This week,
The Times reported on a gender neutral solution to the problem of motion sickness. “Here we go,” I thought wearily, as I clicked. Because, you see, as GFPs who have read
Invisible Women, will know, motion sickness is not a gender-neutral affliction: women are far more likely to suffer from it, and, like many things that mainly affect women, we really don’t know what causes it and therefore how to fix it (see IW, pp.182-5). But now that some (mainly) men stand to make a lot of money from self-driving cars, suddenly there is more interest in fixing the problem of motion sickness – hurrah! (This reminds me a bit of how we’ve ignored the economic value of unpaid work for decades until (again mainly) men started doing unpaid work in the shape of open source software and wikipedia entries (see IW, p.243-4). It also – although this is more of a tangent – reminded me of this
excellent piece about how household tech like Cleanly is making women’s work profitable – for men. It’s called “
The Wife Glitch” and well worth a click.)
ANYWAY, so I googled
the paper and….was pleasantly surprised! The abstract was gender neutral (🙄) BUT the paper ACTUALLY ACKNOWLEDGED SEX DIFFERENCES!
…there is also a strong sex effect for motion sickness susceptibility. The literature strongly supports that women are more susceptible than men to motion sickness (
Jokerst et al., 1999) (
Flanagan et al., 2005) and this is widely accepted in the field.
omg i know rite?!?!!11 And then, on top of that, they ACTUALLY INCLUDED WOMEN IN THE STUDY!!!!
Part 1 (the simulator study) consisted of 20 participants with 10 males (50%) and 10 females (50%). Part 2 (the on-road study) consisted of 22 participants including an experimental group of 15 participants, and a control group of 7 participants. The experimental group consisted of 6 males (40%) and 9 females (60%) and the control group had 3 males (~40%) and 4 females (~60%).
Mind. Blown. Can’t wait to see the sex-disaggregated results!!!!
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