I sat there awkwardly after I assessed my situation. After a few minutes of frantically searching, I had come to the realization I was dreading: there was no wastepaper basket in the bathroom stall. I idly waited until everyone in the bathroom had left before I made my hasty exit to dispose of my pad and discreetly throw some paper towels over it in the garbage for good measure.
This embarrassing predicament occurred over The Stute‘s Freshman Weekend, my very first experience living at the place I would be calling home for the next four years. While I quickly brushed off the experience, the lack of accommodations made for women is an issue that has been a problem for decades now. While women make up half of the population, we are routinely forgotten when it comes to requiring different standards based on our different needs.
One glaring example that shook up the tech world in 2014 was when Apple debuted the HealthKit app, a program which allows users to input data about themselves, such as the amount of steps taken, how many hours slept in the night, and even allergy and immunization records. While the app hosted a variety of ways to track one’s health, it failed to allow users to track their menstrual cycles, effectively alienating the female user base.
Another example that has had a widespread and harmful effect is the lack of female representation in clinical trials for medications. A study conducted on sex-specific medical research by Brigham and Women’s Hospital outlined the reality of women’s struggles to have their specific needs met: while cardiovascular disease is the number one killer of women, only 31% of cardiovascular clinical trial subjects are female; while lung cancer is the deadliest cancer for women, researchers often fail to take into account sex-specific factors in incidence; and despite the fact that two-thirds of Alzheimer’s patients are women, it has been assumed that this is attributed to women’s average longer lifespan instead of the effect of hormonal changes due to menopause and sex differences in gene expression.
While there are countless other instances of female-specific needs being ignored — lack of female crash test dummies when testing cars, innovative artificial hearts designed only to fit male chest cavities, and lack of awareness of female-specific heart attack symptoms — it’s time to stop ignoring the fact that sometimes equality means acknowledging our differences. I’m not just a smaller and lighter non-male. I have different fat distribution than men, my heart beats more rapidly than male hearts, I have different hormone cycles than men, and I have two X chromosomes in every single cell of my body. We need to end the idea that men are the prototype human and recognize that women and men can’t achieve equality in a world tailored to men.
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