Well, good MORNING, GFPs! And no, it’s not Monday, but it *is* International Women’s Day, so you’ll forgive me from deviating from our regularly scheduled programming, for I am a Woman, and this is my Day.

First up, some exciting Invisible Women news: TODAY ONLY, UK-based GFPs can snaffle a kindle copy of Invisible Women for the bargain basement price of 99p! So go forth: click, buy and spread the word! Buy a copy for yourself, buy a copy for your boss, buy a copy for your brother, your dad, your daughter, your niece, you get the idea.

Gender data gap of the week

This week I read a very interesting stat in The Economist. Apparently, at “any given time, about 300m of the world’s women are menstruating.” And since, this week, I am one of that bloody sisterhood, I thought I would, on this day, the day of international women, which must include bloody women, spend this week’s gender data gap talking about the article this stat appeared in, which was also very interesting.

A gendered data gap you say? How unusual.

Anyway, the concern is basically that the skin of the vulva “is one of the body surface’s most sensitive parts.”

It is more permeable than the rest of the epidermis, and becomes still more absorbent when irritated. And the vaginal canal, where tampons sit, is lined by mucous membranes supplied by blood vessels that absorb chemicals into the bloodstream without metabolising them.

As, the author of the article notes, you might think that this would prompt “scientific investigation of the composition of menstrual products, and regimes of regulation capable of responding to the findings of such investigation. That is what happens with drugs and foodstuffs, two other classes of product routinely inserted into the body.”

Naturally, this being an issue that concerns women, that is not what’s happened. All we have are anecdotal reports, and occasional spot-checks by independent agencies — both of which suggest that all may not be entirely well.

One of the issues raised by the article will be familiar to readers of Invisible Women: the use of endocrine disrupting chemicals. Here’s a quick recap from Chapter Five:

EDCs mimic – and therefore can disrupt – reproductive hormones, ‘triggering changes in how cells and organs function, with an impact on a diverse array of metabolic, growth, and reproductive processes in the body’. The data on EDCs and their impact on women is limited. But what we do know is enough to give us pause, and should certainly be enough to trigger a full-scale data-collection programme.
[…]
The World Health Organization, the European Union and the Endocrine Society have all issued major reports on the dangers of EDCs, with the Endocrine Society in particular linking their use to the significant increase in breast-cancer rates in industrialised countries. And yet in many countries, regulation of EDCs is spotty at best. Phthalates, some of which have demonstrated endocrine-disrupting properties, are chemicals used to make plastics softer. They are found in ‘a wide range of products – from children’s toys to shower curtains. They are also used in nail polish, perfumes, and skin moisturizers, and can also be found in the outer coating on medicines and in the tubing used in medical devices’.
In Canada, they ‘are explicitly regulated only in soft vinyl articles for children; their use in the Canadian cosmetics industry is largely unregulated’. In the EU, as of 2015 EDCs can’t be produced unless authorised for a specific purpose – but they are allowed in products imported from abroad. In the US, there are no federal laws that require companies to list ingredients in their cleaning products (in the US women do 70% of household cleaning and make up 89% of home and hotel cleaners – most of whom are ethnic minorities), and a recent report found that even supposedly ‘green’ cleaning products contain EDCs. When Always menstrual pads were tested in 2014 they were found to include ‘a number of chemicals – including styrene, chloroform and acetone – that have been identified as either carcinogens or reproductive and developmental toxins’. (IW, pp.118-9)

The Economist article cites a more recent analysis, from 2020, where Kurunthachalam Kannan, an environmental chemist at the New York University School of Medicine, “tested 43 pads, tampons and pantyliners from a local shop and found three bisphenols, five parabens and five phthalates.”

None of this is to say that menstrual product manufacturers are deliberately trying to poison us, or indeed that your menstrual pad presents a clear and present danger. All this tells us is that we should be collecting data — both on the presence of chemicals and the impact of said chronicals, specifically on women and even more specifically when absorbed via the vulva and vagina.

But, of course, that’s not how what testing there is is done. As the Economist article notes,

existing studies of chemical safety often rely on administration by mouth. These are a poor basis for estimating the impact of vaginal exposure, since substances ingested orally have first to pass through the destructive chemical furnace that is the gastrointestinal system before they are absorbed into the body. Similarly, drawing conclusions from skin exposure in areas like the forearm may be a flawed approach, because this skin is far less permeable than vulvar skin.

Worse, which the article does not mention, most of these studies have been done in men. Here’s me in Invisible Women reminding you why that’s a problem:

Men and women have different immune systems and different hormones, which can play a role in how chemicals are absorbed. Women tend to be smaller than men and have thinner skin, both of which can lower the level of toxins they can be safely exposed to. This lower tolerance threshold is compounded by women’s higher percentage of body fat, in which some chemicals can accumulate. (IW, p. 116)

And in relation to the Economist’s point about oral testing, well, female gut transit times are about twice the length of men’s, kidney filtering is faster in men, and women have less bile acid composition, all of which, together with women’s lower basal metabolic rate, can affect oral absorption (see IW, p. 215)

Then of course there’s the issue with chemicals generally being tested in isolation and on the basis of a single exposure. But as I noted in Invisible Women, that’s “not how women tend to encounter them, either at home (in cleaning products and cosmetics), or in the workplace.”

In nail salons, where the workforce is almost exclusively female (and often migrant), workers will be exposed on a daily basis to a huge range of chemicals that are ‘routinely found in the polishes, removers, gels, shellacs, disinfectants and adhesives that are staples of their work’. Many of these chemicals have been linked to cancer, miscarriages and lung diseases. Some may alter the body’s normal hormonal functions. After a shift of paid work many of these women will then go home and begin a second unpaid shift, where they will be exposed to different chemicals that are ubiquitous in common cleaning products. The effects of these chemicals mixing together are largely unknown, although research does indicate that exposure to a mixture of chemicals can be much more toxic than exposure to chemicals on an individual basis. (IW, p.117)

But, GFPs, don’t despair! There is good news from, inevitably, Sweden:

The Swedish Institute for Standards, a think-tank, has proposed creating a worldwide standard for menstrual products. This would include guidance on limits for various chemicals in them, on acceptable testing methods, and on materials. This idea passed an initial vote at the International Organisation for Standardisation, a confederation of national standards bodies also known as the ISO, this year. The ISO hopes that, by taking cues from existing standards on products such as condoms and sex toys, it can establish guidelines which could reduce inconsistencies between brands, products and batches.

As everyone who listened to episode one of the Visible Women podcast knows, I do love a good standard.

One note of caution to end on, however. The article goes on to suggest that period underwear may be safer — and, well, it might be. But it would be remiss of me not to point to the class action lawsuit settled this year by THINX, the US-based purveyor of premium period pants. THINX marketed their pants as “organic, sustainable and nontoxic,” but several investigations into the pants found potentially harmful chemicals in the crotch area of the pants, including per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Per the New York Times:

In 2017, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified certain PFAS as potential carcinogens. PFAS also disrupt hormonal functions and some research has suggested that they are linked to accelerated ovarian aging, period irregularities and ovarian disorders like polycystic ovarian syndrome.
For pregnant women, PFAS have been associated with an increased risk of high blood pressure, or pre-eclampsia, and some research suggests that babies who are exposed in utero face an increased risk of low birth weight. In a recent study, Dr. Mahalingaiah found PFAS in period blood, which suggests the chemicals can make their way to the reproductive system, presenting a potential risk to uterine function and early pregnancy.

Thankfully, the article closes with advice that menstrual cups made from medical grade silicone are likely “inert” and therefore ok. Which would be a relief to me except…I can’t even to begin to remember where I got my menstrual cup or what it’s made of 🤪

Happy IWD, ladies!

Default male of the week

Let me now, on this, the International Day of Women, laud some of our great womenfolk, specifically, Jodi Huettner, founder of Helga Wear: a company that specialises in designing PPE designed for female bodies.

As long-time GFPs will know I have been on about this issue for a VERY LONG TIME, for more details see here, here, here and also episode one of the Visible Women podcast. Plus, Invisible Women the book pp.120-27. (Did I mention it’s only 99p on kindle today????) Basically, I’ve got a bit of a THING about PPE being designed for the default male body.

Anyway, as I think I briefly covered in the podcast episode on PPE, one of the major issues when it comes to fixing this problem is the failure to account for female bodies in the standards. Ah yes, my lovely standards. When it comes to the FFP2 and 3 masks that became synonymous with Covid, the EU standard for them has nothing to say about sex differences in face size and shape, merely requiring that masks be tested on the Sheffield Head (remember this is a mould of the head of Jim, a man from Sheffield) and then on ten “clean-shaven” people.

Hmmm.

Anyway, three cheers for Jodi, for she too is on the standards warpath:

“We thought we'd done what we needed to do to get to the equity we know today,” says Huettner referring to a movement in the 90s to eliminate gender language from official government policy.
“Here we are 30 years later, learning that we have ignored the statistical distinct natures of the genders… we really only have a monopoly in terms of fit, and it's only a 200 pound Caucasian male body bell curve that we use in design.”
Huettner believes its time to mandate inclusive design in the creation of PPE. She’s been lobbying the BC government, WorkSafe BC, as well as the CSA Group to change wording in official documents to reflect differences between men and women.

😍

As is so often the case, Jodi’s determination to address this gap comes courtesy of her own bitter encounters with the default male:

I started out with my sewing machine in East Van, adjusting my gear to suffer less and be more competitive as a junior engineer in the field along coastal BC.
Having spent hundreds of hours wearing the smaller sizes of standard male-bodied safety garments, I found that I was far from safe.

Eventually, Jodi quit her job where she had to adjust her own PPE to set up Helga Wear. Designing PPE to fit women is “not difficult,” she told Canadian Occupational Safety’s magazine:

We don't have to do anything extra. We already have all the body data, all the information we need to be able to make PPE fit women. The problem is, is we're just not making it for women's bodies.

With thanks to GFP Kristine for pointing me towards Jodi’s story, thinking I might like it, as indeed I did!

Poppy pic of the week

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

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Invisible Women: a bloody sisterhood