As I was getting out of my morning shower, NPR radio announced that MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology – one of the most prestigious universities in the country) had discovered, after exhausting research, that: “overall, the [surgical] masks fit women’s faces much less closely than they fit men’s faces.”
Instead of just asking any woman whosoever, they have developed a “sensor, which measures physical contact between the mask and the wearer’s face,” and have concluded “that the masks that we use in daily life are not very suitable for female participants.” This is headline news? I remember the happy moment that my best friend found a KN94 mask that came in small, medium, and large. I now have a stock of many dozens of mediums and they keep me safe. Up until then, fully aware that other masks did not properly fit, I double masked.
Very little that we use in daily life is suitable to women. It took me two years to find a swivel chair small enough that my feet touched the ground when my own back was touching the back of the chair. There are few upper cabinets in my apartment that I can reach without climbing a step stool, not really the smartest move for elders. I once stayed at an Airbnb in which the entire bathroom mirror was higher than my head. Those kitchen islands with the high bar stools? I can’t reach the foot bar where others rest their feet – mine remain dangling. American packaging is impossible to open without major muscle. Perhaps most annoying of all is that women’s clothing rarely has meaningful pockets.
One of the scariest results of design built around the male body is the disaster known as air bags, which seem to injure as many women as they save.
You can probably add a thousand additional examples, and feel free to do so in the comments. And yes, I know that some women are taller than most men and some men are shorter than most women. Yeah, yeah. But let’s get real.
Without hiring women designers, men will not get it right. It’s like that facial recognition software that doesn’t work on Black people. How many people of color do you think were hired for that development team? As long as all of us are not included on the ground floor, we’re going to have situations like this. How many women died of Covid because they couldn’t locate a properly fitting mask in the first years of the pandemic? I would call this violence against women by design.
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