“Cars were not de­signed for women,” said my wife as she strug­gled to get out of the front seat of our car.

It’s not on­ly cars. Al­most any as­pect of or­di­nary life re­lates more to men and not women. Sports. Side­walks. Fur­ni­ture. Med­i­cine. When you break it down in­to small­er com­po­nents, eg in health­care: gloves, masks, gowns, in­tu­ba­tion tubes etc, the dif­fer­ences be­come even stark­er. They have all been de­signed by men, for men.

The is­sue with cars stands out. Be­cause of the way cars are de­signed, women are more like­ly than men to suf­fer se­vere in­jury or death in mo­tor car crash­es of sim­i­lar sever­i­ty. Ve­hi­cle de­signs fail to ac­count for a va­ri­ety of women’s shapes, sizes, flex­i­bil­i­ty and hor­mon­al vari­abil­i­ty.

The prob­lem in car de­sign is that safe­ty test­ing oc­curs us­ing male crash-test dum­mies and di­rect­ly af­fects car de­sign. Reg­u­la­to­ry safe­ty tests say you have to use a mod­el of an av­er­age male to test cars safe­ty. Full stop. There is a fe­male crash-test dum­my man­dat­ed by a few reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies to be used in side-crash test­ing since the 1990s, but they are scaled-down ver­sions of male dum­mies and rep­re­sent a 4’11’’ by 108-pound woman.

Safe­ty is com­pro­mised in women be­cause the use of male dum­mies does not take in­to ac­count dif­fer­ences in mus­cle mass, body den­si­ty, neck strength, hip anato­my and pelvic struc­ture in a seat de­signed for men. Seat belts and airbags are de­signed to stop the av­er­age 5’10”, 170-pound man, not the av­er­age 5’3”, 125-pound woman and the en­er­gy re­leased can be harm­ful to a fe­male.

Women are forced to sit high­er and clos­er to a steer­ing wheel and in a more up­right, “out of po­si­tion” man­ner to main­tain vis­i­bil­i­ty. Breasts can al­so cause seat belts to ride high­er. All these in­crease the risk of se­ri­ous in­jury in a crash.

The men­stru­al cy­cle, with its hor­mon­al fluc­tu­a­tions, can af­fect joint stiff­ness and range of mo­tion and in­crease in­jury sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ty.

In frontal crash­es, women are two times more like­ly than men to sus­tain se­ri­ous in­juries such as dam­age to the brain or in­ter­nal or­gans and three times more like­ly to suf­fer a mod­er­ate in­jury such as a con­cus­sion or a bro­ken bone. Even in side-im­pact crash­es, women are 50 per cent more like­ly to be se­ri­ous­ly in­jured.

The sit­u­a­tion in med­i­cine is worse. It’s not a close­ly kept se­cret that med­ical re­search in­to caus­es, symp­toms and treat­ments of dis­eases is done in males and re­sults are sim­ply ap­plied to women. It’s as­ton­ish­ing that fe­male doc­tors have nev­er re­volt­ed over this.

Take mak­ing a di­ag­no­sis. Heart at­tacks in women do not usu­al­ly present as in males. Nau­sea, jaw pain, ab­dom­i­nal pain and fa­tigue are com­mon. Not chest pain.

Pain sen­si­tiv­i­ty is an­oth­er huge prob­lem. Women’s re­port­ing of pain is fre­quent­ly down­sized in com­par­i­son with males, where such pains will re­sult in high­er ur­gency in treat­ing. This sit­u­a­tion is wors­ened in black women, where there ap­pears to be a his­toric myth that black women pos­sess high­er pain tol­er­ances (the “Strong Black Woman Schema”). A friend of mine, with a PhD in Child De­vel­op­ment, un­der­went that very sce­nario, to her com­plete sur­prise, dur­ing labour with her first birth in her own ma­ter­ni­ty unit in a world-em­i­nent hos­pi­tal in the US.

Dig­i­tal health de­vices, smart­watch­es and fit­ness track­ers are cal­i­brat­ed based on male av­er­ages for pulse, tem­per­a­ture and ac­tiv­i­ty pat­terns, re­sult­ing in in­ac­cu­rate read­ings for women, es­pe­cial­ly dur­ing hor­mon­al fluc­tu­a­tions.

Fi­nal­ly, phar­ma­co­log­i­cal mis­takes are com­mon in med­icat­ing women be­cause most stud­ies have been done on men. If a drug reach­es blood ther­a­peu­tic lev­els in 30 min­utes in males, that does not mean it does the same in women. Dos­es mat­ter for ef­fec­tive treat­ment.

Even when women are in­clud­ed in clin­i­cal tri­als, preg­nant women are not, mak­ing re­sults even more in­ap­plic­a­ble.

Why is this the way it is? Be­cause male sci­en­tists have tra­di­tion­al­ly dom­i­nat­ed the field of med­ical re­search and re­search on males and not fe­males. This his­tor­i­cal bias be­gan cen­turies ago when the first anatom­i­cal texts were pub­lished us­ing male bod­ies ex­clu­sive­ly. Fe­male anato­my was taboo and it was thought fe­male bod­ies were a mere de­vi­a­tion of the male “norm.”

And we now have the sit­u­a­tion in the US, spread­ing to oth­er parts of the West­ern world, where di­ver­si­ty has be­come a dirty word for male-dom­i­nat­ed, ul­tra-au­thor­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ments. The push for more re­search on women is com­ing to a halt.

The rest of the world has to pick up the threads and do the re­search for their own peo­ple, male and fe­male!

For as Mau­rice Cheva­lier (Google him) fa­mous­ly once said, “Vive la dif­fer­ence!”