Women and girls collectively spend 97 billion hours a year in search of safe toilets — (1 in 3 Women Lack Safe Toilets | WaterAid America, n.d.). As of now, in the populated hubs of Los Angeles and New York City, a statistic from 2017 to 2000 reports the significant depletion of over 30,000 households with access to piped water (Meehan et al., 2021). And while data on how this crisis differs from gender is limited, the data we do have available recognize: this is a woman’s issue. Contrary to the common belief that the poor are evenly divided by gender, an analysis in 2010 found that 71% of those living in poverty are women (SWAMINATHAN et al., 2012), with women earning between 31% to 75% less than men over their lifetime. It is important to acknowledge, however, that the unavailability of public bathrooms may not primarily be the result of intentional system-conscious sexism, but a product of gender data bias. Gender data bias is the collection of data in favor of men; data, if being collected at all, is not being collected at the same rate for women as it is for men. Data is the basis of the creation of all policies, meaning that the gender data gap that comes with forgetting women’s and men’s separate needs, schedules, and experiences negatively impacts policy-making effectiveness. To address this gender data gap, we need to revalue the significance of gender-specific differences and how they can be accounted for in political policy-making decisions.
If you’re a woman, there’s a 1 in 2 chance your medication isn’t optimally prescribed. Women experience Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) up to twice as often as men due to inappropriate dosage, which originates from a lack of gender-specific research; the ‘normal’ dosage prescribed for troponin, a protein injected into the blood during heart damage, for example, may be too high of a dosage for women (Shah et al., 2015). Common over-the-counter medications like aspirin, too, have been proven to not only be ineffective in women but also potentially harmful (Cons of Regular Low-Dose Aspirin to Stave off Serious Illness in Women Outweigh Pros, 2025). But even getting to the stage of diagnosis is an issue. Sex differences aren’t only limited to the reproductive system or different levels of estrogen and testosterone, they appear in our cells: in blood composition; in fatigue resistance; in immune responses; in neural connectivity; in how cells die following a stroke. And yet, a system full of gender data biases doesn’t account for that. Among HIV-positive adults, women make up 55% and are up to six times more likely to develop HIV than a man. Despite making up this majority, a 2016 paper reviews the statistical percentage of US women included in HIV research: women make up only 19.2% of participants in antiretroviral studies, 38.1% in prophylactic vaccine studies, and 11.1% in curative strategies studies (Curno et al., 2016). As a result of this unaccounted for data, male-specific symptoms like chest pain for certain types of heart attacks may not be present in women. And, on the contrary, women facing lack of chest pain are at particular risk of death — “making it extremely concerning”, as Criado Perez, (2019) points out in her novel Invisible Women, “that current NHS England guidelines specify ‘acute cardiac sounding chest pain’ as part of the criteria for a patient being referred for primary percutaneous coronary interventions (PPCI) at one of the country’s specialist twenty-four-hour heart-attack centres.”
To integrate the few women-specific statistics we do have into policy-making decisions, there needs to be an increase in the ratio of women in office. As of 2000, women represented 13.8% of all parliament members around the world — which had increased from 1987 by 4.8%. And while this is an improvement, it’s far from ideal. Even just reserving a third of seats for women in councils, as a 2004 analysis pointed out, increased investment in infrastructure relates to women’s needs; as low as a 10% increase in female political representation resulted in a 6% increase in urban area primary education accessibility in India. Further statistics show that the increase of women in office resulted in a greater likelihood of women’s issues, family policy, education, and care being addressed (Opening the Gates, n.d.). That’s why the societal lashback and male-centricity surrounding politics are especially detrimental to addressing said issues. When Hillary Clinton ran for US presidential office in 2016, she received almost twice as many abusive tweets as Bernie Sanders — the most common word associated with her being “bitch”; one European Parliament (MEP) member reported to the Inter-Parliamentry Union (IPU) of receiving more than 500 rape threats on Twitter over four days (Foulkes, 2016). Part of the hostility directed toward women politicians is a result of naive realism, or projection bias; the psychological tendency to conceive your own way of thinking or doing things as universal. For white men, this bias is amplified by a culture that prioritizes their experiences and presents them as the typical standard, which leaves women being the odd ones out. Unfortunately, the isolationism of women in politics results in a lack of incentive to be apart of important decision-making figures like parliamentary; more than 75% of British women report that sexist abuse of female politicians online “was a point of concern when considering whether to pursue a role in public life” (National Democratic Institute, 2021).
As a part of the unrecognized 50% of the population, I am actively affected by the gender data gaps in daily life — the little things build up, like the average smartphone being 5.5 inches. I’ve heard countless women in my life complain about the sizes of their phones, we don’t have pockets to carry them, and if we do, our phones are too big to fit in them — even typing on my phone with one hand is a struggle, which I had originally perceived as a “me issue” before I realized it was not a “me issue” but a “women’s issue”. It’s the lack of understanding of these differences that puts women at a disadvantage, and until we receive sufficient representation within governments to account for our unacknowledged experiences, policies will never integrate in the interests of women.
Ally Goldberg is a high school student in the Bay Area and a feminist committed to amplifying women’s voices in underrepresented and unrecognized areas through literature.
Works Cited
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