Women Not Included: Safety Equipment

12:52Candice Bailey:Yeah, well, it's become increasingly common now, but currently women are only around 18 % of the total mining workforce. And what this means is that women are really considered in personal protective equipment for mining. What are some of the issues they found with it? Well, according to a paper that I recently read, it's included safety boots that are far too wide, overalls that are far too large, harnesses that do not fit around their breasts and hips properly, respirators that have often failed fit tests because they were designed around male facial dimensions. The results actually not just discomfort.

13:22Candice Bailey:Loose clothing can obviously get caught in machinery and poorly fitting respirators may not provide adequate protection from silica dust, which obviously can cause lung disease.

13:31Dr Ella Hubber:I guess the fact that this is like a traditionally male occupation explains why women have not been considered. Not that that excuses it, but it's an explanation.

13:41Candice Bailey:Well, interestingly, it's not the only industry that I found issues in. In many parts of Africa, women make up a large share of the agricultural workforce. This is not a rare or new occupation for women. But women in these instances report the gloves being too large to grip the safety equipment, the protected clothing being too loose, catching on the vegetation, and once again, masks that just don't seal around their smaller faces. I think when we picture PPE, we always think about it as something used in a construction site. But actually, a woman spraying pesticides on a small farm also needs proper protection.

14:39Candice Bailey:We'll be right back.

15:09Dr Ella Hubber:Your move. Learn more at yourmoveohio.com.

15:19Dr 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. And right now, we're working with safety equipment, whether it's personal protective equipment for the few, like spacesuits for astronauts, or for the many, like face masks. Women are rarely factored into their design, which leaves them uncomfortable and less protected. But this issue extends past just design. What if something was designed with women in mind, but the way it was tested meant that we didn't know if it actually worked? This is the case for the 1.7 billion motor vehicles on the road worldwide.

15:56Dr Ella Hubber:Dr. Astrid Linder, who is a professor of traffic safety at the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute, told me more.

16:02Candice Bailey:We know from many studies around the world for many decades that females are less well protected in a number of type of crashes and for a number of injuries. The largest difference is found when it comes to soft tissue neck injuries, that is whiplash injuries, where the risk of getting injured is about double that for females than for males.

16:27Dr Ella Hubber:And what are the reasons for this when we look at the actual car itself? You know, is it the seatbelts? Is it the airbags, the seats themselves?

16:37Candice Bailey:There are many aspects. And here it depends on the direction of the crash. There will be different parts of the vehicle that can provide you with protection. In a rear impact, it is in particular the seat and the seat back and its interaction with the body. Seatbelts come into play in a frontal impact. And there, of course, the interaction with the seatbelt will influence how the body moves and so on. And the way seatbelts are assessed today in new cars is with the torso of an average male.

17:17Dr Ella Hubber:And when you say, you know, assessed for the average male, how does that work? What's going on there?

17:23Candice Bailey:In crash testing or in assessment of safety, we use cases that are representative for, for example, a specific crash type and then also models of the human. When it comes to low severity rain impacts, there we use a model of the average mate. In the testing, there is nothing addressing how it protects the female. What is this model? What does it typically look like?

17:49Dr Ella Hubber:Like an action man.

17:52Candice Bailey:but height you know weight that kind of thing he has the height of 1.77 centimeters weight around 77 kilos an average female would be 15 centimeter shorter than that and 10 plus

18:10Dr Ella Hubber:kilos lighter it's not just necessarily height right it's also the shapes of our bodies yeah

18:17Candice Bailey:So the whole geometry of the body with the width of the shoulders and the hip area and the center of gravity, which is different between males and females. Where females have a somewhat lower center of gravity than males. That's why it's a little bit easier for females to keep balancing the kayak. So that has a benefit.

18:43Dr Ella Hubber:But the downside being that apparently not tested in crash testing. How long have we been testing cars, safety features, using this male average dummy? 50 plus years. And in 50 plus years, very little has been done to change that. Why do you think that this has gone left unaddressed for so long?

19:10Candice Bailey:I rarely come across people that say that it's not important. I think there are so many things in society that are important. So it takes dedication to make a topic, any topic, to make it into the top priority and to make it happen.

19:33Dr Ella Hubber:So Astrid, Linda, will be back later. But for now, she leaves us with the fact that basically we don't know if the safety equipment in the car, the headrests, the seatbelts, the airbags, will protect women until the reports come back telling us otherwise.

19:47Candice Bailey:Ella, you know, Astrid mentioned that females are more at risk. So I looked at some numbers and according to a 2019 study, women are more than 73 % likely to be severely injured in a car crash. And having said that, I do know that my full-of-chester friends have struggled with these issues before. But I'm relatively flat-chested and unfortunately I love driving. I could kind of qualify for a crash test dummy. I'm a little bit bigger.

20:10Dr Ella Hubber:A little bit heavier than the crash test dummy. But it's clearly not just breasts that are a factor, like Astrid said. For example, I personally hate driving because I need to sit quite far forward to reach the pedals. And apparently sitting closer to the steering wheel puts women at greater risk of internal injury from frontal collisions. So it's just another thing.

20:30Candice Bailey:Okay, I'm tall, so I don't sit quite close to the steering wheel.

20:34Dr Ella Hubber:If only we could all be so lucky, Candice. Great. I did also learn, though, that average male crash test dummies are the standard in testing planes, too. Oh my goodness, that's terrible.

20:46Candice Bailey:Women are just not considered anywhere. Like, we were just meant to stay at home. I can't believe that they crash test planes, Ella.

20:53Dr Ella Hubber:They don't, at least not anymore. It would just be too expensive to be crash testing lots of planes. but they do all kinds of safety testing on individual parts of the planes, like putting parts in hot and cold conditions and in wind tunnels. And when it comes to measuring the forces, the body experiences during events like crash landings or extreme turbulence, that is done with male crash test dummies. I shouldn't be surprised at this point, but I am. But look, you know, we don't want this to be all doom and gloom. So we have reserved some time at the end of the programme for something positive, someone who has seen an issue and is trying to do something about it.

21:36Dr Ella Hubber:So for this, let's go back to Dr Astrid Linder, who has been addressing the crash test dummy problem.

21:42Candice Bailey:I have been in this area now for 25 years, doing the work needed in order to build both virtual models and now finally physical models of an average female and an average male made on the same concept so that we can be represented together.

22:04Dr Ella Hubber:And how do you design an average female crasher stummy? Is it difficult?

22:09Candice Bailey:The beauty of this area is that it has been done with the average male. We are not that different, males and females, so that you cannot use the same method. But you need, of course, to compile data for the female part of the population, as you have done for the male part of the population.

22:26Dr Ella Hubber:It's always about data. In this whole program, it always comes back to there being a lack of data that has been collected for women.

22:32Candice Bailey:The interesting thing is here that actually the data was already there. From 1983, I had to do some testing in order to be able to compare males and females, but that was minor studies compared to the amount of data already available.

22:51Dr Ella Hubber:It's interesting that it was actually there already, but it just took someone like you to actually think to, well, we should probably try and implement this then. In principle, yes. And what is different about the female crash test dummy? Obviously, I assume it's not just height and weight. There are other aspects as well.

23:13Candice Bailey:Yeah, we made models for different crash scenarios. So when it comes to soft tissue neck injuries and the interaction with the seat back and the seat, it's about geometry, center of gravity, proportions of the whole body. But also our response to the crash in terms of transferred into a mechanical model is the stiffnesses in the joints between the mechanical parts. And there we have females compared to males have less muscle strength, around 70%. And that you then implement in the models.

23:54Dr Ella Hubber:So lower muscle strength on average in females is translated into the models as joint stiffness in the dummies. Am I right? Yeah. Yep. And then you also, I assume, have breasts to consider or, as you say, shoulder width, hip width, perhaps, that kind of thing. Exactly. And these are the things that could potentially save people from serious injury one day. The question is then, is this model being used yet?

24:18Candice Bailey:The physical models, they are named the SETS, the seat evaluation tools. They are being used by individual car manufacturers and city suppliers and so on to test their products. But so far, we haven't addressed the female part of the population, either in regulation or in the new car assessment programs. There are discussions underway. So you could say that the question is alive and there is an interest for it. But of course, it takes... We are not there yet.

24:56Dr Ella Hubber:Thank you to Astrid Linder, who has created an average female crash test dummy. Although I was surprised to learn that she did so from data which already existed, she was just one of the first to actually take up the challenge.

25:09Candice Bailey:It's just such a shame, Ella, that the regulation means that this isn't guaranteed to be used in all crash testing. But you know, Ella, I'm wondering. We mentioned earlier that there's a height difference between you and I. and there are many other differences, I'm sure. There's also a huge variation in the population. The average man and average woman might be a reasonable starting point for a prototype, but what about everybody else on either end of the bell curve?

25:31Dr Ella Hubber:How do we cater for them? Well, there is some tolerance within the kind of crash test dummy system. Average testing doesn't mean it will only work for the average, but a certain range on either side. But actually, Astrid did mention virtual models. And with these, you can get fifth, 50th and 95th percentile range models. So small, average and large. So you can capture like quite a big range. But there's still this issue of different size breasts and different size hips. Sure, sure. It's like, how far do we go? Do we make every single type of person? That's obviously not cost effective. Although one positive I did see is that there is a range of virtual models of women in various stages of pregnancy to study like the impact of collisions on the womb, the placenta and the fetus.

26:22Candice Bailey:Yeah, I actually think that's very considerate of the men in the world who don't want to think about us with anything else.

26:26Dr Ella Hubber:You think men came up with this idea?

26:28Candice Bailey:No, I certainly don't. You know, I'm wondering about innovations in PPE as well.

26:33Dr Ella Hubber:Yeah. So for this, I did see a report from the Trades Union Congress here in the UK, which made some great suggestions for PPE for Women, which I think a lot of other countries could implement. So it suggests things like including women in procurement decisions, which sounds obvious, but not everyone does, and partnering with brands that are actually innovating PPE for Women. In that space, I did see one company which does fittings and makes modifications to respirator masks to make sure there are no leaks. Ah, that's fantastic. I also came across a wonderful young woman called Mariam Master, who wears a hijab.

27:12Candice Bailey:She noted that this can be a potential fire-dice, so she developed a fire-resistant hijab, which is also comfortable to wear under a helmet without it slipping. And, you know, earlier on, Rupa spoke about, you know, cultural differences when it comes to PPE. So Mariam is obviously just a good example of how this can be applied. And the good news is that this is being manufactured.

27:35Dr Ella Hubber:That brings us to the end of the programme. Today we've heard how the equipment meant to protect us often doesn't properly account for women's bodies. Mining gear, police vests, crash testing, all built around male averages, leaving women less protected. And as we've heard, this isn't because solutions don't exist. In many cases, they've been known for decades. They just haven't been widely adopted. But we've also heard that when women are involved, better solutions follow. Thank you to Candice Bailey for bringing some great examples along. Thank you for having me, Ella. Women Not Included for Discovery on the BBC World Service was presented and produced by me, Ella Hubber, with additional production support from Elliot Prince.

28:20Dr Ella Hubber:Join us next time as we navigate the city through a woman's eyes, from dark bus stops to public toilet queues, uncovering the everyday design choices that can make women feel unwelcome, unsafe and unseen.