Comprendre l'étendue du problème

On pourra consulter également la page féminisme, qui regroupe différents liens de sensibilisation sur le sujet.

Je ne peux que conseiller la lecture de Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (Caroline Criado Perez), dont je cite un certain nombre de passages ci-dessous. D’autant que l’autrice ne se contente pas d’exposer les problèmes dans son livre, elle montre aussi combien nous y aurions à gagner, toutes et tous, si nous prenions enfin en compte les données des femmes - que ce soit pour l’urbanisme, les transports, les soins médicaux… et les finances publiques.


Des médicaments testés par et pour des mâles.

Avant d’être mis sur le marché, un médicament est testé. Mais la plupart des laboratoires utilisent des animaux mâles. Résultat : les médicaments qui sortent fonctionnent moins bien sur les femmes. Parfois même, ils sont dangereux pour elles.

Historically it’s been assumed that there wasn’t anything fundamentally different between male and female bodies other than size and reproductive function, and so for years medical education has been focused on a male ‘norm’, with everything that falls outside that designated ‘atypical’ or even ‘abnormal’. References to the ‘typical 70 kg man’ abound, as if he covers both sexes (as one doctor pointed out to me, he doesn’t even represent men very well). When women are mentioned, they are presented as if they are a variation on standard humanity. Students learn about physiology, and female physiology. Anatomy, and female anatomy. ‘The male body’, concluded social psychologist Carol Tavris in her 1992 book The Mismeasure of Woman, ‘is anatomy itself.’

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Des mannequins de tests mâles.

Les femmes meurent beaucoup plus que les hommes lors d’un accident de voiture. Parce que les ceintures de sécurité, et plus généralement tout ce qui concerne le siège du conducteur, a été testé avec des mannequins mâles.

Men are more likely than women to be involved in a car crash, which means they dominate the numbers of those seriously injured in car accidents. But when a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured than a man, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured, even when researchers control for factors such as height, weight, seat-belt usage, and crash intensity. She is also 17% more likely to die. And it’s all to do with how the car is designed – and for whom. […] even though car crashes are the number-one cause of foetal death related to maternal trauma,59 we haven’t even yet developed a seat belt that works for pregnant women […] The infuriating irony of all this is that the gendered passenger/driver norm is so prevalent that, as we’ve seen, the passenger seat is the only seat that is commonly tested with a female crash-test dummy anyway, with the male crash-test dummy still being the standard dummy for the driver’s seat.

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Un problème de diagnostic.

Les femmes sont plus susceptibles de mourir que les hommes des suites d’une crise cardiaque… car elles présentent des symptômes différents de ceux des hommes ; ces symptômes sont qualifiés d’“atypiques” (on rappelle que les femmes constituent environ la moitié de la population mondiale…)

Since 1989, cardiovascular disease has been the leading cause of death in US women and, following a heart attack, women are more likely to die than men. […] This may be in part because doctors aren’t spotting at-risk women […] Research from the UK has found that women are 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack […] This is partly because women often don’t have the ‘Hollywood heart attack’ as it’s known in medical circles (chest and left-arm pains). Women (particularly young women) may in fact present without any chest pain at all, but rather with stomach pain, breathlessness, nausea and fatigue. These symptoms are often referred to as ‘atypical’ […] a 2005 US study found that ‘only one in five physicians across multiple specialties was aware that more women than men die from cardiovascular disease each year, and most of these physicians did not rate themselves as effective in treating sex-tailored cardiovascular disease’.

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Les règles ? Ça fait mal, c’est normal.

L’endométriose, une maladie enfin reconnue.

Découverte en 1860, cette maladie n’a jusque-là pas intéressé la médecine. Elle n’est entrée dans les programmes des études de médecine qu’en septembre 2020 ! Grâce au long combat de l’association ENDOmind, une fondation vient de voir le jour. L’objectif : étudier cette affection chronique […] Longtemps, on leur a expliqué que c’était normal. Leurs mères, leurs grands-mères avaient souffert avant elles. C’était dans l’ordre des choses. Des affaires de femmes. Alors, pour ne pas passer pour des faiseuses d’histoires, elles ont appris à serrer les dents bien fort et à souffrir en silence. Aujourd’hui, les règles douloureuses portent un nom : l’endométriose. Une maladie qui touche 10 à 20 % de femmes. Plus de 4 millions. Ce n’est pas rien, tout de même !

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Un problème de toilettes.

WaterAid reports that girls and women collectively spend 97 billion hours a year finding a safe place to relieve themselves […] the problem is particularly acute for women, in no small part because of the attitude that men can ‘go anywhere’, while for women to be seen urinating is shameful. Women get up before dawn and then wait for hours until dusk to go out again in search of a relatively private place to urinate or defecate. And this isn’t just a problem in poor countries: Human Rights Watch spoke to young girls working in tobacco fields in America and found that they would ‘refrain from relieving themselves at all during the day – aided by avoiding drinking liquids, which increased their risk of dehydration and heat illness’.

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Un problème d’abri…

Les abris sont pensés pour les hommes, en général sans séparation hommes-femmes et avec toilettes communes. Résultat : dans les pays où les femmes n’ont pas le droit de côtoyer les hommes (sous peine d’être considérés comme impures et donc de pouvoir impunément subir des violences et des viols), elles restent en dehors. Et comme en plus on ne leur apprend que rarement à nager… C’est l’hécatombe en cas de tsunami ou d’ouragan.

_[An] examination of the data from 141 countries between 1981 to 2002 revealed that women are considerably more likely to die than men in natural disasters […] It’s not the disaster that kills them […] It’s gender – and a society that fails to account for how it restricts women’s lives. Indian men have been found to be more likely to survive earthquakes that hit at night ‘because they would sleep outside and on rooftops during warm nights, a behavior impossible for most women’. In Sri Lanka, swimming and tree climbing are ‘predominantly’ taught to men and 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 the floodwaters. There is also a social prejudice against women learning to swim in Bangladesh, ‘drastically’ reducing their chances of surviving flooding, and this socially created vulnerability is compounded by women not being allowed to leave their home without a male relative. […] ‘They’re at home. So they’re totally reliant on a male coming back to tell them they need to evacuate.’ Many women simply never get the message. […] Cyclone shelters have been built ‘by men for men’,[…] and as a result they are often far from safe spaces for women.[…] Traditionally the shelter is just one big mixed-sex space […] the lack of sex segregation essentially locks women out of the shelters. ‘It’s embedded in Bangladeshi culture that women cannot mix with men and boys outside of their family males,’ […] Any woman mixing with those males ‘is just fair game for any kind of sexual harassment and worse. So the women won’t go to the shelters.’ The result is that women die at much higher rates (following the 1991 cyclone and flood the death rate was almost five times as high for women as for men) _

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… et de viols

Par temps de catastophes, les violences envers les femmes augmentent. Sans doute parce qu’il y a encore moins de risque que d’habitude de se faire punir pour ce genre d’acte et que c’est encore plus facile de les commettre.

On the subject of the violence women face in disaster contexts, we know that violence against women increases in the ‘chaos and social breakdown that accompany natural disaster’ – but, in part because of that self-same chaos and social breakdown, we don’t know by exactly how much. During Hurricane Katrina local rape crisis centres had to close, meaning that in the days that followed no one was counting or confirming the number of women who had been raped. Domestic-violence shelters also had to close, with the same result. Meanwhile, as in Bangladesh, women were experiencing sexual violence in gender-neutral storm shelters. Thousands of people who had been unable to evacuate New Orleans before Katrina hit were temporarily housed in Louisiana’s Superdome. It didn’t take long for lurid stories of violence, of rapes and beatings, to start circulating. […] ‘You could hear people screaming and hollering for people to help them, “Please don’t do this to me, please somebody help me […] They said things didn’t happen at the Superdome. They happened. They happened. People were getting raped. You could hear people, women, screaming. Because there’s no lights, so it’s dark, you know.’[…] Precise data on what happened to whom in Hurricane Katrina has never been collated.

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