The Male Menopause

Good morning GFPs, and welcome to your semi-regular update from the world of generally forgetting half the global population exists — although in this specific version of that world we are at least noticing it happens, which brings me to Spain, which recently played host to one of my favourite variants of the women-don’t-exist genre: the “okay FINE women exist, but men are so much easier to measure” strain.

The story starts with the release, by the Spanish Agency for Food Safety and Nutrition (AESAN), of its official recommendations for women’s nutritional needs across the menopause transition. This is the “okay FINE, women exist” part of the narrative and it’s a particularly striking development since of all the women we would like to believe do not exist, post-first-flush-of-youth women have traditionally scored highly in this regard. So the very fact that we are willing to recognise not only that older women exist, but that they might have specific nutritional needs, is to be applauded. Although we shan’t be entirely taking leave of our senses (and this is where the “but men are so much easier to measure” bit comes in): it’s one thing to acknowledge post-fertile women exist and even, I guess, that they may need to eat if you’re going all human rights on us, but we can’t be expected to actually study the old crones, that really would be going too far. Or at least, that is how I imagine the conversation going over at AESAN, which in 2026 has published a set of official nutritional recommendations for women using data that was collected…exclusively in men. I mean, look, I don’t like to nit-pick — famously, I do not like to nit-pick — but if we don’t have the data, maybe we just…shouldn’t publish the recommendations?

Big thanks to GFP María, who sent me this story after spotting it in El Diario and correctly surmising that I would find it interesting…and in fact there was more than one aspect to this story that I found interesting. So, naturally, AESAN’s data problems were first noticed by a woman, Sonia de Pascual-Teresa Fernández, a researcher at the Institute of Food Science and Technology and Nutrition (as GFPs may remember both from Invisible Women and also from previous editions of this newsletter, women in general tend to be less likely to forget that women exist, with their research tending to be less likely to exclude them and more likely to present sex-based analysis) — although if you were to read the Google translate version of the article you might come away thinking that de Pascual-Teresa was in fact a man since Google has still not managed to get its translation algorithm to reliably stop defaulting to male pronouns.

This is, in a way, staggering, but in another way I guess it isn’t because as we know, algorithms not only reflect our biases back to us, but they amplify them. And since humans are so reliably male-focused, is it any wonder that our word-association robot masters are so keen to carry on this proud tradition?

Which neatly (it’s almost like I planned it or something 😎) brings me on to another story that piqued my interest this week: a study investigating gendered bias in AI models when they are asked to write stories for kids (and, yep, in the cutesy hellscape that is our current reality, this is very much a thing) found that, surprise surprise, the AI models very much do not like writing about female characters.