Invisible Women - Angry Italians & Default Male Backpacks

Hellooo GFPs and Happy Bank Holiday Monday! As some of you may have seen, I was just about hid send on this MAMMOTH newsletter, when for some reason the platform decided to revert to the gibberish I originally had in my intro section (they were my NOTES, you didn’t think I come up with these masterpieces without any PLAN did you?). Anyway, you will just have to put up with whatever angry gibberish I write now, as I am EXTREMELY ANNOYED. And also: hungry.

It especially hurts, because I had vaguely thought about taking the week off, but then I thought the data gap never takes a day off so neither shall we, GFPs! Neither shall we. And I have so much to tell you! Angry Italians, and heart disease and backpacks, oh my!

But first: an apology. A few of you wrote to me after last week’s newsletter asking for the links to the studies I mentioned in Default Male of the Week, that looked at the impact of working from home on mothers v fathers. My bad, should totally have included them, and they are well worth a read in full, so here they are now:

The non-sex-disaggregated one

and the sex-disaggregated one.

In other news, I seem to have hit it big in Italy this week. Not sure, why (maybe there was an article that went viral? are there any Italian GFPs? Let me know!) but it sure has resulted in some Italian men getting their knickers in a serious twist. To wit:

And so on. As you can see it went on for a few days. I can’t imagine what I did to upset them so much, but obviously I’m very very sorry about it.

Would love to hear from some Italian GFPs about wth is going on over there, but in the meantime, last word goes to Isacelina

On a happier note, I have found a backpack! But let’s start with the less happy note. As you may remember from last week’s newsletter, the A[merican]B[eefcake] bought himself some snazzy new noise cancelling earphones that are TOO BIG FOR MY FEMALE SIZED EARS. The search for some noise cancelling earphones that don’t fall out of my very average woman-ears continues.

In the meantime, I have also been continuing with my perennial search for The Perfect Backpack. This is a search with which many women are familiar. It can go on for years, off and on, because the difficulty is, if you want a backpack that will fit your female shoulders, odds on it either has zero organisational capacity and is poorly made, OR it is a hiking backpack. And it will cost you an arm and a leg. The reasonably priced, nice-looking, not-too-outdoorsy backpack that fits a female back AND has lots of lovely pockets, INCLUDING a side slot for a water bottle, Does Not Exist. OR SO I THOUGHT.

As I say, I’ve been conducting this search for SOME TIME. I have brief flurries of searching, followed by usually getting despondent and giving up, reluctantly falling back yet again on my cross-over-purse-and-tote-bag combo. But THEN I thought I had found it: the motherload. It was pretty. It had pockets. It had a water bottle slot.

It looked like this on my shoulders.

It also rubbed into my neck and the inside of my arms because the straps were so ridiculously wide. The worst thing was, that in order to return it I would have to go on at least a two hour round trip to the nearest depot. Anyway, yada yada yada, the AB now has a very nice new backpack.

Meanwhile my fruitless search continued

But because I had been so excited about finding what I had thought was the perfect backpack, I didn’t give up as easily as I might, and, finally, LOOK WHAT I FOUND!

It has ALL the pockets, inside and out, including a bottle slot on both sides.

Yada yada yada, I’m very happy with my new toy. If you are a woman who similarly would like a comfortable, well-organised bag that actually fits you but doesn’t make you look like you’re off camping, you can get one here. You’re WELCOME.

RIGHT. That was a very long ramble. You will forgive me (one day I will get around to making a gif of that moment from the BBC P&P, but today is apparently not that day). You will forgive me for that too.

Instead, I am here with the latest news from the data gap coalface. This week, once again, we learn quite how screwed women are when it comes to having their heart problems diagnosed.

Meanwhile, women were found to be almost twice as likely to be misdiagnosed as men: 44.5% of women surveyed said they were initially misdiagnosed, versus 22.7% of male patients. The most common misdiagnoses amongst women were asthma (30.4%), anxiety or depression (22.4%) and acid reflux (13.6%).

This week came the entirely unprecedented news that male and female immune systems react differently to SARS-CoV-2. Yes, friends, it’s true. A new study, published in Nature no less, revealed this shocking news.

I jest, of course (partly). It is incredibly important that we carry on doing research specifically focused on the sex-differences in response to the SARS-CoV-2 virus specifically. It’s just a bit frustrating that it’s taken a pandemic for researchers and journals to pull their finger out. Meanwhile vaccine researchers continue to publish non-sex-disaggregated data.

This week: are student loan repayments sexist? I have to admit, I had never thought of this before, but this thread raised a very interesting question, that is: should women carry on incurring interest on their student loans during maternity leave?

As you can imagine, a lively debate was had on twitter.

Obviously, the best solution to this is to introduce properly paid use-it-or-lose-it paternity leave, (which I am calling PUTOLIP for short, which is extremely catchy and will definitely catch on), as evidenced by every country that has PUTOLIP. It would also bring with it the added benefit of narrowing the gender pay gap, which itself is good for GDP, again as evidenced by every country that has PUTOLIP. In short, there is every reason to introduce PUTOLIP and no reason not to. So naturally, that’s what we’ll do because we love evidence-based policy amirite?

Unlike GDGOTW, DMOTW, and PPOTW, this section won’t always appear, but with a view to cheering you all up on occasion, when there is jolly news to share, I will do my best to share it! This week, an opportunity to close the gender data gap for female rugby players!

You may think this is a niche issue, but the number of female rugby players is growing rapidly – the total number of registered female players worldwide increased by 28 per cent in 2018 alone – and women now account for more than a quarter of total players globally.

Naturally, the research has kept pace with this shift in the sex ratio of players.

In fact, data on injuries and training techniques has almost exclusively been collected from male players, with the conclusions drawn then generalised across the entire sport, forming the basis of rugby’s law changes and training methods. The development of injury prevention strategies in rugby union is progressing, “but these are predominantly focused on male players.”  

Meanwhile, women are more than twice as likely to report concussive symptoms in sports than men and take longer to recover.

BUT NO MORE! (hopefully)

 A global team of researchers and practitioners from across the world of sports science and medicine, led by Elizabeth Williams, senior lecturer in biomechanics at the University of Swansea, are on the case!

The survey is available in English, as well as in Cantonese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Portugese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish

The survey was published on 24 August and will run for eight weeks until 24 October. So go ahead and fill it out yourself, or pass it on to your rugby-playing pals! Go, GFPs, GO!

No comment because I literally don’t know where to begin.

I mean, actually you would, but sure, you shouldn’t.

This is such a brilliant, practical idea, which as regular readers will know are my FAVOURITE kind of ideas. Chip in with a few quid if you can:

So I’m currently visiting my Mum, who has recently taken delivery of a Very Nice and Smart armchair, which Poppy is ABSOLUTELY NOT ALLOWED ON. But the problem is, Poppy is a sun-hound and that chair just happens to generally be the sunniest spot in the house. And so the sun-wars have commenced.

In conclusion, my mum is a pushover.

You’ll be relieved to hear, GFPs, that that is it! What a marathon. Until next time! xoxoxo