Invisible Women - murderous menstrual blood

‘There’s never been much innovation in consumer electronics for women,’ [Boler] says. ‘It’s always focused on a very superficial aesthetic level: turn something pink, or turn something into a piece of jewellery, rather than taking account of the fact that technology can solve real problems for women.’ The result has been a chronic lack of investment, meaning that ‘the actual technology that’s used in medical devices for women is sort of a kickback from the 1980s’. (IW, p.172)

Fifty per cent of the population have a vagina,’ [Boler says], ‘and yet there’s hardly any journal articles about this part of anatomy. Three years ago I found about four articles done decades ago.’ (IW, p.173)

“Elvie’s product design process always starts by listening to women, finding more about the challenges they face - and then applying world-class design and engineering technology to create better solutions that work with women’s bodies.”

Allen has also been critical of women joining the professional World Snooker Tour, while he recently asked for his ex-partner to be removed from a TV studio next to his practice table at the World Championships in April, claiming her presence was a distraction. (Source)

In our debate on Women’s Health I quoted from Caroline Criado Perez’s thought-provoking book ‘Invisible Women’ and I wish to do the same here at the beginning of our Women’s Health Plan, as she says so much in the few words: ‘women are not, to state the obvious, just men.’

She goes on to explain: ‘Historically, it has been assumed that there wasn’t anything fundamentally different between male and female bodies other than size and reproductive function, and so, for years, medical education has been focussed on the male “norm”, with everything that falls outside that designated as “atypical” or even “abnormal”.’ This has to change. Women are not atypical – they are 51% of Scotland’s population.

This includes supporting the development of individualised care plans after a woman’s first miscarriage, taking forward the recommendations made in the Lancet series, “Miscarriage Matters” published on 26 April 2021 and ensuring women’s services in NHS Boards have dedicated facilities for women who are experiencing unexpected pregnancy complications.

Louise, 38, delivered her stillborn baby in a room next to women celebrating their new babies.

She told BBC Radio’s Good Morning Scotland programme: “I was 13 weeks pregnant and I went to my scan, told no heartbeat, came out the scan room and and [they] spoke of three different procedures. I went to start and was told because I was over 11 weeks have to deliver in the labour ward. My body shut down as soon as I heard those words.

"The promises I was made that I would be met at the door and I wouldn’t see anyone were completely false. I was let in that door by a dad celebrating the birth of his baby and on his way to tell his relatives the good news. I was waiting for a few minutes at that door. No midwives came for me.”

The simple mechanism reduces the effort required to get the jar open. The appearance of the OrbitTM lid is very similar to a normal twist-off lid, but it is actually in two parts: a central panel is sealed to the jar by vacuum, and an outer ring is screwed in place to provide further protection.

To open the jar, the user simply twists the ring in the same way as opening a normal twist-off lid. Twisting the ring firstly loosens the ring, then smoothly pushes the panel away from the jar to break the seal. In this way, the ring acts as a tool to break the seal. Once opened, the jar may be reclosed and reopened as usual.

Women have on average a 41% lower grip strength than men, and this is not a sex difference that changes with age: the typical seventy-year-old man has a stronger handgrip than the average twenty-five-year-old woman. It’s also not a sex difference that can be significantly trained away: a study which compared ‘highly trained female athletes’ to men who were ‘untrained or not specifically trained’ found that their grip strength ‘rarely’ surpassed the fiftieth percentile of male subjects. Overall, 90% of the women (this time including untrained women) in the study had a weaker grip than 95% of their male counterparts. (Invisible Women, pp.145-146)

The resulting research indicated that although many people liked to purchase glass jars because they were re-sealable, reusable and recyclable many women commented on their difficulty to open and even some men claimed that jars could be stubborn.

The study suggested that 22% of the participants that took part in the survey could not open a jar with a normal lid, with the percentage increasing to 40% for women over 50 years of age. Participants that could open both types of lid confirmed that the Orbit lid was much easier to open.