This forces women to deviate from the "standard seat position" and force them to be drivers with "incorrect seat positions", which means a greater risk of internal injury in a head-on collision. The Angle of the knees and hips also makes women's legs more vulnerable to injury when their relatively short legs are trying to reach the pedals. Women, too, are at greater risk from rear-end collisions. They have fewer muscles in the neck and upper body than men, making them more vulnerable to cervical spine injury. Car design amplifies this vulnerability. A Swedish study showed that car seats were too stiff to protect women's cervical vertebrae from injury, while women in car seats were thrown forward faster than men because of their lower body weight, and the back of the seat gave them less cushion. The reason all this makes women more vulnerable with their hands on the steering wheel is actually quite simple -- the cars are designed with crash test dummies based on "average" men. Crash test dummies were first used in the 1950s and, for decades, have been built on the body of a man who is 1.77m tall and weighs 76kg (significantly higher than the average female height and weight). The dummies even have the muscle mass ratio and spine features of men. It wasn't until 2011 that female crash test dummies were used in the United States. Cars often have to pass five tests before they reach the market: one seatbelt test, two frontal crash tests and two side crash tests. However, none of the tests required the use of anthropometric female crash-test dummies. In other tests, the dummies were reduced in height. However, women were not reduced men. Women's bone density was lower and bone spacing was different from men's... These seemingly small differences matter when it comes to injury rates in car crashes. The miniature male dummy, meanwhile, did not even have a raised chest, and the women were strapped in "incorrectly" to avoid the discomfort caused by the seat belt pressing down on their chest, which increased the risk of injury. So most product designers think they're designing for everyone, but in reality, they're designing primarily for men. In 1998, pianist Christopher Donison noted that "one can roughly divide the world into two camps -- the camp of the big hands and the camp of the small hands." Donnison wrote this as a male pianist, who for years suffered from playing a traditional piano because of his smaller-than-average hands, but his words could be applied equally to female pianists. A piano keyboard designed to fit all men, with an octave of 18.8cm wide and an average female hand length of 18cm to 20cm, is not favorable to 87 percent of adult female pianists. In 2015, a study compared the hand length of 473 adult pianists with their "popularity" -- 12 pianists considered internationally known all had hands longer than 22cm. Among the top 12, only two were women, and one was 23cm long and the other 24cm long, much longer than the average female hand. Not only does a standard keyboard make it harder for female pianists to match the prestige of their male counterparts, it also affects their health. A series of studies of instrumentalists in the 1980s and 1990s found that female pianists were about 50 percent more at risk of pain and injury than male pianists. It is common to design only products that fit in a man's palm, such as smartphones. When smart phones or full-screen phones did not appear, various sizes and models of mobile phones can meet the needs of different groups of people. However, with the development of smartphones, the bigger the screen, the better. The average smartphone size is now 5.5 inches. Like a standard piano keyboard, a phone that seems to fit in the palm of a man's hand can also affect a woman's hand and arm health. The solution to this problem seems obvious: design smaller phones. However, a smaller phone usually means poorer performance and specs. When speech recognition software was first introduced, it was also supposed to solve some of the physical strain caused by smartphones, but that didn't solve women's problems because speech recognition software is often skewed towards men. Google's voice recognition software, for example, is 70 per cent more likely to correctly identify male voices than female ones -- still the best on the market. Apparently, women pay the same price as men for products and receive less service. Why heart disease goes undiagnosed. Historically, there was no fundamental difference between male and female bodies other than body size and reproductive function. As a result, medical education for many years has focused on the "standard" of men, and anything beyond that has been identified as "atypical" and even "abnormal." In 2014, a review of trials of cardiac resynchronization therapy devices (CRT-D - essentially a more complex pacemaker) found that women made up about 20 percent of trial participants. The number of women in each study was so small that breaking out the data for men and women did not show any statistically significant difference. But when the review authors combined all the trial results with data broken down by sex, they found something shocking. CRT-D is used to correct delays in the heart's electrical signals. They're implanted into a heart that's already failing, and the D stands for defibrillator. The defibrillator performs a kind of hard reset on the heart, jolting out irregular rhythms so that it can restart at the correct rhythm. It can't cure disease, but it can prevent many people from dying prematurely. If it takes 150 milliseconds or more for your heart to complete a full wave (QRS), you should implant one. And if your heart can complete a full cycle in that time, you won't need it. If you happen to be a woman, the results are different. While the 150 millisecond threshold works for men, it's 20 milliseconds longer for women. That may not sound like much, but women with QRS between 130 and 149 milliseconds who had an advanced pacemaker implanted had a 76 percent lower chance of heart failure or death, as well as a 76 percent lower chance of death alone. But under current guidelines, these women would not be able to get the device at all. As a result, hundreds of women suffer avoidable heart failure and death because these trials treat the male body as the default and women as incidental. CRT-D is far from the only medical technology not intended for women. A 2014 analysis found that only 14% of approved medical device studies included gender as a key outcome measure, and only 4% included subgroup analyses of female participants; In 2013, a supposedly revolutionary artificial heart was developed, but it was too big for a woman. It's all very well and good that its designers are working on a smaller version, but it's shocking that, like other artificial hearts, the female version is coming many years after the default male version. Jeffrey Mogill, a neuroscientist at McGill University, told the Gender Differences Research group that failing to include both sexes "at the very beginning" of a study is "not only a lack of scientific nous and a waste of money, but also a moral issue," and he's right. The solution to the gender and gender data gap is clear: we must close the gap of under-representation of women, ensure that women are not forgotten in decision-making, research and knowledge production, and ensure that women's lives and perspectives are brought out of the shadows. It's good for women everywhere. The answer was there all along. All people had to do was ask women questions.