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Bad Design is Killing Women
Failure to consider women in the designed world — from seat belts to sleeping pills — is killing and maiming them. This can change.
It was a joke in our family that mom scoots the car seat up so far the wheel is practically in her lap. A recent episode of 99% Invisible made me realize there’s nothing funny about cars not fitting women since the result is carnage and fatalities: women are “47% more likely to be seriously injured and 17% more likely to die than a man if they’re in a car crash.” My mom — and women generally — are in greater danger because they have no been considered in the design process.
This failure to consider women in the designed world is endemic to a scale difficult to measure. Cars are just one significant example. It’s not news to women that cars just don’t fit correctly, of course. One uncomfortable facet of that is seatbelts designed without considering breasts. Pedals that are difficult or impossible to use while wearing heels is another failure of the car to recognize women. The overall experience of being in a vehicle just doesn’t fit most women.
One of the more significant results of designed the car to the specifications of the average man is that until very recently all crash testing was done with male crash test dummies. The entire engineering focus, then, was to build a car environment that would protect the…
