Gender trouble

Women's football has become a dangerous game. Many of the sport's brightest stars have suffered career-ruining injuries.¹ The culprit may be on their feet.

A recent survey of top players saw 82% call their boots uncomfortable. With only a limited number of boots designed specially for women, many use men's boots. Sports scientists now claim that wearing these boots significantly increases the risk of injury.

Football boots are the tip of the iceberg. The buildings we live in, the tools we use, the software we rely on - in many cases these have been designed by, for and with men.

As author Caroline Criado Perez wrote in her 2019 book Invisible Women: "the lives of men have been taken to represent those of humans overall. When it comes to the other half of humanity, there is often nothing but silence."²

There are numerous examples. Modernist architect Le CorbusierA Swiss-French architect and urban planner (real name Charles-Edouard Jeanneret). He was one of the pioneers of modern architecture. designed buildings around the height of an average Frenchman.

Smartphones are largely designed with men's larger hands in mind, making them harder for women to use. Voice recognition software is trained on men, and so works better with male voices.

Even the standard temperature in American offices is based on the needs of an averagely-sized 40-year old man - 5F (2.2C) colder than that comfortable for a woman of the same age.

By taking men as the default, they have made life for women more difficult and dangerous.

This imbalance has deep roots. For centuries, many societies were dominated by men. Women were often uneducated and housebound. This has changed over the last century as more women enter the workplace. In Britain, the employment rate for women has increased from 24% in 1914 to 72% in 2023.³

Change is on its way. There are now more female architects and designers than ever before. More women in Britain now study architecture than men. Women now have the chance to design things for their own needs

But huge inequality remains.⁴ The people designing our cities, equipment and activities are still often men. In the United States, only 23% of currently employed architects are women. Women make up just 11% of software developers.

In France, there is evidence that serious working injuries have been decreasing for men but increasing for women - perhaps a sign that safety procedures are still made with men in mind.

Is the world still made for men?

Yes: Overturning centuries of design for men is no easy task. It might take centuries more, along with a vast amount of will and effort, to reimagine and rebuild our cities and lives in a fairer way.

No: Becoming aware of the problem was the important step. Now that we know just how much of the world has been unwittingly designed by men for men, we can adapt our societies piece by piece.

Or... The world is not made for all men, but a certain type of man - white, adult, able-bodied, often physically fit. Gender imbalance is just one of the inequalities that design needs to address.