What are the first handful of countries you can think of led by men and what are they like? What about a handful of countries led by women, if you can think of that many, and what are they like? Describe the difference.
women
The World Not Designed for Women That Could Be
If you hadn’t noticed, the world around you isn’t designed for women. Even if you had noticed like I have, I bet you hadn’t noticed it to the extent Caroline Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, does. Man, it’s shocking!
Despite how incredible the bias is, it’s nothing compared to the ignorance and unwillingness to change it, like with car seat dummies in crash testing. They use a scaled down 50 percentile male and puts it in the passenger seat! That’s where they even try rather than just stick to the 50 percentile male. What? Women don’t drive? Or maybe aren’t stupid so they couldn’t make a dummy of one to be fair, or risk being offensive in doing so? Yes, that must be the reason [sarcasm, if you can’t detect it].
So many more eye opening examples are in the 99 Percent Invisible podcast below, including some really obscure ones you’d have trouble grasping, like how snow plowing patterns are designed for male driving. But still not enough for me as I’m going to have to get the book to learn more, being a designer of many things myself. I’m sure I’ve designed numerous things unknowingly biased towards me, but I’ve also learned to correct my ways such as giving women pockets in some garments I have designed for them… and equal sized pockets to men at that rather than ones 40% smaller that the fashion industry gives them!
BBMI is the New BMI
You might have heard by now about a new, pretty extensive, study that suggests having belly fat is more deadly than general fat all over the body, for impact by obesity. To summarize, forget Body Mass Index (BMI) that is a ratio between your height and weight. Just make sure your waist measurement divided by your hips measurement, is less than 0.9 for men, and less than 0.85 for women who generally have wider hips than men relative to their waists.
Basically, it’s your belly to butt or bum measurement ratio, which is why I’m calling it the Belly Bum Measurement Index or BBMI for short.
Women Led World Quote
My Amazing Spider-Man Beach Towel Bath Robe
This bath robe was made from 3 beach towels. Oddly, I could only find the beach towel on the back online to be able to share with you. I got it at Zellers in Canada, but they don’t have it online. The other two beach towels I got at Wal-mart in Canada. However, you can find all kinds of other, some better, Spiderman beach towels from which to make a similar garment:
Digital Citizen 