Invisible Women: some good news for once

putting their money where their mouth is

Good morning GFPs! This week I bring you news from the English GCSE paper, where a question on the set text An Inspector Calls which asked about Mrs Birling was, according to my correspondent, GFP Tracy, instead answered by many of the students on the topic of Mr Birling. The really ridiculous thing about this is that it apparently had already happened six years ago ☠️ you would think they would have clarified for a world in which everyone assumes male…anyway the good news is that since it has already happened once before, students can be reassured they won’t penalised for this mistake since, per the exam board’s statement, “examiners will pick up on this error and apply a “best fit” approach to marking the overall quality of the candidates response.” Nevertheless, I am DESPERATE for sex disaggregated data on which students got it wrong, so if anyone has an in with AQA, the exam board, please HMU!

In other news, and as I mentioned in last week’s newsletter I am travelling this week, so when you receive this I will be on my way to Hamburg. Well, not actually. When you receive it I will probably be in bed, but I will be ABOUT to travel to Hamburg! And from then to Strasbourg for this conference on the 30th May to launch the Council’s new 5 year Gender Equality Strategy, and also to mark the 10th anniversary “of the entry into force” of the Istanbul Convention — the Council of Europe’s Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women.

The great thing about the Istanbul Convention, as I also mentioned last week, is that it is legally binding. This means that a government who has signed up to and ratified the treaty can be held legally accountable. But, of course, in order to know whether or not a government is abiding by its obligations, you really need comprehensive, systematically collected, sex disaggregated data. And as the monitoring reports on the progress of Convention signatories make clear, this data is all too often missing, fragmented, or otherwise inadequate. Which leads me very neatly onto this week’s gender data gap of the week…

Gender data gap of the week

One of the most commonly asked questions I get whenever I give a talk on the gender data gap is whether there are any areas where the data is skewed towards women rather than men. Yes! I tell them: fertility and cosmetics. Which tells you a lot about what you need to know about how women are seen in society.

But here is one I hadn’t really considered before, despite running up against this gendered data gap myself in the course of my research: domestic abuse. We have pretty good and easily accessible data on the victims, who are overwhelmingly female. But what about data on the perpetrators, who we know are overwhelmingly male? That data is usually much harder to get hold of. But why should that be? Isn’t it as important to know who is committing a crime as it is to know who is being victimised by it? And if we’re interested in prevention, isn’t it even more important to know who the perpetrators are?

I started thinking about this after I was tagged into this post on LinkedIn by Lula Dembele, an Australian policy researcher who has set herself the not insubstantial task of “reducing men’s use of violence in domestic, family, and intimate settings by 25% in 25 years.” Dembele is clearly a GFP in the making as her first step was to look at the data, so she could establish a baseline against which to test her interventions. Which is how she discovered that there just….wasn’t any.

I looked widely for the research and statistics to use for this baseline. But I was truly shocked to discover that there is no measure of or data on how many people perpetrate and use domestic, family, and sexual violence in Australia.

Australia has national statistics that capture data on victims at regular intervals, but none on perpetrators. And, as Dembele says, “only focussing on people who have been victimised (myself one of them) is not going to stop the perpetration of violence. Violence is a problem for victims, but it is not a victim’s problem.”

So, and here is my second bit of evidence that Dembele is, in fact, a GFP, she set about trying to fix this, calling for a national study on the “the perpetration of domestic, family, and sexual violence.”

This started six years ago. Since then, Dembele has written research proposals and briefing papers, spoken at conferences, done media hits, hassled politicians and hustled for funding, both private and public. She managed to get funding to co-author “a state of knowledge paper on violence perpetration,” which found that “less than 2% of perpetrators come to the attention of the criminal legal system.” They also noted that “this data provides an incomplete or skewed data on who perpetrates DFSV due to existing biases within these systems.” What this means is that even the limited data we do have on perpetrators is not entirely reliable.

But despite all this work, and many acknowledgements from politicians and officials that she is correct and we do need this data if we want to get serious about addressing domestic violence, no money has been forthcoming to actually make this data collection happen.

It’s very hard not to feel despondent when you read stories like this, because it’s so often the way when it comes to the gender data gap. Everyone nods and agrees with you, ooh yes, you’re so right, yes it is silly we aren’t collecting this data and hmmm indeed those are terrible outcomes we should absolutely do something about them.

And then no one wants to put their money where their mouth is.

---

Default male of the week

Ok so, I ended on a gloomy note for the gender data gap of the week, but don’t worry GFPs, because I have not one but TWO good news stories for you now, and from from the most unlikely of places: car safety design!

First up, exciting new legislation has been introduced in the US that not only mandates for the first time that female crash test dummies should be included in the same number of tests as the default male dummy (Invisible Women readers may remember that the so-called female dummy doesn’t get tested in the drivers’ seat because we still live in the 1920s apparently). And on the subject of that so-called female car crash test dummy, (again, readers of IW will remember that this is actually just a scaled-down male dummy and for about the millionth time, women are not scaled-down men) this new legislation ALSO requires, again for the first time, that the female dummy be based on, you know, an actual female body.

it me

I know, I KNOW, it feels ridiculous to be so excited about this, but this truly is momentous! The US’s regulatory bodies have been dragging their feet on this for decades, despite their own data showing that “1,300 women die every year who would otherwise have lived if female death and injury rates were comparable to that of males.” And the best thing is that this is a bipartisan bill, (sponsored by two Republican and two Democrat women and yes I am recalling the bit in Invisible Women where I said having female politicians made a difference to what legislation gets passed) which means that in America’s polarised political system it has a chance of actually becoming law.

The other good thing about all this is that a dummy based on female anatomy already exists! ikr, you’d think this would have been enough for the regulators to include it, but apparently not. Anyway, this dummy, the THOR 5F, takes into account all sorts of sex differences beyond height and weight, like muscle and fat distribution, bone density, and body shape, like for example the pelvis. It has been designed using “real world safety data” to identify where improvements needed to be made, and has a huge number of additional sensors embedded “in places where females experience disproportionate injuries.” This means that not only would this dummy help close the safety gap, it would also help to close the data gap, which will in turn enable us to make cars even safer for women.

Sticking with sex differences in where men and women experience injuries, I’m moving on to my next good news of the week! So we’ve known for a long time now that women are more likely to be seriously injured or to die in a car crash than men. But for a long time there was a data gap when it came to understanding sex differences in where on the body men and women were injured. This gap was addressed in a paper that is new to me, but was published in 2020. The authors created a new dataset by linking together law enforcement and emergency services data in order to try to address this question. They found a whole range of significant differences in terms of where on the body men and women were most likely to be injured, but the one that most attracted my attention was the abdomen, which was a more prevalent for women.

And the reason this attracted my attention was the podcast episode I recorded last year, where I interviewed Maria Kuhn. Here’s a clip for you.

So obviously I’m now wondering how much of this increased risk of abdomen injuries in women is down to not just the default male car, but the default male protection device. Talk about adding insult to injury.

So what’s the good news? As ever, that the data gap is being closed — and this isn’t just about the 2020 paper.

If the US legislation gets enacted, the new dummy will further help to close the data gap specifically around the abdomen and how the seatbelt sits on the female body, since this is an area that the dummy is specifically designed to collect data on.

But also, and this is how I came across the 2020 analysis, the lead author of that paper, University of Arizona assistant professor Alyssa Ryan, has received a $467,000 award from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, which she will be using to build on her previous research and further close the data gap:

Ryan, in collaboration with Oregon State University professor David Hurwitz, will analyze massive datasets from the U.S. Census Bureau, National Emergency Medical Services Information System, Federal Highway Administration Highway Statistics and the Fatal Accident Reporting Systems to identify crash trends among different groups. This is the first time that data of such magnitude has been used to research traffic inequity on a national scale. (Source)

Come for the bipartisan legislation; stay for the “massive datasets” 🤤

---

Poppy pic of the week

It’s fine, Poppy, no, no, you get comfy, I didn’t have anything important to say anyway…

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