Invisible Women - universal adult size

when male and female patients expressed the same amount of pain, observers viewed female patients’ pain as less intense and more likely to benefit from psychotherapy versus medication as compared to men’s pain, exposing a significant patient gender bias that could lead to disparities in treatments.

Additionally, the study concluded that the gender of the perceivers did not influence pain estimation. Both men and women interpreted women’s pain to be less intense.

What’s more, psychotherapy was chosen as more effective than medication for a higher proportion of female patients compared to male patients.

It is because what is male is universal that when a professor at Georgetown University named her literature course ‘White Male Writers’, she hit the headlines, while the numerous courses on ‘female writers’ pass unremarked.

It is because what is male is universal (and what is female is niche) that a film about the fight of British women for their right to vote is slammed (in the Guardian, no less) as ‘peculiarly hermetic’ for not covering the First World War – sadly proving that Virginia Woolf’s 1929 observation (‘This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room’) is still relevant today. It is why V. S. Naipaul criticises Jane Austen’s writing as ‘narrow’, while at the same time no one is expecting The Wolf of Wall Street to address the Gulf War, or Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard to write about anyone but himself (or quote more than a single female writer) to receive praise from the New Yorker for voicing ‘universal anxieties’ in his six-volume autobiography.

It is why the England national football team page on Wikipedia is about the men’s national football team, while the women’s page is called the England women’s national football team, and why in 2013 Wikipedia divided writers into ‘American Novelists’ and ‘American Women Novelists’. (IW, pp.12-13)

Our first campaign is crowd researching (whole) novels read in English in secondary schools to publish the evidence - because although we know that Naomi’s findings are true throughout the whole taught curriculum, there is little actual published evidence.

Anyone can volunteer as little as 15-30 minutes from the comfort of their own home to contribute! Our team provides full instructions on what to do and is on hand if anyone encounters difficulties but it’s really simple to do. You can see our data as it comes in which really starts to hammer home the problem. 

We’re planning all sorts of other activities, including creating resources to support schools in shifting the gender imbalance out of the curriculum and calling for Ofsted to take responsibility and actually inspect schools for equality (they currently don’t).

“I realised that swimwear offered either style or substance but almost never both. On one hand – beautiful, flimsy bikinis for lounging about and ordering cocktails; on the other – serious sportswear that offered little shape, support or style. But I wanted a swimsuit that could offer me both.”

Homelessness is usually measured by counting those who use homeless services, but this approach only works if men and women are equally likely to use these services, and they aren’t. Women made homeless as a result of domestic violence are often likely to seek refuge in domestic-violence shelters rather than homeless shelters. In the UK this means that they will not be counted as homeless. They are also likely to live in precarious arrangements with other people, ‘without their own front door, privacy and their own living space, and without access to any housing of their own to which they have a legal right’. Sometimes, as witnessed by the recent rise in ‘sex for rent’ agreements across the UK, they will, like women in refugee camps, be sexually exploited.

According to Canadian research, women fall into these precarious arrangements because they don’t feel safe in the official emergency accommodation, especially when it’s mixed sex. And these safety issues are not a product of women’s imaginations: the CCPA calls the levels of violence experienced by women in shelters ‘staggering’. Supposedly ‘gender-neutral’ services that are ‘presumed to be equally accessible for men and women’, concludes the CCPA, ‘actually put women at significant risk’. (Invisible Women, p.307)

These women are often harder for outreach teams to find as they seek out night buses, libraries, A&E departments, airports, or anywhere they judge to be safer than the street. The fact women are also intimidated by the overwhelmingly male environment of hostels and day centres means they are considerably less visible and so much harder to support.

We know from the data available, including these shocking life expectancy statistics, that women sleeping rough tend to be in poorer mental and physical health than their male counterparts.