Invisible women, Visible Consequences: the Cost of a Gender-Blind World

by Levina de Bie-Vyner

This essay is a discussion. I do not want it to just be a piece on feminism and all that word contains, although that word’s importance cannot be overstated. I do not want this piece to show the problems and not offer the solutions for the world we live in. And that solution of course starts with you, the reader, acknowledging and addressing our systemic complicities. I want, above all, for this piece to recognise in both day-to-day life and on the international stage, the way attitudes towards women foster hugely damaging effects, and how to resolve this. Mostly, I focus on the work of Caroline Criado Pérez, who, through her book, Invisible Women, presents extensive research on the deep-seated biases that prioritise male-centric data, perspectives and needs, advertently and inadvertently leaving out women from medical research to public policy. I hope to guide you through her research in a digestible format, so that one’s own conclusions and discussions can in turn permeate the world we live in.   

I want to begin by discussing an example most prevalent to the gender gap: the design of communal spaces and transport systems, and their often-sexist undercurrent. In many cases, this reflects a gap in perspective rather than active exclusion—women are not deliberately left out, but their needs and experiences are rarely considered in planning processes, meaning policies fail to accommodate them. This oversight can have wider-reaching consequences than simple inconvenience; it can actively limit women’s mobility, safety, and economic participation, ultimately impacting economic output. McKinsey estimates that women’s unpaid work contributes over $10 trillion to annual global GDP yet work that is formally recognised and paid is consistently valued far higher than unpaid labour—most of which is done by women, which require accessible transport routes and spaces which are not accounted for in planning or building schemes. Because of the economy and society we have constructed, what is deemed “valuable” to economic growth is, in reality, entirely disproportionate to the actual amount of labour, time, and effort that sustains daily life. Now, is women’s unpaid work under valued because we don’t see it or, perhaps more alarmingly, because we don’t value it?  However, as seen in progressive initiatives such as those in Vienna, redesigning public transport routes to make journeys safer and easier for women, and improving lighting, visibility, and security in public spaces, demonstrates that gender-conscious planning can directly enhance women’s mobility and independence; for example, 60 % of pedestrian journeys in Vienna are made by women compared to 60 % of car journeys by men, showing how differently women and men use urban mobility when infrastructure supports walking and transit rather than car-centric routes. Such change shows that when women’s lived experiences are deliberately included in planning, cities become more accessible, safer, and more economically productive. As a result, inadequate infrastructure not only reinforces inequality but also prevents societies from fully benefitting from women’s participation, talents, and productivity.  Therefore, highlighting the importance of books like that of Pérez so readers can witness this ‘invisible’ barrier, and perhaps enact their own forms of change.

This imbalance is reinforced even more starkly within the home, where unpaid work continues to fall overwhelmingly on women despite decades of apparent social progress across the globe.  Even in nations with the highest male unpaid working time, the disparity remains striking: in Denmark men still do less than women in Norway, the country with the lowest female unpaid working time. Motherhood intensifies this inequality further. Research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows that the gender pay gap widens to around 33% within twelve years of having a child, as women’s careers and therefore wages, remain stagnant. This reveals that women are not simply “choosing” to step back from work, they are structurally pushed out of it. In Germany, the financial cost of motherhood is brutally quantifiable. A woman who has one child can expect to lose up to $285,000 in earnings by the age of forty-five compared to a woman without career breaks. This is only echoed in data from countries like France, Germany, Sweden, and Turkey. Which shows that even after accounting for social transfers that some companies employ to recognise the contribution women make through their unpaid care work, they still earn between 31% and 75% less than men in their lifetimes, because their unpaid labour quietly fills the gaps that policy refuses to acknowledge. What becomes clear is that the problem is not women failing to adapt to the workforce; it is the workforce stubbornly refusing to adapt to reality. Until unpaid work is recognised as essential rather than invisible, women will continue to be economically penalised for holding society together. US universities provide another example, this time in the academic field, how gender- blind policies can end up discriminating against women, and in turn impact their livelihoods and economic stability.  The pressure millions of women face, either directly or indirectly to have children, goes against the system in place in terms of their work lives. Married mothers of young children are 35% less likely than married fathers of young children to get tenure-track jobs and in turn reveal a stark divide in the availability of academic growth and studies to be conducted by women, something I will get on to later in this essay. The culture of paid work demands radical restructuring, not to “accommodate” women, but to finally account for the labour it has exploited and depended on in many fields of work.

Another important issue to touch on in this essay is childcare and unpaid work, and the impact of this on women’s careers and wider lives. When public services are cut, due to changes in government structures and tax cuts, the demand for them don’t just cease. The work is simply transferred onto women, which isn’t a matter of choice, but built into the system we have created- and could be just as easily built out of it. Which could then easily be done by collecting gender-based data and designing an economy around reality rather than a male-based construction. These objective trickle-down of market driven forces have intensely gendered impacts, they have been created based on non-sex-disaggregated data, and male-default thinking. Together with our women- blind approach to GDP and public spending, global tax systems are not simply failing to alleviate gendered poverty: they are driving it. If the society’s societies we have created care about ending inequality, we need to adopt an evidence-based economic analysis as a matter of urgency, with gender policies entrenched in them. A key example of the devastating impacts this issue can have on mothers is in Los Angeles. When preschools faced steep funding cuts, an estimated 6,000 mothers were set to give up thousands of work hours, costing an annual total of up to $24.9 million in wages lost. This should be an easy problem to fix, with one study finding that mothers are twice as likely to keep their jobs with consistent childcare and that ‘government-funded preschool programs could increase the employment of mothers by 10%’. In reality, this could increase gross GDP of countries and in turn be hugely beneficial to the economic climate, however this is simply not done, partly due to societal expectations, like it being enshrined into law of the unequal maternity – and paternity – leave allowances, as well as because of the ever-present gender pay gap. It makes financial sense for many heterosexual couples, that the woman is the one to reduce her working hours because she tends to be earning less. Paying women more, would once again actually be beneficial to economic structures and wider societal progress. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that if women had been paid equally since 2016, the US economy would have produced $512.6 billion more in income, which is 2.8% of the 2016’s GDP. Ultimately, childcare, unpaid labour and wage inequality are not accidental shortcomings of our systems, but the predictable consequences of structures built around male priorities and assumptions. The economy does not simply “overlook” women; it actively depends on their unpaid labour while denying them equal pay, and equal opportunity. If governments genuinely invested in affordable childcare and pay equity, they would not only transform women’s lives but significantly strengthen national economies. The evidence shows that when women are supported, economies grow, productivity rises, and social wellbeing improves. Yet until policies are designed around the realities of women’s lives rather than a mythical male “neutral,” women will continue to subsidise the system with their time, their income, and their lost potential across the globe, ironically to the detriment of national economies. Are the sexist attitudes the systems we have are rooted in really worth these economic and social shortfalls?

Another key concept that Pérez comments on is the ‘myth of meritocracy’ and how it can serve as a subtle conduit for bias. She explains that studies have shown a belief in one’s own objectivity – or a belief that one is not sexist – can make a person less objective and more likely to behave in a sexist way. This effect was found primarily among men, who were more likely to hire a male applicant over an identically described female candidate in organisations explicitly presented as meritocratic. In organisations which are explicitly presented as meritocratic, the attractiveness of the myth which tells the people who benefit from it (the man hired) that is down to their own personal merit, is clear to see. It is also no accident that those who are likely to believe in this myth of meritocracy are young, upper-class men. This phenomenon is visible even at the academic level: a recent study found that male academics – particularly those in STEM – overrated research claiming that academia had no gender bias compared with real research showing that bias does exist, demonstrating how the myth of meritocracy can distort perception and justify existing inequalities, therefore keeping them in a constant loop of reimplementation. This bias is not limited to professional contexts, it emerges early, with research showing that by age six, girls begin doubting their abilities and limiting themselves, avoiding games which seem to be challenging, compared to boys of the same age which do not exhibit this reluctancy. A phenomenon visible in education, where schools seem to be teaching little girls that brilliance doesn’t belong to them. For instance, at Carnegie Mellon’s summer school for advanced-placement computer-science, teachers observed that parents reported sons would happily spend entire nights programming, whereas girls were rarely described in the same obsessively dedicated way. One teacher remarked that “staying up all night doing something is a sign of single-mindedness as well as a love for a subject. If you are looking for this type of obsessive behaviour, then this is not as likely to be found in girls as it is in boys.” This example illustrates how societal beliefs about brilliance and merit are internalized early, shaping the confidence, opportunities, and career trajectories of girls long before they enter high-paying industries, and if they do, on that level women are once again limited due to the meritocratic biases prevalent throughout society.

The issue isn’t just that technology fails to recognise women; it’s that women are increasingly expected to adapt themselves to technology, reflecting what has been called the “Henry Higgins effect.” Rather than acknowledging that systems are built around a male default, responsibility is subtly shifted onto women to change their behaviour in order to be heard, recognised, or accommodated.  This term is coined by Pérez because it mirrors My Fair Lady, where a woman is reshaped to fit an external standard instead of being accepted as she is. For example, voice-recognition software often struggles with women’s voices, and instead of improving the technology, women are told to “speak differently” or “lower their pitch,” implying the fault lies within them rather than the system excluding them, in one or two cases, this could of course be seen as abnormalities with no gender bias implied. However, these studies working on ai voice chats were found to have significantly underrepresented women as subjects, this lack of sex disaggregation of data, points out once again the gender gap found, not just in past biases, but even now as we move on in technological advances, gender bias remains. This effect becomes even more alarming in areas like car safety. Cars have historically been designed using crash-test dummies based on the “average” male body, meaning women were never properly considered in safety testing. As a result, when women are involved in car crashes, they are 47% more likely to be seriously injured, 71% more likely to be moderately injured, and 17% more likely to die compared to men in the same collisions. Women are also up to three times more vulnerable to whiplash, partly because modern car seats protect men more effectively, while women’s generally lighter bodies are thrown forward faster in crashes. Despite this, for decades only male crash dummies were used, and even today the male dummy remains the standard in the driver’s seat. Instead of fixing these systems, women are simply expected to fit into them. In this way, technological and social bias becomes normalised, placing the burden of adaptation onto women, while the flawed systems that marginalise them continue unchallenged, many areas of life at first glance, seems to hold no gender bias.

Beyond technology and transport, the Henry Higgins effect is also deeply embedded within medicine, where the male body continues to function as the unquestioned “default” model, for gendered medical testing. All the way since the ancient Greeks, the female body has been seen as the ‘mutilated male’ body. For decades, women were excluded from medical research on the grounds that their bodies were “too complex,” “too variable,” or “too costly” to test, meaning scientific understanding was built primarily around male physiology. As a result, women’s health has been chronically misunderstood and systematically misdiagnosed, because the male body was the ideal that women failed to live up to. Biological sex differences are not minor or trivial: women are three times more likely to develop autoimmune diseases, making up around 80% of those affected, yet research repeatedly fails to account for their biology. A 2007 study revealed that 90% of pharmacological articles were based on male-only studies, while in 2014 it was found that 80% of studies that specified sex still only tested on males, and shockingly only 12% of animal studies included female animals at all. This is the true, and damaging reality of the current medical climate, even when it has been known for decades that every organ and tissue in the human body has sex differences between men and women. Even women’s responses to medication are neglected, despite evidence that they are more likely to experience dangerous heart-rhythm abnormalities and adverse reactions at certain points in their cycle. This can also be extremely prevalent in mental health issues. Women are 70% more likely to suffer from depression then men, but animal studies on brain disorders like depression, are five times more likely to be done on male animals. This lack of gendered medical testing is immeasurably detrimental to the well-being, health, and ultimately possible death of women. This is not just scientifically inadequate and a waste of money, it is also an ethical issue as well. If testing was done on women to the same standard it was done on men in the case of sex-based pacemakers for the heart, there is a 76% reduction in death alone, however, under medical guidelines women were not able to receive this advanced pacemaker and have therefore condemned hundreds of women to avoidable heart failure and death. Even when the effects of drugs on women are unknown, they are still being given out. For example, In the US, women ingest approximately 80% of pharmaceuticals, when less than half the drugs they consume have been analysed for sex and the long-term effects are therefore unknown. This exposes how medicine has not failed women by accident, but because it was never built with them in mind, the fact that this still occurring in the 21^st century is deeply worrying. Instead of adapting medical systems to women’s bodies, women are silently expected to adapt to systems designed around men, reinforcing the same pattern of inequality and bodily neglect found across society. Women are dying and the medical world is complicit.

Let’s discuss the medical world’s impact on female bodies, through a phenomenon known as ‘Yentl syndrome’. This describes the phenomenon where women are misdiagnosed and poorly treated unless their symptoms or diseases conform to those of men. This can clearly be seen in relation to heart attacks in women, in particular the fact that they are often missed. Research from the UK has found that women are 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack, often because they don’t display the symptoms for a ‘Hollywood Heart Attack’, the classic pain in the chest. Women are more likely to feel breathless and have stomach pain. These symptoms are often described as ‘atypical’, which completely minimizes their commonness, and could lead to an underreporting of these symptoms in women. This may explain why ‘one in five physicians across multiple specialties were unaware that more women than men die from cardiovascular disease each year’. This can also be examined from a mental health perspective. Autism has been thought to have been 4 times more common in boys than in girls, but new research suggests that female socialisation has in fact masked many more female autism diagnoses than previously thought. This is mainly due to a ‘general male-bias in diagnostic methods and clinical expectations’ and in turn has skewed the expectations for autism diagnostics, which continues still today, where the NHS, in a new autism guidance, has made no mention to differing gender needs. This once again highlights the implications of gender-biased diagnostics and its hugely damaging effects on women. Of course, we have made some progress in medical treatment of women: we no longer lock them up and cut out parts of their brains. Instead, we give them drugs, the modern-day lobotomy. Women are two and a half times more likely to be on antidepressants than men. This is not to condemn the use of this important drug, but to question its overuse in women, when most research agrees that men are more likely to report depression. Are women simply more ‘sensitive’? Or are they just the new and obviously preferable lobotomy for women? This bias extends beyond the use of medication for mental problems. Women are also more likely to receive sedatives or antidepressants than men for reported physical pain. Ultimately, the Yentl syndrome exposes how women are forced to ‘perform’ illness in male terms to be taken seriously, demonstrating how entrenched gender bias continues to shape treatment, and even the definition of what counts as legitimate suffering, from the perspective of medical treatments for women.  

These shortfalls can be largely attributed to the substantial gender gaps in government thinking, and the result is that governments produce male-biased policies that harm women. However, this is not just down to a lack of data available, but perhaps more alarmingly, as a result of the male dominance of government around the world, even when it is strikingly clear that female perspective matters. Organisation for Economic co-operation and development study found that women’s words translated into action, as female political representation grew in countries like Greece, Portugal and Switzerland, there was an increase in educational investment. It was made clear that as little as a single percentage point rise in female legislators was found to increase the ratio of educational expenditure. A similar study of local councils in West Bengal found that reserving a third of the seats for women, increased investment in infrastructure related to women’s needs. Decades of evidence demonstrate that the presence of women in politics make a tangible difference to the laws that get passed. Beyond increased defence spending and repaved roads. It could be argued that when Bernie Sanders said ‘it’s not good enough for someone to say “I’m a woman! Vote for me!”’, he was wrong. The problem isn’t that anyone thinks that’s a good enough reason, it’s that plenty of people seem to think that a candidate being a woman is a good enough reason not to vote for her. This is clearly seen in the 2016 US presidential election. Hillary Clinton was seen as just ‘too ambitious.’ With Sanders’s campaign manager ‘tastefully’ writing ‘don’t destroy the Democratic Party just to satisfy the secretary’s ambitions.’ Being the first woman to occupy one of the most powerful roles in the world does take an extraordinary level of ambition, but you could argue that it’s more ambitious still for a failed businessman, TV celebrity and literally a convicted felon with no prior political experience, to run for that same role. Yet ambition is never a dirty word when associated with men like Trump. When the news, media, pop culture and sexist commentary spewed by those in the public eye is on show for so many impressionable girls to see, or in fact be witness to the complete lack of women in those spaces, this in turn can cause many girls to view power, influence, and ambition as equating with ‘maleness’. Mistaking male bias ever present for all to witness, as impartial, universal, common sense makes the lives of so many women impossible to navigate. A 2017 paper found that while white male leaders are praised for promoting diversity, female ethnic minority leaders are penalised for it. And so, all the stereotypes that go along with the typical view of women in men’s fields: bossy, assertive, cold, are continued on, this directly leads women to try and subvert these ‘negative stereotypes’ and thus, at least implicitly it is shown that playing along with patriarchy is of a short-term, individual benefit to women. What all this means on a grander scale is that democracy is not a level playing field: it is biased against electing women, from corporate roles, all the way till presidency. They are treated differently, experience work differently and in turn this leads to different needs and priorities.

For women to get into parliament, is an increasingly difficult task on a multitude of levels. Firstly, when it comes to women being able to explore their ideas vocally, ‘females are actually the most interrupted gender’ concluded a 2015 study that found that men were on average more than twice as likely to interrupt women as women were to interrupt men. Hilary Clinton, in a televised 90-minute debate for the 2016 election, was interrupted fifty-one times. When she only interrupted her opponent Trump seventeen times. During the 2016 Democratic primaries, she received twice as many abusive tweets as Bernie Sanders, with the most common word associated with her being ‘bitch’. This is also visible in many parliamentary structures across the globe, where if a woman speaks loudly in parliament she is often ‘shushed’ with a finger to the lips as one does with a child. But sadly, tactics used to silence women are often far more brazen. An Afghan MP Fawzia Koofi told the Guardian that male colleagues used intimidation to frighten female MPs into silence – and if that fails the leadership would ‘cut off our microphones’. And sadly, what it often resorts to is threatened sexual violence. Political abuse is a distinctly gendered phenomenon.  More than one in five parliamentarians surveyed by the Inter-parliamentary Union had been ‘subjected to one or more acts of sexual violence’, while a third had witnessed sexual violence being committed against a female colleague. Similarly in Afghanistan, during the 2010 elections, nearly all female candidates received threatening phone calls. In political spheres, women’s voices are not just silenced but threatened and forcibly removed in an area where they are needed more than ever. This is particularly alarming when 75% of British women on a programme for aspiring female leaders said sexist abuse of female politicians both online and in person was ‘a point of concern when considering whether to pursue a role in public life’. Similarly in Australia, 80% of women over the age of 30 said the way female politicians were treated by the media made them less likely to run for office. When it comes to actual policies being put forward, in this case in the US, if they are framed as women’s issues instead of human rights issues, male politicians are less likely to support it. And if the bill is mainly sponsored by women, it ends up being watered down. It seems that democracy - in so far as it pertains to women - is utterly broken. This decline in female representation will give a rise to a gender data gap that in turn will result in the passing of less legislation that addresses women’s fundamental needs. Telling women to behave more like men – as if male behaviour is a gender-neutral human default – is unhelpful and potentially damaging. What instead is called for is a political and work environments that accounts and welcomes the intricacies of gender-political decisions, as well as perhaps more importantly, acknowledging women in more positions of power and influence, would greatly benefit the society we live in beyond the treatment of women.

The real reason that has become obvious for why women are excluded is because we see the rights of 50% of the population as a minority interest. This is extremely prevalent when it comes to post-disaster efforts, which will only increase as we live in an age of warfare and climate catastrophe. An example of this is during the 2001 earthquake that hit Gujarat, India. Maureen Forham a professor of disaster resilience said that after the 400,000 homes were destroyed, ‘They built houses without any kitchens’. Women were not included or even consulted in the planning process. The same thing occurred in Sri Lanka just four years later after the boxing day tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people in its wake, where once again, kitchens were not included in the homes rebuilt. A related issue arises in refugee camps when humanitarian agencies distribute food that must be cooked, but forget to provide cooking fuel. This goes beyond national responsibility. In 2016 only half of those years signed peace agreements contained gender-specific provisions compared to 70% in 2015. If anything, this issue is only worsening. In the June 2017 Afghanistan peace talks, women made up 6% negotiators, 0% mediators and 0% of signatories. Women’s voices are not being listen to and it is costing thousands of lives.  This is not even beginning to touch on the disproportionate maltreatment of women, particularly sexual violence, during post-disaster events or when conflict breaks out. To put this into context, up to 250,000 women were raped during the 100-day Rwandan genocide, and UN agencies estimate more than 60,000 women during the civil war in Sierra Leone. But because of the gender gap, women often have no pathways to report this and therefore the number is considered to be much higher. Even in areas of humanitarian safety zones women are still abused at a higher proportion. Before the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the average age for marriage for a girl was between twenty and twenty-five; in the refugee camps it was fifteen years old. More than half of the worlds maternal deaths occur in conflict-affected and fragile states, often because post conflict and disaster relief efforts too often forget to account for women’s specific health care needs. Ultimately, these examples expose a devastating truth: when women are excluded from planning, rebuilding, negotiating, and safeguarding communities, the consequences are not abstract, they are deadly. Ignoring women’s needs is not an unfortunate oversight – it is a structural failure that reinforces inequality and leaves half the population systematically unprotected in the moments they are most vulnerable, at no fault of their own. Until women are treated not as an optional consideration but as fundamental stakeholders in every stage of disaster response and conflict resolution, we will continue to rebuild societies that are only half-functioning, half-represented, and half-safe. Meaningful change can only begin when women’s rights, and experiences are recognised not as a minority concern, but as central to humanity.

Women placed in these dangerous situations are hindered not just because of the lack of inclusion in post-disaster safety efforts but the lack of teaching, gender bias, and discrimination all to prevalent in those (men) who do make the decisions. Maureen Fordham, the director of IRDR centre for Gender and Disaster at UCL, said that its ‘not the disaster that kills them, its gender’. In turn, a society that fails to account for how it restricts women’s lives, are complicit in their deaths. This can be seen in India, where men are more likely to survive earthquakes that hit in the night because they sleep on rooftops during warm nights, a behaviour impossible for most women. In Sri Lanka, swimming and tree climbing are ‘predominantly’ taught to boys; as a result, when the December 2004 tsunami hit (which killed up to four times as many women as men) they were better able to survive floodwaters, as well as the social prejudice against women learning how to swim, drastically reducing their chances of surviving flooding. This socially created vulnerability is only compounded on when women are not being allowed to leave their homes without a male relative. So, when cyclones hit, women lose valuable evacuation time waiting for a male relative to come. These dangers that occur to women don’t just happen in far of places in the east. When Hurricane Katrina hit the USA, people evacuated New Orleans and were housed in Louisiana’s Superdome, and before long stories of rape and beatings began to circulate. In an interview with IWPR one women recalled that you ‘could hear people, women screaming… I guess they were just grabbing people and doing whatever they wanted to do’, mostly because of the darkness of the nights. The darkness tragically acted like a blindfold, hiding what was happening just as society often ignores the suffering of women it doesn’t want to face. In light of these dangers, many women try to find their own solutions- even in areas which should be considered safe after tragic loss. After the 2004 tsunami, Indian girls walked in pairs to the toilet and bathing facilities to ward off harassment, similarly, a group of Yezidi women who ended up in a camp in north Greece, after fleeing sexual slavery under ISIS, formed protection circles. Others (up to 69%) including pregnant women simply didn’t go at night. Some women in reception centres in Germany would stop eating and drinking altogether to stop the need to go. These examples reveal that disasters do not create gender inequality; they expose and intensify it. When societies fail to recognise the systemic barriers women face – restricted mobility, lack of survival training, social stigma, and inadequate protection – they become complicit in the preventable suffering and deaths of women. True disaster resilience cannot be achieved without dismantling these deep-rooted gender biases and ensuring that women’s safety is placed at the centre of planning and response. Only then can we begin to build a world where survival is not determined by gender.

There is an irony in how the female body is apparently invisible when it comes to collecting data, because when it comes to male sexual violence, the visibility of the female body is key. But we don’t measure it, don’t design our world for it and in doing so, limit women’s liberty. Female biology is not the reason women are being raped. It is not the reason they get intimidated and violated in public spaces. It happens not because of sex, but gender. The social meanings we have imposed on male and female bodies in order for gender to work mean that the mere sight of a women is enough for the spectator to presume a specific set of traits and attributes. The chief amongst these is that women are just too complicated to measure. They are abnormal, atypical, or just plain wrong. Everyone is saying this from transport planners to medical researchers to tech developers. They all knock their heads against Freud’s riddle of femininity and come away baffled and defeated. Women’s physiology and psychology are too hard to account for. Why can’t women be more like men? Well, they can’t, and that is the reality that scientists, politicians, and tech bros need to face up to. Yes – simple is easier and cheaper – but simple does not reflect reality. The solution to the sex and gender gap is clear: we have to close the female representation gap. When women are involved in decision making, in research, in knowledge production, women do not get forgotten. And more often than not, this benefits humanity as a whole. So, really all people need to do is ask women.