It's Men's World, We Just Live In It.

The world is built for men. This is one of the surprising-but-not-surprising facts about the world. In a way, it’s an expected and well-known fact; from childhood, I knew that I didn’t have the upper hand, that my mother didn’t have the upper hand, that my sister and cousin don’t, all because of our gender. But this is surface level. Because despite knowing that sexism exists and facing it and seeing it sometimes, I still end up startled occasionally by how integral the prejudice is to how the world runs. As I read the section from Invisible Women, I was reminded of the ways that the world lets women down, in potentially life threatening ways—by making males the default, especially in health and safety, women’s lives are at risk. For example, women’s heart attacks are often seen as “atypical”—solely because most women experience heart attacks differently to men, the default—and as such, are harder to predict. I noticed this when doing a CPR certification: when listing the symptoms of heart attacks, along with most of the other medical emergencies too, the data heavily leaned towards male symptoms and reactions, not female symptoms that I happened to know about prior. Some impacts of the data gap are somewhat minor, albeit inconvenient, but these kinds of disparities are what can lead to death. Reading about this kind of deadly prejudice reminded me of the danger women face, often unknowingly. Female safety shouldn’t be an aside to men’s. Men should not be the default.

When I make statements like this, I often try to think about the way somebody may interpret it. For a long time, men interpreted women’s freedom and enfranchisement as a thief of their own rights, as if there were not enough freedom to go around. As the metaphor goes, human rights are not pie; if one person gets more that doesn't mean you will get less—all they would get is just a less biased, more wide-spread look on things. And yet, as seen in the Anti-Suffragette posters, men were not having it. Scoffing at men doing the dishes, or men cleaning up the mess a child has left somewhere, because a women has taken it upon herself to get a job, or advocate for herself, these posters show just how hypocritical and warped the view was (and sometimes still is) about women’s unpaid labor. Despite, as Ms. Kirschmann mentioned, being the exact same work that a housekeeper (getting paid) would do, the work that women (and the occasional man) does to keep up with their own home or care for their children is extremely undervalued, and is completely uncompensated. Because of this, married women have to work so much harder to get the same result as a married man would. Much like the data gaps in Invisible Women, this kind of treatment is what reminds me just how true it is that the world is built for men.