When ‘Neutral' Isn’t: Unpacking The Gender Bias in Products and Systems

Men As The “Default”

Many products and systems are designed with an inherent gender bias — a one-size-fits-men mentality.

Pianos

Pianos have been designed with the average male user in mind. Since men's hands tend to be larger, the keys are spaced accordingly. This design can limit female pianists, making it more challenging for them to achieve the same level of technical mastery and recognition as their male counterparts.

Furthermore, studies have shown that women are at a 50% higher risk of pain and injury due to this gender-biased design. While male pianists may navigate the keys with ease, female pianists often struggle against an instrument not built for their anatomy.

Cars

When women take the wheel, they often face a different kind of challenge. Adjusting the seat closer to the steering wheel places them outside the "standard seating position" manufacturers base their safety systems on. Consequently, women are 71% more likely to be injured in crashes and 17% more likely to die, even after accounting for height, weight, and seat belt usage.

The root cause? Crash test dummies are overwhelmingly modeled after male bodies. When female dummies are used, they are often scaled-down versions of male dummies, disregarding the distinct anatomical and biomechanical differences that should inform safety testing.

Restrooms

The seemingly equitable division of restroom space, with equal floor space for men’s and women’s facilities, is another misleading standard.

While men’s restrooms typically have both stalls and urinals, women’s restrooms rely solely on stalls, which take longer to use. Additionally, women often spend more time in restrooms due to biological needs—whether it’s pregnancy, menstruation, or caring for children, the elderly, or disabled.

The consequence? Women frequently face longer lines and greater inconvenience, despite the supposedly equal allocation of space.

Agricultural Machinery

In the United States, as of 2007, nearly one million women operated farm machinery, yet most equipment was designed based on male physiology. Tools were often too heavy, too large, or poorly positioned for women’s shorter hands and different body proportions.

This has led to higher rates of strain and injury among female farmworkers. The industry’s failure to accommodate the female form reinforces the false narrative that women are inherently less capable of performing such labor when, in fact, they are merely ill-equipped by a system that ignores their needs.

Medicine

For centuries, the medical field has treated the male body as the default, with the female body seen as an “atypical” variation. Even today, medical textbooks overwhelmingly feature male bodies, with men being used three times more often than women to represent “neutral body parts.”

This bias has far-reaching consequences in diagnosing and treating diseases, as women’s unique physiological, metabolic, and hormonal differences are often overlooked.

The male-centric approach to medical research means that women are not only less represented but also face risks from treatments that were never designed with them in mind.

Why Are Women “Invisible” in Design?

The examples above highlight how gender-biased design has been normalized in everyday life, rooted in a historical context where men dominated leadership and decision-making positions.

Standards were established with a male-centric worldview during the industrial and technological revolutions, and they continue to shape product design today.

The Gender Data Gap

One of the main contributors to this “one-size-fits-all” approach is the gender data gap. Product testing, surveys, and research often overlook women entirely or fail to account for gender-specific differences.

In tech, for example, Google’s speech recognition software is 70% more accurate for male voices. This disparity exists because the corpora used for training the system predominantly features male recordings, leading to skewed performance when applied to women’s voices. Similarly, in medicine, many studies focus exclusively on male subjects and extend findings to both genders without considering the critical differences between them.

Many animal studies focusing on diseases that predominantly affect women often fail to include female subjects.

For instance, even though women are 70% more likely to experience depression than men, studies on brain-related disorders tend to use male animals five times more frequently than females. Even in research that does include both sexes, two-thirds of the results lack sex-specific analyses.

The reluctance to integrate sex and gender into research is frequently framed as a “burden,” with researchers citing the higher costs associated with including both sexes and concerns over the hormonal fluctuations in female animals, which are believed to complicate results.

However, these reasons reflect the scientific community’s limited efforts to embrace inclusivity and ensure comprehensive research. The notion that studying women's bodies is more challenging only perpetuates the existing gender bias in scientific research, ultimately contributing to the systemic underrepresentation of women's health needs.

The Absence of Women in Leadership and R&D

In most cases, men do not intentionally exclude women from consideration in product design. However, women have unique needs and experiences that male manufacturers—simply by virtue of their own lived experiences—may not fully understand or anticipate.

When women are not adequately involved in the R&D process, from initial design through to production, evaluation, and testing, their perspectives are often overlooked or undervalued.

Take, for example, Google’s massive parking lot. Prior to 2014, pregnant employees struggled to navigate the long distances to the office with their heavier bodies and swollen feet.

It wasn’t until a pregnant employee approached the company’s director, Sergey Brin, and suggested closer parking for expectant mothers that the issue was addressed. Brin immediately agreed, acknowledging that the need had never occurred to him before. As a result, all pregnant employees at Google have benefited from this change.

Similarly, tech journalist Adi Robertson once attended a demonstration for a head-mounted display designed to track the user’s eye movements. When the device failed to function correctly for her, an employee asked whether she was wearing mascara.

After recalibration, the device worked perfectly, highlighting the rare consideration of makeup in tech design. Notably, this VR startup was the only one Adi had encountered with a female founder, underscoring the importance of women’s presence in leadership roles to address such overlooked details.

How to Break The Invisible Loops of Inequality?

The “one size fits all” approach persists because it reduces costs and streamlines production for manufacturers. However, when products that are intended to be gender-neutral are inherently biased towards men, the immediate consequences fall on women.

This isn’t just a matter of flawed science—where women’s productivity and access to certain jobs are hindered—but also a moral issue, especially when it compromises women’s health and safety.

Women are often undervalued in the workplace, not because they lack competence, but because the tools and environments they work in are not designed for them. This reinforces harmful stereotypes about women’s abilities.

Worse still, when women are consistently placed at a disadvantage, they may internalize these biases, doubting their skills and suitability for particular roles. This loop not only exacerbates the gender pay gap, but also limits female involvement in a variety of industries.

Instead of placing the burden on women to adapt to systems not created for them, we need to address the systemic gaps in representation and design. The focus should be on creating products and environments that are inclusive.

Each new season brings innovative products, but they should be designed to serve everyone—women included—not just designed to better suit men.

Translated by Thúy An