I bet you own a trolley, aka a suitcase 💼 on wheels🚲. Did you know, that trolleys became popular in the 80s when an airline pilot👩✈️ started the trend? But luggage and wheels were around for a really really long time before that. So what exactly happened? Why did it take so long to get this most convenient invention off the ground and rolling? Especially since mass travelling was several decades old. My first thought was: “crossing the chasm” 📈 and that… perhaps, the stack of technologies wasn’t yet ready for the trolley. Perhaps wheels were expensive to produce, or hard to attach to a suitcase. But that wasn’t the case. The wheeling luggage was the most obvious of inventions and I was awfully surprised 😱 by the reasons it didn’t stick when it was first created: women made them and women used them 👭👭.
The wheeling luggage story is fascinating, but not a life-and-death type situation. Take cars 🚗. The dummies used in testing automobiles in the US are mainly replicating the male body and completely miss on the strength of the female neck, as well as the slight variation in the arrangement of internal organs for women🙆. Since there is no rule around the type or number of dummies to be used in these kinds of tests, the designs of cars in the US result in a 72% higher likelihood of injury for women👨🦼, and a 17% increased probability of dying, compared to men. What’s more, while the designs are reducing head injury in men by 70%, seatbelts and airbags are actually causing additional injuries for women.
🤦♀️The “missing women” in all parts of a product design is very common, just like products designed for women are perceived as inferior or not as prestigious. That is why we still had plastic pads and tampons until just a few years ago, and products that support new mothers haven’t seen much innovation. That is also why we still don’t know (i.e. the research is not conclusive on) why women live longer, or why some periods hurt so bad that we cannot move, or why women go through menopause, or how come women die at much lower rates than men from 12 out of the 15 most common causes of death? In medical research, studies consciously decided to focus on men and use male subjects because it is easier and less risky (you don’t have to worry about men getting pregnant). But that meant doctors can miss the signs of a heart attack in women, and use drugs that have been tested with only men.
🙆Women are also missing in many industries and job roles.
Take academia…
🏛️👩🎓There are still few women in tenured positions and senior ranks. Academic societies have been accepting women for more than 50 years, and the share of female authors in scholarly communication has been on the rise. There are more than 50% female students and graduates, and the latest challenge is attracting more men into higher education. Still when looking at senior levels, we are struggling.
💆Women lead 20% of the world’s top universities, and in the US women held nearly half (49.7%) of all tenure-track positions in 2018, but just 39.3% of tenured positions. Compound that with the fact that female candidates are 20% less likely to become faculty advisors, and this bias is even stronger in disciplines that are perceived as more feminine. A paper that analysed 46 medical subjects👩🏾⚕️, found that when women are first authors, the paper tends to be cited more than a male-first-authored paper; this doesn't hold up for papers with men as the last author. Leading the authors to conclude that women still need to make their way in more senior roles to be able to attract larger funding.
🙅With the pandemic, we took two steps back. Whilst the total number of new research projects decreased by 36%, that figure disproportionately affected women or carers. The impact on publication levels won't be visible for a couple of years, and that’s when women and carers will be feeling the disadvantage and losing out on promotions. Furthermore, the outcomes of the pandemic on women, and especially women in leadership positions is much more negative than on men, with the burnout gap doubling in the past years, finds a report from McKinsey 🤔. Two key drivers for this increase in burnout are 1) the amount of work that women have to do outside of their job, and 2) the need for the type of leadership skills that women excel at to support employees in a pandemic.
Women are underrepresented within research and development roles outside academia
Globally, there were only 29% of science R&D jobs held by women🧑🔬, with the lowest share in Southwest Asia (only 18.5%). Unfortunately, this number has been decreasing since 2011 in the EU and several other high-income countries. No wonder then that we haven’t been using female-body dummies to test cars. This level of representation can negatively influence the outcomes of all kinds of technologies👩💻 that are being implemented and adopted across all aspects of life.
💻Artificial Intelligence is increasingly ubiquitous and has been shown to perpetrate existing biases. In a 2022 report from UNESCO, OECD, IADB and the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge, the authors show how varied and widespread is the effect of AI-based technologies on every single stage in the career of women, but also outside of their working life. And given 🦿🦾AI learns from the data it is fed, the report urges all stakeholders to support increasing the rate of women in AI roles (entering and not leaving), at the individual contributor level, as well as senior leadership. The report quotes data from the International Student Assessment on the likelihood of girls considering engineering and other well-paid STEM fields - less than 2%😱. And whilst more than 50% of students are women, they constitute much less than half of the graduates from engineering and computer science fields. Add to that the fact that STEM jobs are shown 20% more often to men than to women. And the effect is compounded, the feedback loop is engaged 🔁.
Looking at early-stage investing and startups
The facts speak for themselves! In the first half of 2021, out of the 💰 $150 billion that was invested in US startups, only 💰$23B went to companies with at least one female founder and 💰$2B with all-female founders; that leaves 💰$127 billion that went to all-male founding teams. To understand whether bias in funding at an early stage was persisting at the height of the #MeToo movement, Ilya A. Strebulaev, a professor at Stanford Business School, ran a study on gender and ethnicity bias along with his graduate student. They sent 80k emails to 28k VCs in 2018 and found that VCs are more likely to follow up with female and Asian sounding names by 8% and 6% respectively.
But after pitch stage women still get less funding than their male counterparts, even though the number of female VCs has grown significantly in the past years. The bias has to be broken at in-person meetings 🕺. Recently published research analysed interactions between 140 prominent venture capitalists (40% of them female) and 189 entrepreneurs (12% female) and found that women tended to get questions about losses, while men - about potential gains. Unfortunately, this bias was evident both in male and female VCs. Male founded startups ended up raising 5 times more money 🤑.
With all the great firsts and strides, misrepresentation continues in the headlines
While we’ve all got excited by the many female firsts over the past years, and the positive trends in fundraising, new startups on the block, at least 10 new female university leaders, news media are continuing the underrepresent and misrepresent women🗞️🗞️🗞️. In the headlines, women make up just 24% of subjects, and “for every occurrence of an empowering word, we read two words of crime and violence”.
The Guardian is one of the media outlets that sensationalize headlines about women the least (+4%). That is where I came across the story of the wheelie suitcase, and saved the book “Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men“ on my reading list. While researching for this book, author Katharine Marçal came across a picture of women using a wheeling extra for their suitcases, at least 20 years before men ‘invented’ it. The reason wheeling suitcases weren’t taking off was the perception of masculinity. Women had luggage💼, but they were always accompanied by men, and men were perceived as tough 💪 if they could carry that luggage, so wheeling luggage was 'unmanly'. This perception around the inferiority of the products women are creating or using continues today in different variations. And is compounded when we make less than 30% of R&D roles and aren’t leading large academic research projects, or get less than 3% of venture funding. That’s why we should all work towards breaking the bias🙅🏻♀️, regardless of gender identity.
🌍📣The world is becoming more inclusive, and every day, I am increasingly excited to scroll through my LinkedIn wall and see all the incredible achievements from women all around the world: closing a new fund, raising their series A, publishing an impressive report, getting a fantastic promotion. And all this encourages me to make changes in my own life that #BreakTheBias 🙅🏻♀️ . With this newsletter, I want to inspire you to tap into your passion🧭 or the thing you are or want to be an expert on. This will give you more power 🔌 and credibility 👓, extending that power double bind (women who don't speak up go unnoticed, and women who do speak up get punished) and convincing others that your voice truly matters.