When my girlfriend visited me for the first time, we stayed in my room. It was all very romantic, except that we immediately discovered we were at war over the air conditioning. The coldest temperature she could tolerate still felt lukewarm.
But this isn’t just our problem—it’s a universal struggle.
We often assume that the world is for everyone. Supposedly. Roads, buildings, and everyday objects are designed for “people.” And since women, according to the latest scientific consensus, are indeed people, one might assume that the world is built for them just as much as it is for men.
Ha. Cute.
See, research has revealed that a shocking amount of modern design was created with only half the population in mind. Take a wild guess which half. Go on, I’ll wait.
From office air conditioning that assumes women are just smaller, shiverier men, to crash-test dummies modeled after the average bloke, women have been speedrunning life on hard mode simply because nobody thought to ask, hey, does this work for everyone?
Why does this matter? Because these little oversights have consequences. Some are annoying—like trying to reach a shelf calibrated to male height norms (which, fine, sounds like every romantic scene in every high school movie ever).
But then there are the slightly more pressing issues. Like being in a car crash that wasn’t tested for your body type. Or bleeding out because your stab-proof vest was designed for someone with, shall we say, fewer curves.
And if you think this is some ancient relic of the past—oh no, it’s still very much a thing. Right now. Today.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. the reference man
2. from a minor office inconvenience
3. to dying from work (literally)
4. and everyday gadgets designed for typical (right-handed) men
5. driving to horrible accidents
1. the reference man
Before diving into the topic, let’s take a look at a really important term in the topic: the reference man.
Imagine a man between 20 and 30 years old, weighing around 70 kilograms, standing about 170 centimeters tall. He lives in a climate where the average temperature ranges from 10°C to 20°C. He’s Caucasian and follows the lifestyle and habits common in Western Europe or North America.
In science, engineering, and medicine, this man is known as the Reference Man. He serves as the standard model researchers and designers have used for decades to develop many aspects of the modern world.
When creating products, systems, or safety standards, many industries used this single male figure as the “average” human. As a result, women, children, and people of different body types were often overlooked in the design process.
This is one of the reasons women, in particular, may feel that certain everyday items or environments aren’t quite suited to them. Office chairs may feel too large, indoor temperatures might feel too cold, and using smartphones with one hand can feel awkward. These small inconveniences all stem from the fact that much of the world was built around the measurements, needs, and physiology of the Reference Man.
This influence goes beyond furniture and technology—it also affects medical research, safety equipment, transportation, and even public spaces. In many cases, products and policies were developed with this one male profile in mind, leaving others to adapt as best they could.
The Reference Man’s impact can be seen almost everywhere. But you are so used to things being this way you might not even notice. Understanding this helps explain why so much of the world may feel slightly out of sync if you don’t fit his profile. And once you become aware of it, you start seeing it all around you.
For now, it’s enough to know: the modern world was built around a single standard—and many people have had to adjust to fit into it.
2. from a minor office inconvenience
I conducted scientific research via Instagram, a professional communications network, by asking my female friends if they felt too cold at work.
94% said yes, only 6% said no. So it’s a somewhat shared experience among women.
But why is this a thing?
Apparently, women feel colder than men at work. Scientists have looked into this, probably after noticing all the blankets and passive-aggressive thermostat wars in offices.
Turns out, the standard office temperature was set in the 1960s using the metabolic resting rate of the average man, which is great if you’re an average man. Less great if you’re anyone else.
So, what is the metabolic resting rate? Well, glad you asked, it’s how many calories your body burns while you’re lying there like a sad potato, doing absolutely nothing.
Even then, your body still needs the energy to keep you alive—making your heartbeat, processing the dodgy takeaway you ate last night, inflating and deflating your lungs, and, most importantly for this discussion, warming you up like a biological radiator.
If your metabolic rate is low, your body is rubbish at heating itself. If it’s high, you’re a human space heater. Before the 1960s, scientists measured this using something called calorimetry, which is just a fancy way of checking how much energy someone burns while existing. Weirdly, they mostly tested men. Maybe they thought women didn’t need heat, or maybe they just forgot women existed.
Direct calorimetry involves placing subjects in a sealed chamber to measure heat output, while indirect calorimetry estimates energy expenditure by analyzing oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production.
Like this but not actually exercising, like you and me
Another common tool was the Benedict-Roth spirometer, which calculated metabolic rates based on respiratory gas exchange. When the formula for office temperature was standardized in the 1960s, it relied on data from these methods—but only for men.
Since the average male metabolic rate is 20–35% higher than women’s, the result was an office climate optimized for male bodies, leaving women to freeze in the name of “scientific accuracy.”
However a recent Dutch study found that the metabolic rate of young adult females performing light office work is significantly lower than the standard values for men doing the same activity.
Okay, so this chart is basically showing how warm or cold people actually feel compared to what scientists used to think they should feel. And, surprise, they got it kind of wrong.
On the left, there’s this big grey area — that’s what they call the thermoneutral zone. It’s just a fancy term for the temperature range where your body feels fine. Not too hot, not too cold. Scientists came up with this back in the 1960s, and the way they did it was by studying men sitting still, staring at the wall, and doing nothing at all, including the laundry.
The thing is, most people at work aren’t just sitting perfectly still. Even if you’re at a desk, you’re typing, clicking, maybe even leaning back dramatically when you read a passive aggressive email. All of that actually warms you up a bit — which means the old “comfortable” temperature range is actually cooler than it should be for people who are, you know, alive and moving.
Then in the middle of the chart, there’s this little bunch of dots. Those dots are from a study where they actually measured the comfort levels and skin temperatures of real women working in offices. And they’re way off from that original 1960s zone.
In other words, the temperatures in most offices are set to? They’re not even close to what feels comfortable for most women.
The reason why this happened is pretty simple — back in the 1960s, they mostly studied men. Because at the time, the idea of women working in offices was still seen as unusual.
In the rare case that they do, they mostly work as receptionists, secretaries, and typists. And when they do, they only account for a small proportion of the workforce. Not exactly what a typical 1960 researcher would have in mind as a typical office worker when researching these types of things.
So the scientists just assumed that if they figured out what was comfortable for men, that would cover everyone.
That’s why today, a lot of women feel freezing at work. It’s not because they’re being dramatic — it’s because the whole system for setting the thermostat was based on data that ignored them. And to make it even worse, the formula they use to guess how much heat women’s bodies produce is wrong too — by up to 35%. So the default office temperature ends up being around 5 degrees too cold for women.
And this isn’t just about comfort. When people are cold, they don’t focus as well, they make more mistakes, and they’re generally less productive.
Studies have shown that in colder environments, employees are more likely to make errors in their work, from typos to calculation mistakes, as their mental resources are split between their work and their physical discomfort.
Additionally, the body’s physical response to cold — tense muscles, reduced dexterity, and slower reaction times — can further contribute to decreased productivity, especially in tasks requiring fine motor skills or sustained attention.
So it’s not just a personal issue — it’s actually bad for business too. So capitalists, as much as they hate people and society, should care about this too.
And the thing is, this isn’t just about office temperatures. There’s a much bigger pattern where women — and anyone who isn’t the “average man” — kind of get left out of the data scientists and engineers use to design everything from safety equipment to medicine. And those little gaps add up over time, to the point where the world just doesn’t fit right if you’re not the person they originally had in mind.
So yeah — if you’re always cold at work, you’re not imagining it. The office wasn’t set up for you. And that’s just one example of how a tiny decision made decades ago can still affect people today.
3. to dying from work (literally)
You know how we always say work is supposed to support our lives? Like, we work to make money, so we can live the life we want. Except sometimes, work is just quietly shoving us one step closer to the grave.
Back in the early 1900s, around 4,400 people died at work every year in the UK — a horrifying figure, though perhaps less surprising when you consider what “work” often meant back then: dangerous industrial jobs, unsafe mines, and unregulated factories.
By 2016, the number of annual workplace fatalities had fallen to 135, thanks to sweeping improvements in health and safety regulations, technology, and oversight.1
So, overall, workplaces have gotten significantly safer. But those improvements haven’t been evenly distributed. Most occupational health and safety policies, standards, and risk assessments were developed with male-dominated industries in mind—construction sites, heavy manufacturing, and other sectors where physical injury is obvious and severe.
Meanwhile, injuries and illnesses in female-dominated sectors — such as healthcare, education, and service work — have received far less attention, even though these jobs come with their own significant risks, including musculoskeletal disorders, workplace violence, and exposure to infectious diseases.
In some countries, workplace injury rates among women have actually been rising, particularly in sectors like healthcare and social assistance, where chronic stress, repetitive strain injuries, and understaffing create hazardous working conditions.
The result? Women are way more likely to get things like repetitive strain injuries or deal with workplace violence [2]—stuff that doesn’t always make headlines but seriously impacts their health. Nurses, for example, do a ton of heavy lifting, but the guidelines for how to safely lift a patient? They’re mostly based on the average man’s strength.
So yeah, workplaces have gotten safer overall, but they’ve also accidentally become more dangerous for women. Which is kind of an achievement, in a twisted way.
And then there’s the stuff that’s harder to see. Like cancers.
Take breast cancer, for example. While the mortality rate (how likely you are to die from them has gone down), the incidence rates (how likely you are to get them) have skyrocketed over the last 50 years [3], but we have almost no data on whether certain jobs make it worse.
Because, as many resources were poured into breast cancer research, scientists haven’t really studied women’s work environments, women’s bodies, or women’s exposure to workplace chemicals, and because we lack the knowledge on how or the legal requirement to do it, little is done to help women not having to cut out their breasts.
And even if they started studying it today, we wouldn’t have clear answers for decades—because cancers like this take years to show up. But they’re not starting those studies today. They’re still mostly assuming that whatever happens to men happens to women too. Like women are just men with smaller hands and higher voices.
The thing is, men’s and women’s bodies don’t work the same way. From the inside to the outside. Different hormones, different immune systems, and even different skin thickness. Women’s skin is thinner, so chemicals absorb faster. Women also tend to have more body fat, which means toxic stuff doesn’t just pass through — it gets stored, like leftovers you forgot in the back of the fridge.
And yet, when we test chemicals for safety, they’re usually tested on men, in isolation. Meanwhile, in real life, women are breathing in hairspray, cleaning products, pollution, and that weird chemical smell in the office — all at once. And nobody’s really checked what that cocktail does to the body. Probably nothing good.
And then after their shift, a lot of these women go home and clean the house — exposing themselves to even more chemicals. No one’s really studied what happens when all those chemicals build up together in the same body. But if they don’t mix well in a test tube, I can’t imagine they mix well in a person.
Most workplace chemical research focuses on how stuff gets absorbed through the skin — which is fine if you’re planning to bathe in acetone. But the chemicals in salons? They float through the air. You breathe them in. And we just haven’t studied that much. Because why would we? We’ve been too busy studying how men’s bodies react to sitting in chairs.
Then there’s the safety gear—PPE, the stuff that’s supposed to protect you.
In theory, employers have to provide gear that fits. But in reality, that just means smaller versions of men’s gear, or the unisex gear if you want to be inclusive, but mostly tested on men. And as we discussed, women’s bodies aren’t just mini-men bodies — different shapes, different proportions. This means safety harnesses, stab vests, and even basic work gloves don’t fit properly.
This isn’t just annoying — it’s dangerous. In 1997, a female police officer was stabbed and killed because her body armor didn’t fit, so she had to take it off to do her job4. Two years later, another female officer had breast reduction surgery because her body armour was crushing her. After her story came out, 700 female officers reported the exact same problem.
And somehow we still haven’t sorted it out. A new armor is designed specifically for women now, we got it in 2023, but whether their police forces buy it or not is still optional.
Women officers still get bruised from their equipment, develop back problems, and have vests that don’t cover everything they’re supposed to. Some designs don’t even account for breasts — which feels like a pretty important detail to miss.
So, to sum up: workplaces are still mostly designed around men. The tools, the gear, the chemicals, even the air — all based on this imaginary “Reference Man” who’s treated like the default human. Meanwhile, women are left to just… deal with it. On the plus side, at least men can comfortably hold a brick.
4. and everyday gadgets designed for typical (right-handed) men
I’m left-handed. I’ve spent my whole life wrestling with tools made for right-handed people. Everything—from scissors to the fruit-skin-peeling thing—feels like a daily reminder that the world wasn’t built with people like me in mind. It’s like being a penguin trying to survive in the desert—possible, but unnecessarily difficult.
Most things designed for one-handed use default to the right hand — which, sure, makes sense from a business perspective. But for left-handed people, it’s functional but awkward.
That’s what it’s like for women living in a world designed by and for men. Unless something is explicitly made for women, the default setting is “male.” From office temperatures to safety gear to healthcare — it’s all calibrated for men first. And sure, from a business perspective, that made sense too. But for women, it’s frustrating. It’s exhausting. It’s the desert all over again.
Now imagine being a left-handed woman. That’s life in nightmare mode.
Take smartphones. The average size is now 5.5 inches, which sounds small, but in a woman’s hand, it’s the size of a medieval shield. Men, with our statistically larger hands, can comfortably text, scroll, and swipe right without risking a wrist injury. Women, meanwhile, have to perform elaborate finger gymnastics just to leave the men’s text on read.
Now if I throw in the stats where it’s stated that women are actually more likely to own an iPhone than men, wouldn’t that be ironic?
Apple, a company that makes its products white, sleek, and expensive—arguably the most feminine traits a product can have—somehow still forgets women exist when designing them.
And it’s not just phones. Voice-recognition software—the thing that’s supposed to make life easier—actually makes it harder for women by refusing to understand them.
A study found that Google’s speech recognition software was 70% better at recognizing men’s voices. This is great for men, but not so much for the woman screaming at her car’s voice command to “CALL 911”.
Tech’s default setting is “man.” Apple’s first health-monitoring system could track your steps, your blood pressure, and even your molybdenum levels—because obviously, we all wake up in the morning desperate to know our molybdenum levels—but somehow forgot to include a period tracker, which is a bit like making a car and forgetting to add doors.
When Siri launched, she could help you find prostitutes and Viagra, but if you told her you’d need an abortion, it balatantly claimed that it was anti-abortion.
When confronted about it, Apple claim that it was not intentional and rather it was still in testing. When a testing process helps people find Viagra but can’t with abortion clinics, perhaps your testing process needs a testing process. But it’s wholesome that they still think this is a problem.
And it’s not just digital tech. Even fitness trackers underestimate steps taken during housework by up to 74%. This is interesting because if men were the ones doing most of the housework, I’m fairly certain we’d have an Olympic sport called Competitive Vacuuming by now.
So while the tech industry likes to think of itself as futuristic, cutting-edge, and innovative, it somehow still operates under the assumption that “man” is the default and “woman” is just some weird spinoff.
The good news is, that smartphone screens probably won’t be getting any bigger because they’ve finally hit men’s hand size limit.
5. driving to horrible accidents
My mother has been urging me to learn how to drive for a while now. I do know how to drive but I haven’t take the qualification tests yet. In my family, my mother is the only person to not know how to drive.
And it’s not that rare in other families either. In many households, especially in more traditional or conservative cultures, driving is often seen as the man’s responsibility — a subtle extension of the belief that men should take charge in practical or protective roles.
This dynamic has even made its way into pop culture through the term “passenger princess”, which refers to the person — often a woman — who sits in the passenger seat while someone else (typically her partner) drives.
It’s a playful label, but it also reflects a deeper, normalized assumption about who belongs behind the wheel and who does not.
But it’s not actually that unreasonable to suggest that women maybe should not drive. Stay with me.
Women are 73% more likely to be seriously injured in a car crash than men.5 That means if you crash and you’re a woman, you’ve got nearly half the chance of coming out of it looking like an abstract painting. Not because women are worse drivers—though that’s a popular myth—but because cars are designed for men.
When it comes to crashes, there is one thing that are designed specifically to make people die less in accidents. Crash tests.
Crash tests are basically like when you drop your phone on purpose to see if the case actually works—except instead of a phone, it’s a car, and instead of a case, it’s all the safety bits like seat belts and airbags.
Scientists smash cars into walls with crash-test dummies inside, a human-shaped piñata full of sensors, to see how much they’d get jumbled up in a real crash. The idea is to mimic how a human would absorb the impact of a crash sitting in a designed car, and based on what they learned they can make cars safer so people don’t get turned into spaghetti in an accident.
So you can see how crash test dummies have to be almost perfect human replicas because even small differences can mess up the results. If a dummy’s weight, height, or even the squishiness of its fake flesh isn’t right, it won’t react like a real person in a crash.
For example, if the dummy’s neck is too stiff, it might not show the risk of whiplash properly. If its chest doesn’t compress like a human’s, it could underestimate how deadly a crash is. Since car safety is based on these tests, any flaws in the dummy mean real people could end up in more danger than expected.
For decades, crash test dummies were modeled exclusively after the Reference Man. This means that seat belts, airbags, and headrests were all optimized for that body type. The logic behind this was simple—back in the 1960s, when these tests first started, the assumption was that the typical driver was a man. Women, it seems, were just supposed to sit quietly in the passenger seat, hoping for the best.
It wasn’t until 2011 that the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) finally introduced a female crash dummy—but even that wasn’t much of a win.
First, instead of designing a new model to reflect the actual anatomy of a woman, they just shrunk the male dummy down to 4’11” and 49 kg (108 lbs).
This “female” dummy lacks key differences like variations in muscle distribution, fat composition, spinal alignment, and pelvis shape—all of which affect how a body absorbs impact in a crash. And how your body absorbs impact in a crash determined how fucked you are.
Secondly, they’re only used in 5% of tests, which means that the chances of you woman picking up a car designed for women to not die inside is just a little bit higher than pulling a five-star banner in Genshin Impact.
The audacity.
“Oh Guy, I’m sure that it doesn’t matter that much? If it works for men maybe it works for women too?”
I heard you asked. No.
Because of this oversight, women are at higher risk for serious injuries. According to a 2019 study from the University of Virginia, women are 73% more likely to be seriously injured in frontal crashes compared to men, even when wearing seat belts.
Another study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) found that women are 17% more likely to die in a car accident than men in similar crashes.
One major reason is that women tend to sit closer to the steering wheel because of their shorter legs.
This puts them at a higher risk of chest and abdominal injuries from airbags and steering column impact. In car safety testing, this is called being an “out of position” driver, as if women are just sitting incorrectly on purpose instead of adapting to how cars are designed.
Whiplash is another big issue. Women are three times more likely to suffer from whiplash in rear-end collisions compared to men, largely due to differences in neck strength and posture. Yet car seats are still designed for male bodies, which means they often fail to properly support a woman’s neck in a crash.
If you’re pregnant, the situation is even worse. Car crashes are one of the leading causes of fetal death due to maternal trauma, yet safety tests don’t account for this. A pregnant crash dummy was developed in 1996, but it’s not required for safety tests, so manufacturers rarely use it.
Meanwhile, seat belts and airbags haven’t been adapted for pregnancy, meaning a hard stop could directly injure the fetus or cause placental abruption.
There is some hope. A Swedish scientist, Astrid Linder, has developed the first true female crash dummy, which takes into account differences in body shape, muscle mass, and biomechanics. She’s pushing for the European Union to mandate its use in crash tests, something that should have happened decades ago.
There she is!
But as of now, most crash safety tests are still based on an imaginary six-foot-tall, 170-pound man with a rock-solid neck and a perfectly aligned spine. Women? They’re just supposed to fit themselves into that mold and hope for the best.
But at least the male dummies are doing just fine.
conclusion
If aliens landed tomorrow and took a look around, they’d probably assume Earth was designed for one species: The Reference Man. Everything—the cars, the offices, the safety measures—fits him perfectly. Meanwhile, women are out here trying to navigate a world that treats them like unusually small, inconveniently shaped men.
The truth is, this isn’t some grand conspiracy—it’s just bad design. The world wasn’t built for women because, for most of history, the people designing it were men. And when you’re creating something for yourself, you don’t stop to ask, “Hey, would this also work for someone with an entirely different body, experience, and set of daily challenges?”
So we ended up with a world where women constantly have to adjust, adapt, and make do—whether it’s wearing safety gear that doesn’t fit, taking medicine that was never tested on them, or trying to reach the top shelf without scaling the countertops like a raccoon.
Yet, instead of asking why the system was built this way — why some risks are taken seriously while others are ignored — the conversation so often collapses into a pointless tug-of-war between men and women. We fight over who has it worse, who’s more overlooked, and who’s to blame — all while the real issue, the system itself, stays untouched and intact.
And that’s what frustrates me most about this whole conversation.
Because this was never about men versus women. It’s about a world designed with only some bodies, some jobs, and some risks in mind — while everyone else is left to squeeze themselves into spaces that were never meant to hold them.
The real fight isn’t between us — it’s against the systems that pretend some forms of work, some kinds of pain, some lives matter more than others.
And it can be changed. It’s not the law of physics; it’s just a series of decisions made by people. If we start making better decisions, maybe the world will finally be designed for everyone.
And then women won’t have to worry about freezing in offices, getting misdiagnosed, or dying in car crashes they were never considered in.
Now that would be a time to be alive.
Read the original post “one size fit men” here for detailed footnotes and direct interaction with author.
