Hello GFPs! I hope you’ve all been misbehaving. I took a little break from writing to try to recover from a deeply hectic couple of months of book tour travel and podcast production. But now I’m BACK! What’s the goss? Other than Elon Musk trying to outdo Liz Truss in over-promising and catastrophically under-delivering, that is…

I’ve been on and off watching the car crash (on which, more later) and while twitter has for a long time been a total trash fire (and yet somehow a painfully sanctimonious one??) on which I spend as little time as possible, there is no denying how useful I’ve found it for research purposes. And I do get tagged in a lot of interesting academic papers and whatnot on there. So, on balance, I’d like it to stick around and not end up as another victim of a man’s planet-sized ego…here’s hoping! If it does go down in flames you can find me here, of course, or I’m @ccriadoperez on Instagram. I currently have no plans to try to figure out Mastodon as it sounds like way too much faff…so I guess I’m going down with the ship! Who’s with me?

PS: if twitter DOES go down do feel free to send me any interesting papers, reports, default males and toilet queues etc you see to this address! You can just hit reply to any email 😘

Gender data gap of the week

During my absence it appears everyone was getting super excited about a new AVERAGE female car crash test dummy that has been developed by a group of Swedish engineers. A few people were kind enough to credit my work. And I agree, it all sounds really exciting…but I’m afraid I’m here in traditional, classic CCP style to p*ss all over everyone’s parade, even if said parade is partially in honour of me, soz.

But first, just a bit of background for anyone who hasn’t been paying attention. In Invisible Women, I wrote about how much less safe cars are for women. In brief, if a woman is in a car crash she is 17% more likely to die than a man in the same crash. She is also 47% more likely to be seriously injured. In 2019, after Invisible Women was published, another study came out which put the increased risk of serious injury and death for women at 73%.

This significant disparity in risk is in no small part thanks to the use of a dummy that’s based around the body of the average American male, as a stand-in for the average human in car crash testing. It’s not the only dummy that’s used, but it is the most commonly used dummy, and while a so-called “female” dummy exists, this is really just a scaled-down version of the male dummy, and for the people at the back: WOMEN ARE NOT SCALED DOWN MEN. There are other differences between men and women, for example, the pelvis. Here is a picture of the male versus the female pelvis:

Kind of different, huh? And this difference really matters in the event of a crash, because the seatbelt has been designed to catch on the bones of the [default male] pelvis, because bone should withstand the force of the crash. But because the female pelvis is not just a scaled-down default male pelvis, but is in fact a different shape altogether, the seatbelt may not catch on the pelvic bones of a female crash victim, but ride up and instead crush her internal organs.

This is exactly what happened to Maria, who we interviewed for S1E4 of the Visible Women podcast. Listen to her talking about the injuries caused by her seatbelt here:

According to Verity Now, a US-based group campaigning for female dummies to be used in safety testing, in the US alone, over one million injuries were sustained by women in car crashes in 2018, 76% of them in the driver’s seat — which is relevant, because in the US NCAP tests, even the scaled-down male dummy is not tested in the driver’s seat. So they’re not even pretending to protect women.

Given all of this, why am I not putting out my bunting for the all-new-inspired-by-CCP average female car crash test dummy?

Well, first of all, I should be very clear that this is not inspired by me at all, and it is in fact entirely unrelated to my work. This average female dummy is the end result of a project started and driven by the brilliant, single-minded, and indefatigable Astrid Linder, the Swedish road safety engineer I interviewed both for Invisible Women the book *and* Visible Women the podcast.

Astrid’s project began long before I’d even heard about sex disparities in car crashes let alone started writing about them. So all the thanks and appreciation very much should be directed her way. She’s not only been on about this for literally decades, but has also been working to fix it for that long. And now we have the physical fruit of her labour (when I spoke to her for IW the dummy was still digital and only existed as a prototype). So this is a genuinely exciting development.

But…..(you knew there was a but), this dummy is of no use unless it’s actually used in the safety testing. And the dummy existing very much does not mean it will get used. For example, there has been a 5th percentile female car crash test dummy in existence for a number of years now. It’s been validated and is ready to go. It even has a female pelvis! But this female pelvis is just sitting in a warehouse somewhere, because this dummy is not currently required for any of the regulatory tests and it’s not used in the US consumer tests either. Instead, we get our scaled-down friend with her default male pelvis. So extremely tiny men (the currently dummy is tiny even for a woman) are catered for, something about which I, for one, am thankful. But the dummy with an actual female pelvis? She’s NFI. So will Astrid’s dummy get used in any of the tests? Magic 8-ball says reply hazy try again.

Still, if anyone can do it, I’d put my money on Astrid. So…maybe signs point to yes.

Bonus gender data gap

DeLIGHTed to see some sex disaggregated data reported in The Times this week, and on an extremely important topic too:

Here comes the science! Sadly, the study found that men “suffered after committing adultery.”

Default FEmale of the week

Plz enjoy this inadvertent default female-ing from my good friend Bob (bob is a girl)

Sadly Bob did not follow through on this threat and let us all down. Still, have to say I’m feeling pretty vindicated rn. Thank you for your service, Bob and Mr Bob.

Poppy pic of the week

That’s it! Until next time, my dear GFPs….xoxoxo