A lot of ink has recently been spilled on a story that makes extravagant claims such as this:
There’s Never Been a Crash Test Dummy Modeled After a Woman—Until Now
As Boot might have said in Scoop, "Up to a point".
What is true is that until now, crash-test dummmies designed to simulate women have been based on the original male ones, and besides there was no requirement for them to be taken into account. A less breathless and more measured account of the creation of the new dummy is given in Popular Science,
It had been a long time coming. As the WI's Female Crash Test Dummies says
Female crash test dummies do exist but they are not mandated to be used in most tests. A pregnant crash-test dummy was created in 1996 but testing with it is still not government mandated either in the US or in the EU.
Women will not be surprised at this framing of the rules without reference to them (to put it at its least selfish; some people have suggested that it's a conspiracy by men to tilt the rules against anyone who isn't a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.)
Another area where standards favour (or at least fail to consider) women is office temperature. A 2021 article in Nature found that
[O]ffice temperatures are less comfortable for women largely due to overcooling. Survey responses show that uncomfortable temperatures are more likely to be cold than hot regardless of season. Crowdsourced data suggests that overcooling is a common problem in warm weather in offices across the US. The associated impacts of this pervasive overcooling on well-being and performance are borne predominantly by women. The problem is likely to increase in the future due to growing demand for cooling in increasingly extreme climates. There is a need to rethink the approach to air-conditioning office buildings in light of this gender inequity caused by overcooling.And this is ironic in the light...
<tangent subject ="stick-in-the-mud, moi?">And, unlike whoever wrote that Nature article, I still care about which light I'm talking about.
<tangent>
Women's brains work better in warmer offices
.But male designers of the world aren't content with just ignoring the needs of just over half of the world's population. They also arrange some things to favour women, who are, on average, not as tall as men. Those things are, of course, the things that men don't want to do. Building regulations, or at least standard design (I don't intend to search the actual "Regs") dictate a height for kitchen worktops that suits the shorter worker.
<autobiographical-note>
In the summer of 1970 I did a holiday job on a recently completed Northwick Park Hospital. Sub-contractors had increased costs they were charging, the client had baulked at the new payments and had asked the subcontractors to economize. So there was one lot of estimates and a new set of accounts. This provided opportunities for fraud, and it was thought that a bunch of school kids would be less likely than forensic accountants (less likely, and cheaper) to have the wool pulled over their eyes. One of the economies was that a low-maintenance [but costly] floor-covering was replaced by a cheaper alternative.In the summer of 1971, for only a day or two, I did a job at the same hospital, now open. That cheaper floor-covering had to be polished every day with big Columbus Dixon machines, which seemed (to me) to have a will of their own. Which way they moved (right or left; forwards was down to the operator) was controlled by the angle of the handle. And the sweet spot (where left became right) was well below my waist. The foreman, a good foot less tall than me, couldn't understand my problem. He kept demonstrating how easy it was. But I jacked it in. Curvature of the spine.
</autobiographical-note>
But last week, alerted by Pick of the Week, I discovered a conversation with Holly Smale about her autism. It spent years undiagnosed and misdiagnosed partly because of the belief that "The typical autistic person is a boy". No. The typical autistic person DIAGNOSED IN CHILDHOOD is a boy. A girl with autism behaves just as obsessively, but nobody notices because girls should be seen and not heard. Listen to her; I recommend it. I particularly like the duck/frog bit at the end, where she talks about spending her first 39 years being told she's "a shit duck" only to find out that actually she's a frog.
Word watch
<sideswipe>
By the way, it isn't then "downloaded to your phone", pace Chris Mason's lamentable Newscast outro. The app on your phone just gets to know about it, so that you can download it if you're interested. This isn't by any means the worst thing about that outro. (For the full rant see here.) Just saying...
</sideswipe>
...But earlier this week, on Newscast, as it happens, I was surprised (and momentarily misled) by a related, but transitive, use. Adam Fleming said "Netflix has dropped The Crown." Initially I interpreted this as analogous to "The BBC has dropped Bake Off". But I soon realized that it meant something quite different: If you have a Netflix subscription, The Crown has become available to stream – and that's another word that of late has been behaving differently.
And finally
...teachers and pupils who couldn't be bothered to learn or teach the finer points of English use correctly (sic).
...my point stands. There is nothing incorrect about a preposition at the end of a sentence.
OK. But methinks Ms Wild doth not protest enough. The correspondent is a pompous windbag, who no doubt blighted the English lessons of generations of young sufferers. Not everyone who believes in this shibboleth is a pompous windbag; some of them, presumably, suffered this sort of teacher. But they are all wrong, and they are all misinformed
Time I did something useful; oh no, it's lunchtime.
b
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