By Sara Shariff
For The Exclusive
sexism
/ˈsɛksɪz(ə)m/
noun
prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex.
From closing the gender pay gap, to giving all women the opportunity to access education, there’s a lot we still need to achieve in the fight for gender equality. While it’s important to work on fixing the big issues, it’s the small and seemingly harmless instances of everyday sexism that are also working to maintain and normalize inequality between men and women.
Different expectations about the way men and women are supposed to behave are everywhere, but it’s particularly frustrating when they are treated differently for exhibiting similar behaviors. An assertive woman is called “pushy” or “bitchy”, while an assertive man is promoted; an ageing woman is called a “witch”, while an ageing man is called a “silver fox”. Men who work long hours are “workaholics”, while career-focused women are selfish.
Y.Y (name changed) a student from Tbilisi state medical university had this to say “I was told to pursue gynaecology or paediatrics as it suits women more”.
From their twenties onwards, women find they are constantly asked when they’re going to get a partner, get married and/or have children, as if women’s worth lies only in their marital status and childbearing capabilities. Unfortunately, in the 21st century, this is what most people still believe: that a life without children is a life unfulfilled, that a woman who is unmarried and childless is an “Unwoman”, to borrow Margaret Atwood’s phrase.
Z.Z (name changed) a student from TSMU shared they experience pressure from their relatives to get married immediately after graduation while her older male cousins face no such pressure.
Such prejudices don’t just lie in people’s expectations and societal norms. They affect women’s everyday lives too down to the everyday products they use.
Take smartphones for instance. Because women’s hands are typically smaller than men’s by about 2.5cm or so, phones over 12.5cm are difficult, if not impossible, to use with one hand without fumbling or dropping. Yet phones are getting ever bigger, with the largest current models nearly 17.5cm in size.
This male-leaning tendency was noted in a 2010 expert paper on the gender dimensions of product design, prepared by a group of Danish researchers for the United Nations.
The paper concluded that there is a male gender bias in many tech products, and that differences in male and female preferences need to be considered in order to create products that cater for women, too.
Not that such disparity is limited to the field of technology.
Think about power tools which are unwieldy and heavy for women to use, work chairs that are not ergonomic, food jars and can or bottle openers that aren’t friendly to female hand sizes and strength, and face masks that don’t fit well on women’s faces.
But what happens when sexism costs lives?
As K.K a student in TSMU pointed out there have been serious gaps in seatbelt safety testing due to gender bias.
Since the 1970s, car safety tests have been using crash dummies based on the 50th percentile male body, which is considerably taller and heavier than the average woman. But despite various research showing that this puts women at far higher risk of injury than men, the first female crash dummy wasn’t developed until 2012 and is still not mandatory in tests now.
It’s a similar story in medicine.
In Singapore, CPR dummies with a female physique only officially came into use this year.
Today, women are more likely to be misdiagnosed than men are and take longer to be diagnosed with heart disease and some cancers; they may be less likely to be offered pain medication; their symptoms are more likely to be written off as anxiety or all in their head.
Take heart disease, for example. In the late 19th century, Dr. William Osler, one of the founding fathers of modern medicine, declared that women presenting with what we now know to be symptoms of heart attacks or arrhythmias — including shortness of breath and palpitations — were almost certainly suffering from “pseudo angina,” or false angina, “a collection of neurosis-induced symptoms masquerading as genuine disease,”
It’s only in the past 25 years that cardiology studies have included women in significant numbers. Today, some heart attack symptoms that are more common in women, such as jaw and back pain, are still described as “atypical” simply because doctors don’t see them as often in men, and are less likely to be taken seriously, even though 44 percent of women will develop heart disease at some point in their life and one in five women will die from it.
“We have used the male model for diagnosis, for treatment, as the gold standard,” said Dr. Jennifer Mieres, a cardiologist with Northwell Health and co-author of the book “Heart Smarter for Women.” This has “led to continued misrepresentation, misdiagnosis, under-recognition of heart attack in women.”
And historically, medical research and drug trials have either excluded women because their shifting hormones complicate results, or don’t separate the findings by gender. Instead, it is simply assumed that what works for men works for women, too.
It was only recently discovered that “Women have a longer circadian rhythm than men which leads to more sleep for women. Men need 7-8 hours of sleep where women need 8-10 hours which leads to different circadian rhythms. The sleep cycles are similar, but cortisol goes down and melatonin goes up sooner in women than men.” Whereas 7-8 hours was thought the norm in the past as that is what was discovered to work for men.
“We found that for women, poor sleep is strongly associated with high levels of psychological distress, and greater feelings of hostility, depression and anger. In contrast, these feelings were not associated with the same degree of sleep disruption in men.
This write-up barely scratches the surface of how deep rooted gender bias is and how it costs men too. But that will be an article for another time. Unfortunately due to the word limit being reached I would like to conclude by saying that sexism, whether in societal norms, product design, or medical research, has serious consequences and costs lives. It perpetuates inequality between men and women and leads to misdiagnosis, higher risk of injury, and under-recognition of health issues in women.
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