Invisible Women - SHOCK as archaeologists discover women existed in ancient Thebes 😱 PLUS! The next step for GFPs

There are a few questions that I’ve been asked repeatedly in the six months since Invisible Women came out. “What was the worst example of the gender data gap you came across?” is a common favourite. “How do we get men to read it / are any men reading it?” is another. But probably the most common one is, “How are you not furious ALL THE TIME?” 

I’ll get to the other two questions, but to answer the final question first: it’s because of all of you. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still furious a lot of the time, but I spent three years writing the book in a state of permanent rage, with no outlet. I felt alone and isolated with this explosive knowledge. I knew that what I was writing was important – too often life or death important. But I also knew that there was a chance I wouldn’t be believed. After all, I’m not a scientist. And I’m a woman. A woman writing about sex and gender. I knew – and my research confirmed this – that all this meant I was up against some in-built assumptions that would make me a far less credible witness than, say, a white male psychology professor to just pluck one example out of nowhere.

And that knowledge, that permanent anxiety, on top of the facts I was uncovering, that I wouldn’t be able to do those facts justice, made me furious. All the time.

But then the book came out. And there you all were. An army of very visible women (and yes some men). And not only did you tell me that the world suddenly made sense to you, that you felt seen. You started sharing your own stories. You started telling them to me, to other people, to strangers in queues for the toilet. 

And I stopped being so angry. I stopped feeling so powerless, alone at the top of my mountain of gaps. I felt like I was witnessing the birth of a movement.

But I also started feeling a bit anxious again. Here I was, in the privileged position of being sent personal stories, research papers, engineering solutions, concrete changes that were being implemented as a result of someone having read *my* book. Plus more toilet queues than I knew what to do with. And I knew that these were all important. That something needed to be done with them. But what?

The study investigated whether mildly elevated blood pressure — readings between 130 to 139mmHg over 80 to 89mmHg — was a stronger risk factor for heart attacks in women than in men. Blood pressure was measured in 6,381 women and 5,948 men in Norway, when they were aged 41. Heart attacks were recorded during the next 16 years.

…but algorithms trained on this dataset connected pictures of kitchens with women 68% of the time. The paper also found that the higher the original bias, the stronger the amplification effect, which perhaps explains how the algorithm came to label a photo of a portly balding man standing in front of a stove as female. Kitchen > male pattern baldness. 

If you run a general search for whether resistance training is good for reducing heart disease, you’ll come across a series of papers warning against resistance training if you have high blood pressure. This is in large part because of the concerns that it doesn’t have as beneficial an effect on lowering blood pressure as aerobic exercise, and also because it causes an increase in artery stiffness.

Which is all true. In men. Who, as ever, form the majority of research participants. The research that has been done on women suggests that this advice is not gender-neutral. A 2008 paper, for example, found that not only does resistance training lower blood pressure to a greater extent in women, women don’t suffer from the same increase in artery stiffness. And this matters, because as women get older, their blood pressure gets higher compared to men of the same age, and elevated blood pressure is more directly linked to cardiovascular mortality in women than in men. In fact, the risk of death from coronary artery disease for women is twice that for men for every 20 mm Hg increase in blood pressure above normal levels [which we now know is in fact only normal for men]. It also matters because commonly used antihypertensive drugs have been shown to be less beneficial in lowering blood pressure in women than in men.

So to sum up: for women, the blood-pressure drugs (developed using male subjects) don’t work as effectively, but resistance training just might do the trick. Except we haven’t known that because all the studies have been done on men.  

The interpretation of the mummy’s sex as a male was established by radiological examinations in the 1990s (Urbanik et al., 2001). But, the current research proves that the sex of the mummy is undoubtably female […] The sex of the individual as female was confirmed by the presence of the fetus, breasts, and female genitalia visible on the CT images. 

Even human bones are not exempt from male-unless-otherwise-indicated thinking. We might think of human skeletons as being objectively either male or female and therefore exempt from male-default thinking. We would be wrong. For over a hundred years, a tenth-century Viking skeleton known as the ‘Birka warrior’ had – despite possessing an apparently female pelvis – been assumed to be male because it was buried alongside a full set of weapons and two sacrificed horses. These grave contents indicated that the occupant had been a warrior – and warrior meant male (archaeologists put the numerous references to female fighters in Viking lore down to ‘mythical embellishments’). But although weapons apparently trump the pelvis when it comes to sex, they don’t trump DNA and in 2017 testing confirmed that these bones did indeed belong to a woman.

The argument didn’t, however, end there. It just shifted. The bones might have been mixed up; there might be other reasons a female body was buried with these items. Naysaying scholars might have a point on both counts (although based on the layout of the grave contents the original authors dismiss these criticisms). But the resistance is nevertheless revealing, particularly since male skeletons in similar circumstances ‘are not questioned in the same way’. Indeed, when archaeologists dig up grave sites, they nearly always find more males, which, as noted anthropologist Phillip Walker drily noted in a 1995 book chapter on sexing skulls, is ‘not consistent with what we know about the sex ratios of extant human populations’. And given Viking women could own property, could inherit and could become powerful merchants, is it so impossible that they could have fought too?

After all, these are far from the only female warrior bones that have been discovered. ‘Battle-scarred skeletons of multiple women have been found across the Eurasian steppes from Bulgaria to Mongolia’ wrote Natalie Haynes in the Guardian. For people such as the ancient Scythians, who fought on horseback with bows and arrows, there was no innate male warrior advantage, and DNA testing of skeletons buried with weapons in more than 1,000 Scythian burial mounds from Ukraine to Central Asia have revealed that up to 37% of Scythian women and girls were active warriors.

In our breaks we had to choose between going to the loo or getting food – the queue for the women’s toilets were just too long. We want a solution to our own problem!

We chose to tackle this issue in our Master’s research project and the design developed from feedback when testing with users, prototyping and constant iteration. The enthusiasm and encouragement from women confirmed the necessity of this project. 

After stepping into the urinal’s structure, a user would squat over the ‘pedestal’ to pee. This is an adaptation of a squat toilet but with increased comfort and privacy. We designed it this way as our research showed that 80% of women already squat over the toilet as well as people wanting touch-free facilities since COVID began. 

PEEQUAL is 6x more time efficient to use than a lockable toilet, cutting queues and generating events money. Taking Reading festival as an example we would generate an extra 1.5 million from the efficiency of our urinals alone. 

It is a touch-free and open-air, 10x more sanitary than a portable toilet, a COVID-friendly product, perfectly placed to help in post-pandemic recovery. 

It’s also flat pack, 6x more compact in transport. Using the Reading festival as an example again, we would save them 70 artic lorries. Not only does this save festivals money it reduces their environmental impact. 

PEEQUAL can be configured in three different ways, easily adapting to various environments. The area can also become an additional safe space for women at events. 

PEEQUAL is made from 100% recycled material and is 100% recyclable, manufactured in the UK. Our Manufacturers can directly recycle the units into new, closing the loop completely.

Comparing the environmental impact to portable toilets PEEQUAL produces ninety eight percent less C02 emissions.

We are currently testing our prototype at events that are running this year. We aim to get feedback from users and iterate the design to ensure it is something women actually want and will use. We will be testing at Bristol Comedy Garden from the 2nd-6th June 2021, then at Valley fest on the 30th July. We are very grateful for these opportunities and encourage anyone who may have similar opportunities to reach out to us and get involved!

We are looking for more events willing to help us test the prototype this year before renting out our final product to events in 2022.

Firstly, the width of the base of the neck. Generally males have a slightly wider base of the neck, due to the natural growth of the upper trapezius muscle, so a slightly wider harness yoke is specified. The second area is the broadness and depth of the shoulder muscles – generally these are larger on males and as such the harness is slightly longer to accommodate this wrap. Finally, female-specific harnesses are curved to avoid running directly over the breasts and therefore are shaped to run down the side of the chest and body.

Generally, the outside of male hips are perpendicular to the floor. Therefore, male hipbelts wrap almost exactly horizontally from the lumbar outwards to the hipbelt buckle. This ensures even padding from the top of the hips through to the bottom of the hipbelt pad.

Female hips tend to angle inwards, usually being wider around the iliac crest and narrower at the waist. The hipbelts, therefore, are shaped more conically, slightly wider at the bottom and narrower at the top, when attached to the body. The hipbelt shaping reflects the general hip shape and helps to prevent pressure points.