So, in this first module on why it's important to apply a gender lens to policymaking, I'm just going to take a moment to really make sure that all the things we talk about through the modules are grounded collectively in similar thinking, around why it's important to apply a gender lens to policymaking, and also to start to think about what it means to do that in practice.
So, one of the most important high-level reasons that there's real opportunity in this new legislation in Victoria, is because progress towards gender equality in Australia has actually slowed in recent years. One measure that provides a bigger picture understanding of where we are with gender equality, and what our progress might look like relative to the rest of the world, is a measure called the Global Gender Gap Index.
What this index is essentially, looking at is a benchmark globally, that looks at gender equality across a range of areas, including economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. And it ranks us against other participating countries around the world. So, since that measure started, Australia has actually fallen from a ranking of about 15 out of 115 countries back in 2006, to a ranking of 50 out of 156 countries. So, we can see there really is the impetus to start being more deliberate in turning things around.
And when we start to look at some of those other countries who see in the top 10, in this index, you can see them listed there on the right-hand side of the slide, we can see that those that are performing the best have that legislation in place to help drive and speed up that change.
So, when The Gender Equality Act 2020 came into force in March this year, it really did put Victoria in a really strong place to start quite deliberately measuring and demonstrating progress towards gender equality. This is the first Act of its kind in Australia, but also one of the first of its kind in the world. So, for that reason, it is a really exciting opportunity. Now, we do understand that with great opportunities, there can also be some potential overwhelm and confusion. And we acknowledge that. However, we hope alongside that, this training can help you to work through some of the practicalities of your roles in advancing gender equality in Victoria, and also start to drive your organisation as a whole, to start making these processes business as usual, so that it becomes a more sustainable process over time.
One of the key mantras that we want you to take away is that if you're not applying a gender lens to policymaking, then you're potentially entrenching discrimination and causing harm.
And this harmful discrimination is not necessarily deliberate. There's not necessarily any ill will intended, but it will happen. And it will continue to happen if we don't think about how gender impacts on experiences and access. When we're designing programs, policies, and services, which can lead to our programs not adequately understanding or responding to the various needs of women, men, and gender diverse people.
We can see this happening in lots of different areas, from the medical field, to designing the size of smartphones, to voice recognition software, to snowploughing, to the width of the keys on a piano. There are lots of examples where policies, programs, services, and objects are designed without all genders and people in mind. And the impacts can range from slightly annoying to deadly.
So, the reason we're going to talk about these examples is that as you start to roll out GIAs across your organisation, it's going to be really important in those conversations with colleagues, to have a bank of examples, simple, accessible examples, that you can really draw on to introduce this idea of why we must apply a gender lens right from the beginning.
So, I'm going to talk through a couple of examples. Here we can see some statistics that relate to women's safety in car crashes. So, we can see, for example, that in a car crash, a woman is 17% more likely to die. She's also 47% more likely to be seriously injured, and a little over 70% more likely to be moderately injured. So, the question for us to think about really is why in a country, which appears to have some of the overall strongest safety standards and policies in the world, why these inequitable outcomes might be the case. So just take a moment to think why we might see these inequitable gender outcomes before we move on to the answers.
So, the reasons for those statistics are that the original crash test dummies are based on the idea of passenger safety being designed around the average man, the 50th percentile man.
This ignores women's anatomical differences, such as having less neck muscles, having breasts, differently shaped hips, generally being shorter in stature, which moves women out of the standard seating position. All of this combined means the car is not designed with particularly women's safety in mind. So, we've been using male crash test dummies since the 1950s. It was suggested at some point in the 1980s that female crash test dummies be used, but this was ignored. It wasn't until 2011 that a female crash test dummy was designed. However, this was not really accurate, as they simply scaled the male crash test dummy down to be a little smaller.
Social norms and assumptions also come into play here as they popped this female crash test dummy in the passenger seat, highlighting assumptions that women don't drive as often as men.
Now in Australia, we do have updated information from the Australasian New Car Assessment Program on safety standards that includes data on different sized male, female, and child crash test dummies. However, they don't have the power to approve or ban, simply rate cars in Australia. Information is also not readily available on just how these dummies accurately represent the anatomical differences between women, men, and children, apart from size. So, that's just one very everyday example that we can see that everyone can relate to around not designing with different genders in mind.
Another useful example is that of heart attacks. Here's a sobering statistic; women are three times more likely to die of a heart attack than men. Now, before giving you the answers, just take a moment to think about why this might be the case.
Basically, the majority of medical research and therefore the vast majority of knowledge we have is based on the male body. Historically, it's been assumed that there hasn't been any fundamental difference between male and female bodies, other than size and reproductive function. And so, for centuries, medical education and medical research, even today, is focused on the male norm. For all sorts of diseases, because of the way that had been researched, the way we treat them, the way we diagnose them. It has been based on research on men, and women often get misdiagnosed and heart attack, heart attacks are no exception. Women are up to three times more likely to die following a heart attack than men. And that's for a whole host of reasons. First of which is that female heart attack symptoms are not the heart attack symptoms that we've always been taught. Many of us have been taught that if someone was having chest pain and pain down their left arm, that they were having a heart attack. It turns out that actually those are not the typical heart attack symptoms for women. They are the typical heart attack symptoms for men.
Only one in eight women will experience chest pain, women are more likely to experience breathlessness, nausea, fatigue, and feel something more, closer to indigestion.
Women don't realise they're having a heart attack a lot of the time, so they don't go to see the doctor. But even if they go to the doctor, the doctors themselves don't realise that women are having a heart attack.
So, these are just some of the examples that you can use to highlight to people that in something as ubiquitous as driving a car or as common as a heart attack, when we don't design or study outcomes for different gendered people, or account for our assumptions about gender, it can be really quite deadly. We've highlighted examples where women have been left out of the design process here. But some other examples include for men not having nappy change tables available and men's public toilets. This means that fathers can find it extremely difficult to change and care for their children. And gender diverse bathrooms are another great example of not designing with gender diverse individuals’ safety and comfort in mind.
There are many examples out there, but these and more can be found in the excellent book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Carolyn Criado Perez, we encourage you to have a read and search for your own data bank of everyday examples that you can talk to your colleagues about as well, and really highlight why it is that we need to be designing for different gendered bodies in mind.
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