Gender-Smart-Investing
Engineering Innovations Process
Gender sensitive medicine
Inclusive Crash Test Dummies
Osteoporosis Research in Men
Smart Mobility

Numerous case studies in Engineering, Science, Environment and Medical Research prove the effectiveness of Gendered Innovations’ methods. This selection highlights some of GI’s astounding benefits.

Gender-Smart-Investing:
Bidhaa Sasa

Bidha Sasa

The Challenge:

Innovative clean energy technology does not reach the underserved population of rural Kenya. Even though solar systems or efficient cook stoves are frequently found in cities, families that live in rural parts cannot access them because the established distribution system do not serve them. Gender roles play a crucial role in designing business plans to achieve a high ecological and social impact. The inclusion of women’s perception and life realities are increasingly seen as the key to the implementation of clean energy in individual households in the countryside of Kenya. 

The GI Solution:

Bidhaa Sasa addresses inequality on several levels by providing access to education, financial resources and also by conquering the lack of infrastructure in rural areas. As the role of women often refers to staying at home, products are delivered directly at the front door to overcome limited mobility. However, the main barrier is and remains the financing of clean energy. That’s why Bidhaa Sasa implemented group payments with easy mobile money payments. They offer so-called nano-credits which are a very small but significant amount to ensure the procurement of clean energy for families with low financial income. Giving women access to finance means therefore that women make up 69 % of all clienteles. Client acquisition is organized through peer-to-peer learning and primarily performed by women. Bidhaa Sasa uses a gender sensitive approach solely by creating products to improve the domestic situation. The majority of the employees are once again women who have known the mentioned challenges all their lives and therefore are best at identifying and addressing the respective needs.

Gender-Smart-Investing: Bidhaa Sasa

Engineering Innovations Process: Exoskeletons for all

The Challenge:

Innovative Technologies like exoskeletons are designed to improve one’s life after surgery or in terms of body disabilities. However, they are mostly designed for the average person. Designers tend to use the one-size-fits-all approach – a design choice that illegitimates differences in age, gender or body size which then discriminates end users. As it is common in various working fields mechanical and robot technology were historically seen as part of a distinct male sphere, and the criteria used today to develop new technology still didn’t change that much. 

The GI Solution:

Exoskeleton users come in a wide variety of height, weight, or genders etc. Therefore, an intersectional lens on engineering processes to address society in all its facets is needed. Several studies show that exoskeletons lead to significant medical, technological, and social improvements within clinical treatment. Roger Andre Søraa* and Eduard Fosch-Villaronga published a study named “Exoskeletons for all” in 2019, which argues for inclusive technological design choices. By considering height, weight, correlated conditions, capabilities, gender, cultural and inclusivity aspects, they’re trying to draw attention to the fact that individualized technology must recognize the world in its diversity.

Engineering Innovations Process: Exoskeletons for all

https://doi.org/10.1515/pjbr-2020-0036

Gender sensitive medicine

The Challenge:

Classic medical research is based on standardized processes and reference models which mainly fulfill the predominantly male perspective in science. For a long time, this has led to disadvantages of marginalized groups and especially of biological women. As long as health care and clinical pictures disregard the world in its diversity, patience won’t get the comprehensive treatment they deserve as human beings. As an example, women are 27% less likely than men to receive CPR from bystanders in public which can be seen as the result of a restrictive social perception on the female body. The absence of breasts on CPR dummies means that people with breasts are much more likely to die in accidents. A similar example can be seen in the case of drug development. In the 1990s ten drugs were withdrawn from the US market and eight of them showed greater health risk to biological women than men. As before, women died because drug testing has been predominantly tested on men.  

Sources:
Perman, Sarah & Shelton, Shelby & Knoepke, Chris & Rappaport, Kathryn & Matlock, Daniel & Adelgais, Kathleen & Havranek, Edward & Daugherty, Stacie. Public Perceptions on Why Women Receive Less Bystander Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation Than Men in Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest. Circulation. 2019. 

US General Accounting Office. Drug Safety: Most Drugs withdrawn in Recent Years had Greater Health Risks for Women. Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office. 2001. 

The GI Solution:

By this means, sex and gender sensitive research is a key element for improving medical research and drug development. This requires scientists who bring the importance of a diverse society to the forefront. Prof. Dr. Sabine Oertelt-Prigione is one of the main leaders on Gender-sensitive Medicine and holds therefore the only professorship in Germany. One of her main concerns is the best possible care for patients, which she understands as acknowledging differences in sex, gender, age, body size etc. Two research examples are the analysis of the impact of sex and gender in the Covid-19 pandemic (1) or the sex-differences in symptoms and functioning in cancer survivors (2). This has led to findings such as the increased mortality rate of biological males due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Men also tend to perceive a harder re-entry into daily life after cancer which can be attributed to internalized gender roles.  

Sources:

(1) European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, Oertelt-Prigione, S., The impact of sex and gender in the COVID-19 pandemic: Case study, Publications Office, 2020.

(2) Sabine Oertelt-Prigione, Belle H. de Rooij, Floortje Mols, Simone Oerlemans, Olga Husson, Dounya Schoormans, John B. Haanen, Lonneke V. van de Poll-Franse, Sex-differences in symptoms and functioning in >5000 cancer survivors: Results from the PROFILES registry, European Journal of Cancer, Volume 156, 2021.

Inclusive Crash
Test Dummies

The Challenge:

In car design, the medium-sized male body (175 cm; 75.5 kg) has been taken as the norm—making cars safer for these men but leave out woman, obese or elderly people and put them to a greater risk and danger. In a comparable car crash a woman has 47% higher chance to sustain severe injuries.  Moreover, conventional seatbelts do not fit pregnant woman properly and motor vehicle chrashe are the leading cause of fetal death related to maternal trauma.

The GI Solution:

In order to enhance automotive safety devices such as seatbelts should be designed for all people. “Linda” by Volvo, is a virtual pregnant crash test dummy that models the effects of high speed impact on the womb, placenta, and fetus.

Osteoporosis Research in Men

The Challenge:

Medical research often treats men as the norm and builds reference models on data that is not representative for women. However, in osteoporosis research reference models until the late 90s were mainly based on data from young white women. Their bone mineral density was used to create a reference model for diagnosis. The problem was obvious: The reference models did not represent male bone mineral density adequately and were thus not applicable enough to men.

The GI Solution:

Considering sex differences helped identify risk for men and this is what researchers continue to do: They identify sex-related factors that may increase the likeliness to suffer from osteoporosis and metabolic bone disorders. Gender and sex analysis helped to uncover the sex bias in the reference models and led to considerable improvements.

Osteoporosis Research in Men

Smart Mobility

The Challenge:

Mobility is rapidly changing: Cities are trying to adapt to the growing demand for smart mobility options to reduce CO2 Emissions. Urban transportation is increasingly offering those options underpinned by information and communications technology (ICT) platforms designed to ease access to transportation services and to personalize modern transportation

But in Mobility patterns one can still observe gender norms. Gendered care work – such as running errands, caring or relatives, taking children to work – conduct a different mobility pattern than commuting to work. But these mobility pattern and gender are largely ignored but the developments in smart mobility.

The GI Solution:

The innovative concept “mobility of care” reveals significant travel patterns otherwise concealed in data collection variable. The researchers unconventionally collected care trips under one category instead of collecting it in numerous small categories (such as errands, health, social). The Data showed that Care-Related-Work Trips (29%) are almost an as big part of the researched cities mobility as employment (33%). This allows transportation engineers to design systems that work well for broader segments of the population. The reconceptualizing data collection is important because women perform a relatively large share of accompanying trips. They make more short trips and more chained trips than men. Women also tend to prefer shorter distances between home and the workplace.

Smart Mobility