Invisible Women: sex disaggregated airport queues
turns out, women are not in fact, too complicated to measure!
Good morning GFPs! I’m back! Not that you probably noticed I was gone, although if you’ve been paying attention and reading my missives religiously you’ll know I have been away from home for the past week, travelling to Hamburg and then Strasbourg to give a couple of talks. So let me tell you all about it!
First up, Hamburg, where I discovered at this museum of Hamburg’s port and warehouse area (massively recommend if you find yourself in the Speicherstadt with some time to kill) that…
…which explains why there was NO TEA in my hotel room 😭
Thankfully, this was also true:
And I was massively spoilt for choice for my coffee needs, including from this place that had its own roaster in the middle of the cafe, very cool, happy coffee addict here, I’ll just pack my own teabags next time.
Back in the museum, I of course nosed out the one exhibit that told me what the women were doing and the answer was: sorting coffee! At a desk like this!
This work, the exhibit informed me, was “regarded as being typical women's work as it required no special training. It was badly paid and very monotonous.” Enough said.
I was also struck by this pic from the late 19th century…
..as I had literally just walked up that bridge and I was sure the statues had not been “Germania” and “Hammonia” as indicated by the sign, but Europa and Hammonia. And indeed, when I got back outside and went to check them out, not only were they Europa and Hammonia, but they looked very different altogether:
It seems that the originals were, along with a lot of the Speicherstadt area, destroyed in WWII and these were the replacements.
On to Strasbourg and the Council of Europe!
Which I was completely CHARMED by. I mean Strasbourg, although also the Council of Europe, who were a total delight. Here is one of the delegates with my book in Romanian! Which I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen before!
And here is Strasbourg charming the pants off me
And here it is terrifying me with these unreasonably alarming flour mill spouts
And then there was this guy for whom I have no explanation either…
One of my reasons for accepting the Council of Europe’s invitation to speak to at their conference was, I admit, personally motivated: one side of my Argentine family were originally from the area, working in Strasbourg and living in a town called Ingwiller, 50km to the north west. They were Jewish, but their daughter, my dad’s grandmother, converted to Catholicism when she married Jose Luis Criado Perez, my dad’s grandfather. The rest of the family that stayed behind in Strasbourg and the surrounding area, as far as we know, died in the Holocaust — but family records are slightly patchy. I wish we knew more! In any case, I did get some time to have a look around Strasbourg’s old Jewish quarter, including the site of the old butcher (my family were butchers and I wondered if this was where they sold their meat??), as well as Ingwiller’s beautiful synagogue and the old Jewish cemetery.
I tried to find some of my family’s graves in the cemetery, but had so little time before I had to catch my train back to Strasbourg, and in any case, it felt like pretty much every gravestone had either Braun, Weil or Levy on it, all of which are family names of ours, but I assume they weren’t all my family? On some of the graves were plaques dedicated to the memory of children and grandchildren of those buried there, who had been taken from the town by the Nazis and whose whereabouts remained unknown. It was a pretty sobering visit; as a friend said to me “the history is very close to the surface in Europe.”
On the other hand, as my dad said when I told him I was doing the talk, there is a pride in being “la descendiente de dos judios que tuvieron que emigrar a la argentina por ser ciudadanos de segunda categoria, este ahora hablando en strassbourg al Council of Europe,” which for those of you who don’t speak Spanish means, “the descendant of two Jews who had to emigrate to Argentina because they were second-class citizens, [who] is now speaking in Strasbourg to the Council of Europe.” That felt like something. Even if a very small something.
In other news I am doing MORE SPEAKING, if you can believe it. This time a little closer to home, in Edinburgh, on the 18th August. You can book tickets here.
And now on to the main reason you actually sign up to this newsletter! I mean, I assume you don’t sign up to read my travelogues / solipsistic family ramblings. That’s just foisted on you BECAUSE I CAN. Be thankful I ran out of time to whine about the absolute sh*tshow that is the Paris metro, of which I will only say: PARIS Y RU LIKE THIS 😭
Gender data gap of the week
GFPs, if you can believe it, I come to you with MORE GOOD NEWS! (Remember how jolly my last newsletter was?) This week, the good news comes from the journal Physiological Measurement, which joins the exalted (and growing!) list of scientific publications that now require sex and gender reporting in all manuscript submissions, woohoo! All research published in the journal will have to “declare the sex and gender balance of subject groups,” and authors must “explain any variations in results related to sex or gender.” This, says the journal, will make it clear whether the findings are applicable to everyone or just, you know, men. Hooray!
Interestingly, the journal introduced this measure following a two-year trail, in which all authors were “requested to include sex and gender reporting information if absent. In addition, if the sample groups were found to be unjustifiably imbalanced, they were asked to increase the subject group size.” The trial was a success and, said Dr Jemimah Eve, IPEM Director of Policy and Impact, “showed that [the sex and gender reporting requirement is] straightforward for researchers to follow,” thus busting the long-held complaint by SOME researchers that “WoMeN ArE ToO CoMpLiCaTeD To mEaSuRe”. Turns out, not so much! And as I note extensively in a little book called Invisible Women, differences between male and female bodies can REALLY MATTER in everything from diagnosis to treatment.
In conclusion, three cheers for the journal of Physiological Measurement and all who sail in her sex disaggregated waters (shush YOUR metaphors are mixed and make no sense)
Default male of the week
Two stories for you this week, the first from Riyadh, where Saudi Arabia’s first male humanoid robot, Mohammad, groped Lebanese journalist Rawya Kassem, who was standing next to him.
Look at that face. Butter wouldn’t melt. Note, though, that the female robot to Kassem’s right, Sara, is managing to keep her hands to herself, so maybe these engineers are actually onto something, as this sex difference seems kinda legit.
In a statement defending Mohammad’s handsy behaviour, his designers insisted that Mohammad is “fully autonomous,” and he was functioning “independently without direct human control,” as if this makes things better? It reminded me of the exchange between Apple and Jamie Heinemeier Hansson when she was given a 20th of the credit given to her husband: “it’s just the algorithm,” as if that is an explanation as opposed to a description of the problem. Anyway without analysing the data on which Mohammad has been trained, it’s hard to say just what it was about Kassem’s left buttock he found so irresistible, but I feel comfortable suggesting that his developers might like to add something to his training along the lines of “women’s bodies are not amusement parks, keep your hands to yourself.” Might be worth adding that line of code to a fair few human men too tbh.
IN OTHER DEFAULT MALE NEWS, GFP Sreeparna replied to a linkedin post of mine (I know everyone dumps on linkedin, but…I kind of like it?!), informing me that airport queues in India are separated by sex.
Men's lines go way faster than women's because apparently, more men travel than women for business and have more security personnel. Untrue- during holidays, weekends & increasingly otherwise when more women travel and have children [and accompanying cabin bags] along with them increasing the lines (and stress levels) during the rushed hours.
I had never heard of this and asked if this applied all the way through security or just for people selected for a pat-down, and it turns out it the queues are separated all the way through, as in this photo.
Very much not the good kind of sex disaggregation.
Poppy pic of the week
“OK, but what if, and just hear me out on this, I didn’t have to get up today?”
GFPs, that’s it! Until next time….xoxoxo
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