Posted by I used to read more non-fiction than SFF and then I went down the rabbit hole of SPFBO (self published fantasy blog off) and I didn’t have time to read much else. It’s wonderful and enraging to start back with my non-fiction reading with this book. It has been a hot minute since I’ve been so utterly dumbstruck and pissed off about how the world works. I’ve known for a long time that most medicinal trials are done on men and that the results may not reflect how women will react to them. I’ve known for a long time that a seemingly endless parade of side effects are fine when developing and prescribing women’s birth control, but only a handful of those same side effects nixed the release of men’s pill-form of birth control. I knew that men sizes and body types were the default for designs like seatbelts and tools and various every day things.
I did not know the deep the impact was for women, however. For instance, we are 73% more likely to be seriously harmed in a car crash… mostly because seat belts aren’t designed to work around breasts and for whatever reason, no development plan has gone in place to fix that. When we’re placed in the same environments with heavy metals or plastics or other toxic chemicals we do not have the same tolerances but we are still exposed to the same levels. The safe levels of exposure for men are different than those for women due to a lot of things, average body fat percentage, average weight, the way we absorb things through the skin, fluctuating hormone levels all play a part in why we’re more likely to suffer harsher side effects when working places like a plastics factory.
Each topic is very well explored, studies are cited, real data is used to support arguments that we need to be seen because we aren’t — not really. Watson and Crick didn’t discover the structure of DNA, Rosalind Franklin did and here’s her wiki. There are countless examples of where a woman’s work was claimed by a dude for social reasons, everything from composing symphonies to discovering the structure of DNA, we have been largely erased by history. This is why when Britain went about making new money and putting new people on it, they rejected many of the women suggested because they didn’t meet the criteria of being a ‘household name’ because no one knows who we are when we die. When you think of famous scientist most people have someone like Einstein pop into their heads, when you should just as quickly think of someone like Franklin.
This book was enlightening even though I already knew a good deal of the information, it gave my current knowledge a lot more depth and background. I suggest it if you want to light the world on fire.