[Music]
so thank you very much for having me
here to speak today I'm just going to
start off with a quick correction which
is that I didn't campaign for Jane
Austen on a bank note because we don't
have a lack of Jane Austen on a bank
note problem we have a lack of women on
a bank note problem so I was just
campaigning for female representation
and that's kind of relevant to what I'm
talking about today I'm because I'm
talking about how often we seem to
forget that women are 50% of the
population in all sorts of areas and and
in particular this is a problem when we
start talking about big data because if
the data doesn't adequately represent
the human population you're going to
have a bit of a problem when you start
creating policy around it when you can't
start creating products around it so I
just want to start with an analogy to
set the scene and I just want you to
imagine a world where we know absolutely
nothing about women I'm talking basic
female anatomy I'm of course talking
about grand theft auto and grand theft
auto 5 to be specific which was the
first time that not in the main game but
in the online version you could be they
had playable female characters the
reason that they didn't have playable
female characters in the real game was
that well this is the reason they gave
with this the characters needed have
narrative arcs and as we all know women
are famous for not having narrative arcs
any ways that you could play as a woman
in the online version and so obviously
being the rabid feminists that I am
looking for trouble I thought well I'm
just going to go and see what playing as
a female really means here so you I was
looking at all the options you could
have you know you can choose the
ethnicity you can choose the hair the
dress the makeup I feel I have but they
don't let my men wear makeup but they do
it on GPA they let men wear makeup but
anyway as you start playing for those of
you who played GTA you'll know that one
of the things that you can do is you can
pick up a nice lady
in your car and ask you to do things to
you or pay her really to do things to
you and they have three options and so
you're driving around as a lady trying
to pick up another lady and
anyway you managed to convince one and
she's like you know you're like well
what do you do and she says well you
know I've got these three options well
I'll go to the first option and then
this one's head comes and starts going
up and down in your lap and you're like
haven't got one of them it's not really
doing anything for me actually it's kind
of embarrassing teachers stop now and so
obviously to be clear I am NOT saying
that blow jobs for women is my campaign
for the following year but as I said I
think it's a really interesting analogy
for what happens if we build a world
designed around male needs and then just
stick women in there and kind of how
it's all going to work out because you
know men and women are the same right
so through the data gap more
specifically first of all what do I mean
when I say the gender data gap very
simply the gender data gap is a lack of
data about women compared to men either
because and that's the usual reason the
data isn't collected at all or because
it's not disaggregated by sex sometimes
it's actually also because of poorly
designed data collection systems so for
example there's a huge problem in the
field of development because traditional
household surveys have been designed
around male working patterns which is
that you have one job and you go from
you know you have a normal working day
whereas women tend to have a much more
complex for working patterns they may be
working two or three jobs they've got
unpaid work to do as well but the
traditional household surveys only asked
about each person's main occupation and
so women tended to say unpaid care work
but it didn't mean that they weren't
working a full productive work week as
well it just meant that they had
different forms of work women in
Bangladesh for example can work for as
long as 17 hours a day and whole sways
the women's paid work was unrecorded as
a result so that's what the gender data
gap is why does it matter in the example
I've just given for in agriculture
actually agriculture is one of the main
forms of the women's unpaid work and
women's paid work that wasn't collected
and it meant a whole load of aid
policies were developed and implemented
that only served male farmers needs and
completely left women behind and so as a
result female farmers started doing
worse and worse and worse than people
started thinking well female
farmers are just really rubbish like
come on guys catch up but what I
actually happened was that male farmers
were being given a leg up anyways so
this is design business like this issue
of design that only accounts for male
needs is an issue that crops up all
sorts of barriers from transport sure a
lot of the women here will recognize
this too medicine to the workplace this
is what comes up when you search Google
Images for human I find it really
interesting that weird like whatever he
is man comes up before a woman but
anyway so to be clear I'm obviously not
saying that Google is the body here this
is actually a pretty accurate
representation of what people mean when
they say human in fact I was at Foyle's
bookshop yesterday looking through
medical anatomy textbooks and posters
because I sure know how to have fun and
it was fascinating to me how you know
even in these medical textbooks these
medical posters it was still just
drawings of male bodies there was one
that I really enjoyed which was the
human vascular system which was you know
a drawing of a man and then they had the
little picture of the female pelvis to
one side but I mean at least the female
pelvis was included which he knows was
step forward anyway let me give you some
more examples of how we tend to think of
male when we think of human and only
female when we specify female so you've
got here the lego time feature
minifigure watch and clock which is blue
obviously for a boy girls can't have
blue and the lego time feature
girls minifigure watch and clock so
they're exactly the same except for the
one that's called girl is for girls
don't you know what's going on here but
thanks for March for illustrating my
point so brilliantly yeah this is a
great product from BIC and actually been
taken out circulation now I know this
because I spoke too thick about it
anyway fix for her turned out we thought
we've been using gender-neutral pens
turned out they'd be men pens all along
we hadn't realized and as part of my
research my book actually did get in
touch with BIC because the product
description says the pen is designed to
fit comfortably in a woman's hand and I
wanted to know if it actually done any
research into whether or not the female
hand is need a different pen and B
guys like women do tend to have smaller
hands than men and this actually is the
problem in all sorts of areas for
example huge smartphones that were very
very fashionable a couple years ago my
iPhone 6 gave me RSI tools being too
large for women's hands is a particular
problem in the conductor construction
industry a friend of mine told me about
trying to change the head on a Black &
Decker trimmer this was home work by the
way she's not in construction industries
but still listen to her story when it's
attached in order to change it you have
to press both cabs at the same time to
release it I think the man they had in
mind we'd do some one movement but the
span was - why - my hand and the
pressure required too much for my thumbs
to do base at the same time just to sort
of break for a second their hand grip is
actually also a huge difference between
men and women in fact the average 20
year old woman has around the same hand
grip strength as the average 70 year old
man and so there's quite a big
difference there so that's probably what
was partly going on there anyway she
continues and I'm 5 7 maddening and yes
my friends do send me these stories all
the time I'm a lucky girl eventually
worked out I could press one in first to
release it wedge something in to stop it
springing back into place then do the
other one they obviously never tested it
on a woman she concluded another friend
recently sent me a picture of her hand
covered in pastors after taking up the
flooring in her house she couldn't find
any work gloves to fit her teeny tiny
hand size and so on anyway unfortunately
I don't have time to go into details
about my exchange with bit pens and let
me assure you it was a thrill ride let's
just say the word fashion oriented
customers came up and I feel pretty
confident in saying that the bits of her
range was not in fact based on any kind
of sex disaggregated data on hand size
anyway when it comes to designing things
that don't work for the female body
Hansa and far from the only problem I'm
sure a lot of you will remember when the
Apple health app was released with much
fanfare a couple of years ago
accompanied by words like comprehensive
and sure it was pretty comprehensive
included tracking for things like copper
intake and molybdenum impressive I don't
know what that is
and but although the health app wasn't
called
health for men it did have a rather
glaring omission that kind of put a
dampener on the whole comprehensive
thing so yeah I mean base
it seemed like Apple took these Google
results for human remember these rather
to literally and kind of forgot all
about that and yet they didn't have a
menstrual tracker which is kind of basic
for women's health I mean it's kind of
the number one thing you might think of
that women might want to track but it
gets more serious and smartphones and
grand theft auto failing to account for
basic female anatomy there's a serious
gender data gap actually in medicine as
well so women are almost twice as likely
as men have an adverse reaction to a
drug and eighty percent of drugs
withdrawn from the market are due to
unacceptable side effect in women and
this is partly because women are hugely
and have historically been hugely
underrepresented in medical trials we
typically make up about twenty to thirty
percent and it's actually worse when it
comes to animal trials which is of
course what house phase one trials
happen even when a drug is specifically
aimed at women so you may remember the
Female Viagra that was being talked
about last year and everyone was really
excited about it but it turned out there
was a potential interaction with alcohol
and so the designers of the drug were
like well you know were very responsible
people we should probably catch this you
know seed see what the deal is so they
designed a test and they tested it on
twenty three men and two women and
that's probably fine right because men
don't have different alcohol tolerance
to women we don't but a belies that
differently it'll be fine yeah so um
that was a small problem anyway the lack
of representation is for a number of
reasons which I again I don't have time
to go into but the least convincing of
which is that the menstrual cycle cycle
makes women too variable to be able to
test which is you know all very well and
I'm so delighted for you guys in the
room that you've got such lovely simple
bodies and but the problem is we
literally do have a message of cycle and
so when we've put medication in our body
we kind of need to know how it's going
to affect us so emerging evidence
suggests for example antidepressants can
vary over the course of the menstrual
cycle and subsequently drug dosages may
be too high at some points and to lower
others
heart attacks is another example so
there's a certain type of
medications that has actually been shown
to cause a specific kind of heart
arrhythmia in women and it's much more
dangerous during the ovulatory phase of
the menstrual cycle so you can see it
really does matter that the woman's
menstrual cycles are taken into account
even if it is much more difficult I'm
sorry scientist that's just you know
women are complicated what can I tell
you and so staying with hearts and
rather like the human thing this is what
comes up when you search google for
heart attack and as you can see ie men
have heart attacks and obviously that's
not true and so the protection of course
is that heart disease is a male disease
but ischemic heart disease is the number
one killer of US and European women up
to 28,000 women a year in the UK die
from heart attacks and women are in fact
more likely to die following a heart
attack than men are and recent research
from UK found that women were 50% more
likely to be misdiagnosed while owning a
heart attack and for so much types of
heart attack that figure was almost 60
percent so you know we're not just
talking about people like you and me
here we're actually talking about
medical professionals miss diagnosing
women and because women's symptoms are
considered atypical 50 percent of the
population that's pretty atypical and so
yeah it's probably because of a lack of
awareness amongst opposed to public and
doctors but it actually goes beyond
those not just awareness so a lot of the
tests and clinical standards and this is
where the data comes in have been
designed using data from studies done on
male bodies again around 20% of the
subjects are female and usually when it
comes to a specific study the number
will be so low that it's not even
statistically significant you've just
got a couple of women in there you can't
really draw many conclusions from it and
so are essentially the test that has
been designed may not detect the
problems with women's hearts from there
may be sent home saying there's nothing
wrong with you it's also an issue with
treatment I'm just gonna give you one
example of that pacemakers are more
likely to be used in men than women we
don't really know why but academic
suggests this may be because of scarce
scientific evidence that they're working
women hello data gap and so there's a
heart implant called a CR TD which is
basically a more complicated version of
a postman
which is used on patients who have a
thing called a left bundle branch block
which basically means and I'm not I've
had to learn how the heart works it's
really complicated but basically what it
means is that the contraction of your
left ventricle is slightly delayed
delayed so basically there's an
electrical circuit that goes around your
heart for every time you pump blood
around your body and get it back into
the heart and there's a certain amount
of time that's meant to take and so in
this instance there's one part of it
that's delayed and the the sort of
guideline for when you're meant to
insert this heart implant so people have
a problem with their electrical signals
is that if it takes 150 SEC 150
milliseconds or longer you should have
one inserted and this is based on the
wealth of study data but you can see
what's happening here women only
represent around 20 percent of
participants in CRT studies and the
figures as I said are so low that
individual studies can't produce sexist
aggregated data that actually means
anything but luckily for women this is
where big data can be helpful actually
the FDA combined a whole bunch of
studies that have been done and this
isn't the best way of doing things the
best way is always going to be
randomized clinical trial but this is
the second best you take a whole load of
randomized clinical trials together and
you finally get enough women to be able
to make some kind of pronouncement and
what they found was that actually women
benefited from the insertion of a CRT D
when their electoral circuit lasted
between one hundred thirty two hundred
and forty nine milliseconds so that's
quite a lot lower than the male
threshold in fact women in this group
had wait for it a seventy six percent
reduction in heart failure or death and
a seventy six percent reduction in death
alone if they had a QR TD inserted in
them and in the slower threshold so all
these women were dying because the
threshold was set too high for the
female heart sometimes it's not just
about whether or not you have the data
it's about how you use the data and are
you using it in a gender sensitive way
or to put it another way do you have sex
ads disaggregated data on how to handle
your data so I'm going to give you a
real world example of how this might
play out
which just came up completely randomly
really in an interview I was doing for
my book about something completely
different I was talking to a
neuroscientist and it was just dark a
trumpet got elected so obviously we
started talking about the American
election and she told me that she had
been in America getting out the vote for
Hillary Clinton and told me about how
she and her fellow volunteers had gone
knocking on doors where a Clinton
supporter was known to live and quite a
few times the door got adopted by a mad
man who when they found he found out
that they were Democrats got extremely
angry and slammed the door in their face
um so these men it turned out did not
deport Hillary Clinton and nor did they
appear to know that their wives did and
this woman was kind of worried given the
high rates of domestic violence in
America and how very angry these men
were that there was a chance she may
have triggered some domestic violence
incidents obviously we don't know and
she's just basing that on possibility
probably better not to run that risk
though and around four million women in
a year in America are beaten in their
homes by their male partners or
ex-partners and I personally wouldn't
like to play those odds
so rather like Apple with its health
care domestic violence stats are
actually a type of data available to
political parties they should make use
of them the same woman in fact who's an
academic at a university also told me
about the vitriolic abuse she received
over email after a talk she gave at a
festival last summer her abusers had
found her email address on her
University website which is of course
pretty standard as a rule all academics
have a direct email address listed on
the University websites page and that
can be pretty debilitating as a female
academic they're just trying to get on
with your research and you've got all
and sundry able to send your emails
whenever they want um I actually used to
have a contact for my website which I
received I removed in the end because I
was getting worked through it but also I
was getting a hell of a lot of abuse and
it's not just the actual abusive emails
it's every time you get a ping you're
like oh it's just going to be a
desperate I'm not really feeling it
today thanks guys so anyway I I removed
that um but you know you have to
question our University's thinking about
this when there
climber's blanket policy are they
providing their female staff with extra
support to help deal with the abusive
emails they're going to get as far as
I'm aware they're not so I'm just going
to give one it's really hot under these
lights I'm just going to give one more
example by the way I know wait that's
not true
government women do you have different
body temperatures to men's that actually
they tend to be lower so it's not it's
not your fault it's not a male default
room and anyway so one more example of
how organizations can fail to design
products that cater to both male and
female needs even when there is actually
already data in existence and this one's
personal to me so some of you may know I
or in fact you all know because I
mentioned it right at the beginning
laughter I campaigned for female
representation on English banknotes um
and you know nothing crazy just a line
drawing of one woman for one note anyway
that campaign was won and I was
delighted battle over not so fast lady
said the men of Twitter who were not
happy and in fact they were mad as hell
about this line drawing of a lady and
they weren't going to stand for it and
they just demonstrated how much they
were not going to stand for it by
sending me some tweets so just going to
give you some examples of how angry some
men got about a line drawing of a woman
on a piece of paper this is the kind of
stuff they're going to do to me
anyway so these obviously are kind of
horrifying and terrifying I didn't mean
it right like they weren't really going
to come and do this to me ah probably
probably not I mean I didn't know who
they were didn't know where they were
and they what they were capable of they
were coming in every minute probably
probably wouldn't happen right and then
I started getting this and so what had
happened with this was that they'd
started spanning stop spamming me even
sorry through ask fm and I'm sure you
all know how that works some of you look
very confused so I'll explain it and
it's basically a platform where you can
ask not only ask a user a question and
their answer gets tweeted automatically
and if you include the Twitter handle in
questions of mine was included then I
get notified when this random person
tweets out and so I was basically
getting a tweet every minute saying we
know where you live and there was no way
to stop it just to clarify thankfully
this actually isn't my home address and
they did have my correct email but you
know you're not getting that that was an
office address but you know they'd found
that address what else could they find
and there was nothing set up at Twitter
or ask yet for ask fm at the time helped
me deal with this properly I'm pleased
to say a lot has changed at Twitter
since then but prior to this experience
of mine and all the attendant media
coverage twitter was simply not set up
to deal with the fact that women
routinely get abuse online in a way men
simply don't tend to the reporting and
blocking procedures were completely
inadequate for abuse at such a volume
they were clearly set up for just some
minor irritant that you had time to fill
in a five minute form that was on a
different website and you know
describing everything that had been said
to you so I would have to type in you
know we are going to mutilate your
genitals and shove a pole up your vagina
I didn't really want to type that out
so yeah and just to give you an idea of
gender discrepancy in online abuse
there's a fascinating pre-twitter study
done by Maryland University which was in
chat rooms
it's before Twitter and they set up a
bunch of fake accounts each with either
a standard male or female name and they
found that men got on average three
abusive messages a day women got a
hundred and the reason I'm telling you
about this particular research one of
course has been a wealth of research
done since then is to demonstrate this
sex disaggregated data was actually
available by the time that switch was
being built so rather like you asked to
assume that the Apple healthcare
developers knew that women had wounds
and periods when they didn't include a
period tracker in their comprehensive
help out Twitter could have considered
this data when they were building their
product and produced a platform but from
the very beginning accounted for the way
that women are abused online instead
they are now having to play catch-up and
that's much harder for them when they're
trying to change a culture that has
already become abusive so we live in an
era of big data and were meant to be
really excited about that and I would
like to share in that excitement but at
the moment my excitement is tempered by
two things first of all I know there are
huge gaps in our knowledge when it comes
to women which means that any use of big
data to design anything from consumer
products to government policy is hugely
problematic and potentially dangerous
but also that there are countless
examples of even when data does exist
we are simply failing to use it because
we are just so used to thinking that
this is what a human looks like so I
barely had time to scratch the surface
in this talk today but hopefully it's
given you a bit of an idea of the scale
of the issue and I'm going to finish now
I just like to close with a simple plea
just one action to take away from this
and into your life your work life your
day-to-day life it's very very simple
don't worry and all I'm asking is that
when you star in any new project you
stops just one second and you ask
yourself a very simple question have we
remembered to think about the 50% of the
population that just happens not to be
male thank you very much
[Applause]