Women Not Included: Consumer Products

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0:52Dr Ella Hubber:I was recently on my phone in bed idly browsing social media as you do when I came across a question someone had put out to the world. It said, what are some of the most ridiculous examples of bad design without women in mind? And in the thread beneath, people gave examples of things we have already covered in this series, like safety equipment and medicines. But surprisingly, most were mundane, everyday items. For example, one user wrote, button down blouses. Why do they always gap open over the boobs? You are designing for humans with boobs. Another one complained about underwear design, saying, a lot of thongs and other skimpy underwear are obviously designed by men with little concept of vagina location and its daily gifts.

1:46Dr Ella Hubber:Several people pointed out how mobile phones were too big for their hands. Others mentioned tools, razors, gym equipment, tampon packaging. In just a few hours, there were almost 2 ,000 replies. I'm Ella Hubber and this is Women Not Included for Discovery on the BBC World Service.

2:08Dr Ella Hubber:In this six-part series, we have explored the many ways the world has not been designed with women in mind. And today we're talking about consumer products, the everyday items that run our lives. And coming along for the ride with me is science and health journalist Katie Silver in Sydney, Australia. Hello, Katie. Hi, Ella. Katie, I've already laid out a few examples of consumer products not serving women well, but where does your mind go? My mind goes to the extra amount that we have to pay for this, the so-called pink tax, which is this phenomenon where products and services marketed specifically at women are priced higher than the male counterpart.

2:48Dr Ella Hubber:Yeah, pink tax is a classic. And I always question, are these products actually different enough to justify the price or are they just pink and more expensive? Let me tell you this one anecdote and you can decide. So one of the most notorious cases I've seen is Bic for Her. I'm not sure if you've heard of it. No. It's a pen designed to, quote, comfortably fit in a woman's hand. Okay, if I'm being very kind, I can see the intention behind this. You know, as I said at the start, mobile phones are often cited as being too large for many women's hands and they want something smaller. So perhaps the same applies here.

3:29Sure. But in this case, there is just a huge range of things that influence the kind of pen that might be comfortable for you. Grip style, handedness, finger length. A small hand definitely doesn't just mean a small pen. and to make it worse, it was typically 70 % more expensive. So you were paying more but receiving less with your smaller pen. So Bic for Her was mocked by everyone and the Amazon reviews really are quite something. Okay, okay, you have to tell me one. Please tell me one. Okay, all right, I've got one here. It says, I love Bic Crystal for Her. The delicate shape and pretty pastel colours make it perfect for writing recipe cards, checks to my psychologist.

4:07I'm seeing him for a case of the hysterics. Ask your husband for some extra pocket money so you can buy one today.

4:13Dr Ella Hubber:Oh, that's fantastic. Scathing. I'm surprised, though, that Bic sells this with the backlash they got. Well, Bic has discontinued them, but they are available elsewhere online. And I should say, I reached out to Bic for comment on how or why they thought this was a good idea. And I'm still waiting, Ella. It's been quite a while. Okay. And of course, the pink tax issue is a lot more than just pens. Yes, of course. So it's much bigger than this. Yeah, New York's Department of Consumer Affairs crunched the numbers and they found this price premium existed on nearly 800 products with clear male and female versions that were sold across the city from more than 90 brands.

4:54The funny thing is we can't even opt out of it. So there might be the argument that, well, these products use different materials like textiles or ingredients and are therefore more expensive to make. But as an individual consumer, we can't choose that companies have made this decision on our behalf and basically chosen for us to have to spend more.

5:12Dr Ella Hubber:It's a very good point, Katie. But for now, I want to move away from the cost and look more towards the actual design and testing of some of these products. So I'm going to go away, get some expert opinion and bring it back for you. Does that sound good? Sounds great. Thanks, Ella. There is sort of this moment where I think they realised this isn't just me. This is all of us. I would love to see some general packaging warnings. It's about starting with the science and the design that start with women's bodies and women's experiences. Women find ways to cope. Hi, Katie. Welcome back. Hello. So where are we taking this then?

5:53Dr Ella Hubber:Okay, so I wanted to find a few tangible examples of consumer products that we could really dive into like the design or even the science of with an expert. So I decided to start with something I have personally noticed, and that is running shoes. I have noticed that my running shoes, which are labelled women's, look exactly the same as the men's version, just smaller. And I thought, surely there are more differences between our feet than just size. So I looked into it and came across Chris Napier, who is the director of the Simon Fraser University Run Lab in Canada. And in 2025, Chris and his team did a study where they held focus groups with women runners to understand their experiences with running shoes in their own words.

6:45The dominant message was that comfort and fit do matter. And many women were having to compromise. They also describe, you know, long process of trial and error. So trying different lacing strategies, sizing up or sizing down to make the shoe fit them. And that was sort of an aha moment, I think, among most people in the group in that we had a lot of women sort of recounting what they thought were their individual experiences. And then there is sort of this moment where I think they realized this isn't just me. This is all of us. We've all had to do these things. And I think by the end of it, it was really clear that this is more than just a me problem.

7:24This is a broad problem for most women.

7:27Dr Ella Hubber:So let's take a step back for a second and figure out how we got here. How are running shoes actually designed? So running shoes are built around a three-dimensional mold, which is called a last. and that last determines the underlying shape of the shoe. And so historically, most lasts have been based primarily on a male foot, on male anatomy. And the women's version is essentially just scaled down from that and often just with changes to colour or sort of exterior styling. And that's where the phrase shrink it and pink it comes from. Right. So then what does a woman's foot actually look like compared to a man's then?

8:06Dr Ella Hubber:Why does this become such a big problem? A woman's foot is not just a smaller man's foot. On average, women tend to have a proportionally wider forefoot and a narrower heel. And they also have differences in the instep and the arch characteristics. And there's overlap between individuals, obviously. So this isn't about saying all women are the same, but it's about sort of recognising that there are average anatomical patterns and we need to design with that diversity in mind. And then when you get these kind of shrink it and pink it factors, is it just a comfort issue or does it affect injury?

8:43Dr Ella Hubber:Does it affect performance? Comfort is the most immediate issue for sure and that shouldn't be dismissed. But it's not only about comfort. So footwork can influence how forces are applied to the body, how the foot moves inside the shoe, how the lower limbs absorb those impacts. There may be a link there with injury. We don't know because that hasn't really been studied and this is part of the problem. But there's also likely a link with performance. For performance, even small changes in comfort or stability or sort of efficiency of movement can matter and especially for athletes who are training and competing at a high level.

9:18Dr Ella Hubber:Do you think that because this is apparel for women, it's not taken as seriously as sportswear. Yes. Women have been excluded for a long time because they're complicated to study. They have menstrual cycles. There's the added difficulties of pregnancy and menopause. And they've often been looked at as being confounding factors and inconveniences for research. But they're part of the reality of female physiology. And so they're important to include in research design. But there's also been for a long time, a lack of women in leadership positions in sports science, in engineering and product design, and in decision making.

10:05And so I think the consequence of that is that women may be seen as consumers, but less visible as sort of data sources or co-designers.

10:16Dr Ella Hubber:Chris will be back later in the show. But for now, Katie, he leaves us with the knowledge that even though shoes might be labelled as women's, they are based on a last that is designed on male anatomy. It's terribly devastating. I really hope he comes back later in the program and tells me where I should instead be buying my shoes. Really interested to know if they're going to sort of study proper ergonomics and design to correct this problem because, as you say, the consumer market's huge. I mean, I can tell you that they are. That's their next step. Now that they've found the problems, their hope is to design better shoes, which is great.

10:54Brilliant. Chris as well mentioned that women in leadership roles issue. An article I read in the Harvard Social Impact Review highlighted that even though women influence the majority of buying decisions, as much, for example, as 90 % in the US, only 19 % of product designers in the US are women and only 11 % of leadership roles are held by women.

11:15Dr Ella Hubber:Ah, okay. So the implication here is that most of the people in the room designing the products, making the decisions, don't actually know what their consumer base wants or needs. Yes, exactly. And one analysis I read on the issue by a brand manager said that higher-ups just assume they can gain this knowledge through analysis or research, but having women's voices in the room is essential. If you were in the room, Katie, is there anything you would change? Well, my partner always gets me in trouble basically for why do I lose my phone, always saying that to me. It's because I have nowhere to put it.

11:51You know, none of our clothes as women have pockets. So I would certainly add more of those for a start.

11:56Dr Ella Hubber:Yes, absolutely. I completely agree with you. I'm currently wearing an outfit with no pockets. Me too. This is the absolute scourge of my life. And I think a lot of women can probably relate to this. Ella, do you know why we don't have pockets? I think I do know this one. It's something to do with maintaining a very form-fitting silhouette in clothes, which pockets apparently ruin. Yes, they do apparently. So it's to look thin, basically. And funnily enough, it's also about making money. So Caroline Stevens is Program Director of Cultural and Historical Studies at the University of the Arts, London.

12:34She told the BBC that the fashion industry is invested in women buying handbags and having pockets doesn't align very well with that goal. It's crazy. It's like a handbag conspiracy. Exactly. I mean, you take the handbag out of the outfit and make people pay extra for it.

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13:47Dr Ella Hubber:You're listening to Women Not Included for Discovery on the BBC World Service, where we explore the many ways the world is not designed for women. This time we're talking about the everyday items that run our lives, consumer products. We've already contemplated the pink tacks and the shrink it and pink it approach to footwear. Now I want to move on to an experience and product that most women listening will be familiar with. Tampons, pads, menstrual cups, period underwear, billions upon billions of menstrual products are used worldwide every year. And even though I use them every month, I had no idea how they were manufactured or tested or why they were labelled a certain way.

14:32Dr Ella Hubber:But because Dr. Bethany Samuelson-Banout, who is the director of classical hematology at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, uses these products in the clinic, she has become very acquainted with what the labels like regular, super and ultra on menstrual products really mean. They're not terribly precise labels, but there are some kind of general guidelines about how much they should absorb to have these different labels, mostly for safety purposes around tampons. But those tests are all done with saline. So it just gives you an idea of how much saline the product can absorb. Why does it matter or does it matter that these products are tested with saline instead of blood?

15:14Yeah, because we think that the absorbency of blood should be quite different than the absorbency of saline. So saline is just basically pure, clear liquid. It's got some salts dissolved in the water, but it doesn't have the cells and all of the proteins and all the other things that we expect to see in blood or menstrual effluents. And so we really should expect some differences in absorbency between blood and menstrual effluent and saline.

15:40Dr Ella Hubber:And you use these products in the clinic as a diagnostic tool. How does that work? So we base this on a study that was done back in the 90s, which involves collecting all of the menstrual products over the course of a cycle and processing them to measure the amount of hemoglobin in them. From that, we gather that changing a pad or a tampon more often than every one to two hours is consistent with heavy menstrual bleeding, at least if it's saturated. What is heavy menstrual bleeding a sign of or what can it be a sign of? In teenagers, it's commonly a sign of just the ovaries trying to figure out their way in life and kind of irregular bleeding.

16:22But it can be a sign of a bleeding disorder and up to 20 % of folks with heavy menstrual bleeding. It can be a sign of fibroids or other structural things in the endometrium. And in some cases, it can even be a sign of things like endometrial cancer.

16:37Dr Ella Hubber:You're using tampons and pads in the clinic as a diagnostic tool for heavy menstrual bleeding, but they were never designed for this purpose. right? And you obviously saw an issue there and ultimately designed a study to measure what these products can actually hold. Can you tell me a bit about the study, like how it was designed and what you found? So this study really was to see how much blood these products can absorb. And so what we decided to do was use expired blood products. So when you donate blood, they go to hospitals and blood banks and sometimes the product expires before it can be used.

17:12And so We got some of those from our blood bank and we collected pads, tampons, menstrual cups, menstrual discs, and measured absorption. And we did that by either pouring the blood and measuring how much blood that was. Or in the case of tampons, we actually dipped the tampon into a container full of blood and then measured how much less blood there was after we took the tampon out. And so we did find that these products can absorb quite a lot of blood, up to 50 milliliters in some cases. And to put all that in perspective, 80 milliliters or more of blood loss per cycle is considered to be heavy menstrual bleeding.

17:50And so if somebody is filling a menstrual cup three times during a cycle, that means that they have heavy menstrual bleeding. Or if they're saturating a couple of overnight pads during the cycle, that means that they have heavy menstrual bleeding. And so, you know, this really supports our clinical evaluation that women find ways to cope. And our findings also suggest that it varies how much is absorbed depending on the product type.

18:15Dr Ella Hubber:And I know you're a doctor, you're a hematologist, but these are ultimately consumer products we're talking about. And so from a consumer point of view, do you think should product labeling look different or should companies be testing differently? You know, I would love to see some general packaging warnings. You know, at this point, using expired blood products is probably the best that we can do. But I think, you know, measuring that and standardizing it over different product batches, for example, and then be able to get some kind of succinct information that we could get to the consumer with this particular product.

18:54If X happens, then you may have heavy menstrual bleeding and you should get checked out. I think that would be the best use of a company's time to really improve the consumer experience and help us catch more heavy menstrual bleeding.

19:07Dr Ella Hubber:Thank you to Bethany Samuelson-Banao. It's surprising to hear that even products that are specifically for females often lack the testing needed to fully understand how they perform in the real world. It's crazy. And I'm kind of shocked that there's even that much of a difference between blood and saline solution. Like, I never would have guessed. I should make the distinction here that in the USA, tampons are considered medical devices, which means they are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. So there is a certain level of testing that needs to be done to make sure they are safe. But that is not the case everywhere.

19:48Dr Ella Hubber:In many countries, tampons and other menstrual products are classed as consumer goods, which also means they are only subject to consumer regulation, not medical regulation. That doesn't mean that companies are not testing them, but it can affect how much they do. And sorry to bring this back to money, but the way they're classed can also affect how much they cost. So in many countries, menstrual products are considered non-essential, so they're subject to general sales tax, which increases the cost. Yes. Yeah. I remember in the late 2010s in particular, this issue really blew up. There were a lot of petitions online to try and get this tax removed in many countries.

20:28Yeah. It actually goes back way earlier. So in Australia, I remember there was this notorious protest against the tax on tampons. It was a long time ago, but it's totally imprinted in my memory. There's a clip, if you want to have a look, it was former Australian Prime Minister John Howard. Let's have a look at this.

20:46Dr Ella Hubber:Okay, so we have a crowd of mostly women. They are holding placards that say no tax on tampons. They are wearing red capes. And are they throwing tampons at the Prime Minister? Yes, they are. So this is back in 2000. They called themselves the Menstrual Avengers and they were protesting against a 10 % goods and services tax on sanitary products. So yes, Australia was almost like a place of almost like suffragette style shale behaviour on this. And it took 18 years and they finally agreed and the tax was dropped in 2019. We also abolished tax on menstrual products here in the UK in 2021, so not long after.