Women in a man's world
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 8 March 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In a world designed by men for men, women often come off worst, sometimes with fatal consequences.
Manuela Saragosa speaks to author Caroline Criado Perez about the gender data gap - the fact that everything from smartphone health apps to lapel microphones is designed with a male body in mind, and how for example cardiovascular problems in women go under-diagnosed because the female body is treated as "atypical".
This blind spot for women is built into our work environments in large part because the people designing those environments are mostly men. So how do we get more women into positions of power? The answer, according to organisational psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, is not to ease the way for women to reach the top, but rather to make it more difficult for so many incompetent over-confident men to do so.
Plus, Kathryn Colas, founder of consultancy Simply Hormones, explains how the affect of the menopause on women in the workplaces is only just beginning to be recognised by employers.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuel Zaragoza. Coming up, sexist data and |
| 0:08.3 | incompetent male leaders. We reward men for things that we should actually exclude them for, |
| 0:14.7 | like narcissistic traits, psychopathic traits, being greedy, self-centered and aggressive. |
| 0:21.4 | We're so used to the male being the default, men representing humanity, that I think a lot of |
| 0:27.7 | it is just forgetting to include women. Basically, women are too complicated to measure |
| 0:31.9 | because it makes it too expensive. On International Women's Day, the researcher who says |
| 0:36.3 | the modern world is designed with only men in mind. |
| 0:39.8 | That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:45.1 | This is a man's world. |
| 0:47.7 | James Brown said so in his chart-topping song back in the 1960s, a song which Rolling Stone magazine went on to describe as |
| 0:55.2 | biblically chauvinistic. But was Mr. Brown just stating the obvious? A new book shows |
| 1:01.1 | how women are regularly excluded from data, what's been called the gender data gap. The author, |
| 1:07.3 | Caroline Creado-Perez, says it happens all the time in business, academia, government, pretty much all walks of life. |
| 1:14.3 | It's often not deliberate, just that in many studies, the default human, the reference point, tends to be a man, not a woman. |
| 1:21.9 | How does that manifest itself in real life? |
| 1:24.3 | Well, we voiced up some examples women wrote about on Twitter. |
| 1:28.0 | I got a new iPhone and found myself dropping it constantly. Finally twigged that it's because |
| 1:33.8 | modern phones are designed for enormous manhands and are too big. Heart monitoring for stress |
| 1:40.9 | echocardiogram cannot be done with a bra on, jogging on a treadmill with |
| 1:46.2 | EKG leads, 40D breasts and no bra. I objected and I was told that's just how the test works. |
| 1:54.9 | Designed by and four men who can jog shirtless for 10 minutes. |
| 2:00.0 | I get awfully annoyed by lapel mics and having to remember |
... |
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