Sep 21, 2020

Invisible Women - Motion Sickness & Sick Tech

By Caroline Criado Perez • Issue #27 • View online

Morning, GFPs, short and sweet (probably. well, ok maybe not sweet, but probably short) edition coming up 😘

Gender Data Gap

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!!!!

…

…………………………………………………………….

Default Male of the Week

Andrew Seward

@MrAndrew

(1/2) Out running this morning on a new route and a lady runs past me.

Despite only passing, when I get home @Strava automatically tags her in my run. If I click on her face it shows her full name, picture and a map of her running route (which effectively shows where she lives) https://t.co/flnHpSvA79

4:34 PM - 14 Sep 2020

Sort it out, @Strava 😑

INTERMISSION

Do you want to help shape London’s spaces to better reflect actual Londoners? Here’s your chance! Recruitment is now open for the Mayor’s Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm. Let’s get us some better statues! 💪

Data in a Time of Corona

So here we are, stuck in the middle of a pandemic with the hapless Boris and Trump, you’d think the least the scientists could do is sex-analysis of all their COVID research given, you know, it has blatantly sex-specific results.

Anyway, here is the abstract of a paper released this week. I’ve bolded the most relevant bits:

Sex and gender differences impact the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 mortality. Furthermore, sex differences characterize the frequency and severity of pharmacological side effects. A large number of clinical trials are ongoing to develop new therapeutic approaches and vaccines for COVID-19. We investigated the inclusion of sex and/or gender in currently registered studies on ClinicalTrials.gov. Only 416 (16.7%) of the 2,484 registered SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 trials mention sex/gender as recruitment criterion and only 103 (4.1%) allude to sex/gender in the description of the analysis phase. None of the 11 clinical trials published in scientific journals on June 2020 reported sex-disaggregated results. Hence, lack of consideration upon registration does not seem to be corrected during trial execution and reporting. Given the biological relevance and the potential risks of unwanted side effects, we urge researchers to focus on sex-disaggregated analyses already at the planning stage of COVID-19 trials.

Once again with feeling:

MORE DATA

This week I interviewed that Tim Harford from BBC’s More of Less, who has a new book out: How To Make the World Add Up. The book is really very good and if you want to find out more, including whether or not Tim allowed me to ban the A[merican]B[eefcake] from getting on the tube to go and play football, click here!

Look, ma, I done a blurb

Poppy Pic of the Week

Poppy and her fearsome hound shadow ❤️

That’s it for another week, GFPs! Until next time….xoxoxo

Did you enjoy this issue?

By Caroline Criado Perez

Keeping up with the gender data gap (and whatever else takes my fancy). Like the Kardashians, but with more feminist rage. Plus, toilet queue of the week.

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