Hacker News Reader

Comment by prydwen | Hacker News Reader

A woman is not just 'a smaller male'. Male dummies do not take into account female's different weight distribution, muscle mass etc.

This is one of the reasons why women are much more likely than men to die or be seriously injured in a car crash. The book 'Invisible women' by Caroline Criado Perez has a section about this, I highly recommend it.

View on HN

> The book 'Invisible women' by Caroline Criado Perez has a section about this, I highly recommend it.

I asked for this book for my birthday and read it. However, I couldn't help but notice that when the author wrote about my field (computers, broadly speaking) the research was often... lacking?

She wrote a solid 3-4 pages on large phones and it was just surreal to read. Paraphrased:

> Phones are very large. This is bad for women; they have smaller hands. Nobody knows why tech companies make large phones. It is very silly, because women actually use their phones more than men. I asked multiple tech journalists for an explanation, they had no idea either. Here I present some theories that can tie this issue to sexism: companies simply design phones with men in mind, companies expect women to carry a handbag all the time so a large phone is no bother, and so on. And sure, women could buy an iPhone SE but that model hasn't been updated in two years.

Nothing about better battery life, nothing about better media consumption. It was so confusing, as every tech journalist, literally every tech journalist, knows that bigger phones have better battery life.

Sadly it made it a bit difficult for me to fully trust the rest of the book.

From what I remember from phone history, the original iPhone was the size it was due to extensive research to ensure a Japanese woman's hand could reach all parts of the screen and there was a planned big push into Japan, which mostly succeeded at the time.

But Korean women actually lead the push for bigger phones, since they could keep larger devices like the Samsung Note in their purses and using more than one hand turned out to not be a big deal to most people if it meant being able to see more content/detail on the screen and better battery life.

That's also just sort of blatantly incorrect. The early growth in phablet sales that eventually lead to them becoming the normal size for phones was disproportionally in _women_.

That's just standard MO for these think pieces. Anger sells.

Corporations: sell things women actually buy.

Journalist: why are these corporations so sexist against women? This makes me angry!

Anecdata but I, a man, prefer small phones that easily fits in my pocket and I can easily use with one hand. But otherwise most women I know have very large phones and when I've asked them, they prefer them. I think one component may be purses, but another is how likely one is to treat their phone as their primary computer.

Same. I have moderately large hands (XL motorcycle gloves), and I prefer the iPhone Mini form factor for the exact same reason. Sadly, it looks like it's gone to the graveyard. I haven't seen a flagship Android phone in a similar size recently either.

To get the battery life, I'd rather have a thicker phone without increasing the screen size.

I can relate to your last sentence regarding trust. Happens alarmingly often when I read popular takes on things I know a fair bit about.

Which makes me wonder about the extent to which I can trust popular takes in things outside my wheelhouse.

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

― Michael Crichton

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

With a book title like that it's unsurprising that this is her theory. So an entire round of "tech journalists" produces no answer, at all.

Pretty suspicious as the answer is obvious: phones are large because people want large phones. The reason that the iPhone SE is never updated is because nobody buys them, women included. Small phone fans are just a tiny vocal minority.

To add, when the Android ecosystem pioneered larger phones, there was intense pressure on Apple to follow. Because, again, people want large phones.

Women are far more likely to have big phones because they are more likely to carry it in a purse.

Based on the title alone, I couldn’t take that book seriously.

Idk. Her point that now that phones are maxed out to being comfortable for men and have stopped growing really nails it. They even having folding ones now, because forcing men to have a phone laughably large for their hands just isn't an option, whereas it is for women.

Have phones maxed out? Seems the evidence is inline with it basically growing to cannibalize all of the other utilities that it is able to replace.

A bigger phone may have a better battery life, but that does not mean that better battery life is why phones are large. iPhones have gotten bigger while battery size has shrunk. There is literally a void inside of the iPhone 14 Pro Max. Apple obviously make a very deliberate choice about the size of their phones, and so unless you have a plausible suggestion for the why of their sizing choices, your opposition to the idea that it's based on the average man's hand size doesn't hold up.

Apple cut the production of the iPhone SE because of low demand. If it would be true that women would like to use small phones but cannot buy any, this is very hard to explain.

The small SE never was upgraded to anything resembling recent hardware. It‘s pretty much iPhone 6 level tech - no surprise demand was falling.

A new SE was released just this year with an A15 chip so that’s not it

The new SE (2nd and 3rd gen) have the form factor of the iPhone 8 and no longer the small form factor of the iPhone 5. They’re bigger than the iPhone 13 mini.

Was that before or after it wasn't updated for years?

Has the average man’s hand size doubled in the last fifteen years?

The "void" only exists in models destined for one country.

> However, I couldn't help but notice that when the author wrote about my field (computers, broadly speaking) the research was often... lacking?

The words "Gell-Mann amnesia effect" popped in my brain. Luckily it didn't affect you

Dummies don't take muscles or weight distribution into account. They're metal skeletons with rubber bodies over them.

This is one of those discrimination situations where the truth is actually the exact opposite of what is reported. The dummies tested are 4'11 95 pounds and 5'9" 171 pounds. If the extremes pass then it's likely everyone in between is fine. The people who aren't covered are those above 5'9" or 171 pounds which skews heavily male.

The dummy in video seems to be way closer to woman then just size. For example, it has breasts. Those matter for seat belt position. So yeah, it seems that dummy is more then just smaller.

But honestly, dont see issue. Men are loosing nothing in this. Male dummies will continue to be used too.

> But honestly, dont see issue. Men are loosing nothing in this. Male dummies will continue to be used too.

You're right of course, but I think the deeper issue is that crash dummies and tests are designed just for the "average" and that many people fall outside of this "average". As a 2 metre tall bloke I've sat in many cars where the head rest just doesn't raise high enough for example, which always struck me as a fairly serious but also easily fixable shortcoming.

So the thing is that the issue of female crash dummies is a special case of the wider "crash tests should represent a wide range of people". Of course women of various shapes and sizes should be included in that, but also men of various shapes and sizes. By focusing so strongly on only specific groups (women in this case), I think sometimes these larger issues get kind of lost, even though the specific focus isn't really a bad thing in itself. e.g. stuff like "well, we included women now, which is what you wanted, so job done!" ... well, no...

> By focusing so strongly on only specific groups (women in this case), I think sometimes these larger issues get kind of lost, even though the specific focus isn't really a bad thing in itself

You can suggest testing a wider distribution of crash dummy types without also inventing a scenario in which this article somehow prevents that from happening.

It's funny that on average women already live 5 years longer than men, but every "gender equity" initiative seems more interested in increasing that gap than decreasing it.

There are actually people working on various causes of that - attempts to lower incarceration rates, initiatives for safety practices in work help men more then women. Initiatives against smoking and alcoholism make male lifespan larger. Less guns in society would actually lead to less men dead.

One problem is that tackling easy causes of male deaths is met with complains about making men softer or feminizing them.

You're kind of reinforcing my point that while there are things that incidentally help men, none of that is done in the name of "gender equity".

For example you mention incarceration and studies show a "sentencing gap" where if a man and woman commit exactly the same crime, the man will on average receive a longer sentence. But there is no call to reduce incarceration for men specifically. There are some calls to reduce incarceration for everyone. There are also bizarrely some calls to reduce it for women specifically in the name of "gender equity" (even though the "sentencing gap" already privileges women).

Basically it's politically incorrect to specifically help men unless you wrap it up in language about how it actually helps the people who matter, i.e. women and children.

There is one class of human being who are really at the bottom, and it's not women (or even poor women) but poor men. They die early, are more victims of violence, commit suicide more often, die at work an order of magnitude over women, have greater chance to be homeless, greater chance to have disabilities, have less partners etc etc. But let's be frank no one care about them, even in Europe.

These kind of things aren't binary; some groups, on average, have it better in one area, and worse in another. But I don't think that should really come in to play when we're talking about one specific area (car crashing, in this case).

The world is complex, and when dealing with groups of people even more so.

The dummy's breasts don't seem to move in the video despite the impacts, I think they're probably made out of steel, or a very stiff rubber. I doubt they accurately simulate real breasts, I think they're on the dummy to convey femaleness.

They don't need to move much. The issue I noticed is that when my breasts grew, some safety belts went through throat (previously did not).

They push the belt to the side.

In a collision that rends a metal car frame, I think all flesh would move. Crash test dummies don't simulate this aspect of collisions.

The existing NHTSA female dummies have breasts as well. See:

https://www.nhtsa.gov/nhtsas-crash-test-dummies

Presumably the difference here is around weight distribution and other limb length and size proportions. Still I think "First Female Crash Dummy" is a stretch.

It’s entirely possible this will make cars safer for everyone

As someone 4 inches taller and uh... let's go with significantly heavier than 171 pounds I feel like I'm losing. I certainly wonder what would happen in a crash when I'm riding with my knees jammed against the dashboard. And weight is obviously important and it's rather concerning that I'm stressing the safety system past what it was tested against.

> women are much more likely than men to die or be seriously injured in a car crash

I don't think that's right, at least not as stated? Many more men die in car crashes than women: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

Men tend to be in crashes that are more severe than women, though, probably because men are more likely to speed and drive drunk. If you try to look at crashes of equal severity (which is always a bit fraught since you don't have a real control group) then you do see something like what you're describing, though the NHTSA thinks this is mostly due to how robust men vs women are on average and not car design: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811766.PDF

Natural language is always ambiguous, but it is very reasonable to interpret "women are much more likely than men to die or be seriously injured in a car crash" as

    P(death_or_injury | crash AND female) > P(death_or_injury | crash AND male)

That is, women are more likely to die or be seriously injured CONDITIONAL ON being in a crash. So it is irrelevant that more men than women are injured in total.

Conditional on being in a crash men are probably still more likely to be killed or injured, because the crashes men are in tend to be more severe (often due to their driving decisions).

Sure, there's still the question of survivability between men and women if those accidents are categorized based on severity with measuring things like speeds involved, whether it was a T-bone, type of road (highway, city street, etc.) and probably lots of other dimensions I'm leaving out.

> Conditional on being in a crash men are probably still more likely to be killed or injured

Sounds like the "probably" here is a guess?

Young + Male is a great way to increase your car insurance [1]. I think it's safe to say car insurance's cost is reflective of risk (cost) with a more serious accident costing more than a less serious.

CDC also states that men get into fatal accidents much more often (2x) than females [2].

[1]: https://www.moneygeek.com/insurance/auto/rates-by-age-and-ge... [2]: https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/teen_drivers/teendr...

No, that says "motor vehicle death rate for male drivers aged 16–19 was over two times higher than the death rate for female drivers of the same age".

You're rehashing the above conditional probability discussion.

"Crashes involving male drivers often are more severe than those involving female drivers."

"The number of driver fatal crash involvements per 100 million miles driven in 2016-17 was 63 percent higher for males (2.1 per 100 million miles traveled) than for females (1.3 per 100 million miles traveled). Rates were substantially higher for males than for females ages 16-29, but were only slightly higher for ages 30 and older. The sex difference was largest among drivers ages 20-29."

https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/males...

"per 100 million miles" is also restarting this conversation from scratch.

Conditional on being in a crash is the operative clause here.

> Crashes involving male drivers often are more severe than those involving female drivers

is closer to the mark, and the next unquoted sentence "However, females are more likely than males to be killed or injured in crashes of equal severity, although sex differences in fatality risk diminish with age" seems like it may be what the article was talking about, though the cited source is from 1998, well before a number of modern car safety features were standard (even air bags weren't required until that year).

https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/males...

The key point is that in the same situation, women are more likely to be injured from what I understand.

It does sound somewhat dodgy, though; as it implies they throw out the fatality data. Would love to see the data.

More men than women die conditional on being in a crash, because men tend to be involved in more severe crashes. But in crashes "of similar severity" women tend to be more severely injured than men. One confounding variable is the size of the vehicle, but it may be factored into the "similar severity" calculation.

Maybe they were injured instead of killed?

I remember hearing somewhere that a number of the men involved in "speed and drunk" crashes are going through financial issues, life insurance doesn't pay out if you commit suicide but it does if you crash into a bridge at 100mph.

Life insurance does typically pay out in case of suicide after a 1-2 year cliff. It's a health issue like any other.

I doubt those instances are conscious financial decisions. Suicide methods are highly correlated to the methods people have at their disposal... and cars are for many, the most dangerous item they have.

Life insurance often does but sometimes has a 2 year waiting period before it does. AD&D is a separate policy on top of life insurance, often worth an equal amount, which does not pay out in cases of suicide.

So masking a suicide can double payments to the family. AD&D also does not pay out in deaths involving toxic substances or “reckless driving”.

Men also drive more. Taxi drivers, truck drives, cops, all those professions are male dominated. And at least where I live, it is man drive family car to work and woman is more likely to go by public transport to work. Man is more likely to be the one to drive when family goes somewhere (and some are quite territorial about it).

In a car crash, that is, per crash, women are much more likely than men to die or be seriously injured.

Men are involved in many, many more crashes overall, but in a car crash, cars are currently designed to protect men better than women.

The indefinite article is doing a lot of work there.

Conditional on being in a crash, men are more likely to die due to being involved in more severe crashes. But ceteris paribus, women tend to be more easily injured.

Literally the first sentence in the article says, "Compared to men, women are 17 percent more likely to die in a car crash and 73 percent more likely to sustain serious injuries in a front-end collision."

The article does say that, but the article is simplifying. If you click through they're citing https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... which says 17% "given similar physical insults". But conditional on being in a crash is not the same thing as conditional on being in a crash of a given severity.

What do you suppose is the error introduced by weight distribution differences, as opposed to the dummy being 40lbs (29%) too light?

Absolute weight is more important in a crash test scenario. If your proportions are correct, but the weight is far off, that’s going to be much worse than having incorrect proportions with the correct weight.

> women are much more likely than men to die or be seriously injured in a car crash

Can you cite an academic reference for this? I'm suspicious, but genuinely curious.

The first two links in the article might be of interest. Not exactly what you asked for but still might satisfy your curiosity.

Edit: linked article changed, was referring to: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-first-female-c...

I only found one link in the article, https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/8117..., and the abstract begins with:

Aging increases a person’s fragility (likelihood of injury given a physical insult) and frailty (chance of dying from a specific injury). Young adult females are more fragile than males of the same age, but later in life women are less frail than their male contemporaries.

My impression is that this thread suggests the design of cars has a bias to male safety at the expense of female safety. This link doesn't support that conclusion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com