https://dqydj.com/weight-percentile-calculator-men-women/
That female dummy would have been in the 24th weight percentile, while the male in the 57th female weight percentile.
This "female" test dummy won't actually be representative of most drivers, just as the "male" test dummy isn't. Neither for men nor for women. I'm sure the people who interpret the test results understand this already of course.
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.
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.
But honestly, dont see issue. Men are loosing nothing in this. Male dummies will continue to be used too.
They push the belt to the side.
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.
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.
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.
One problem is that tackling easy causes of male deaths is met with complains about making men softer or feminizing them.
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.
The world is complex, and when dealing with groups of people even more so.
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.
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
P(death_or_injury | crash AND female) > P(death_or_injury | crash AND male)
Sounds like the "probably" here is a guess?
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...
You're rehashing the above conditional probability discussion.
"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...
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...
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.
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.
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”.
Can you cite an academic reference for this? I'm suspicious, but genuinely curious.
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.
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.
Based on the title alone, I couldn’t take that book seriously.
Corporations: sell things women actually buy.
Journalist: why are these corporations so sexist against women? This makes me angry!
To get the battery life, I'd rather have a thicker phone without increasing the screen size.
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.
The words "Gell-Mann amnesia effect" popped in my brain. Luckily it didn't affect you
Which makes me wonder about the extent to which I can trust popular takes in things outside my wheelhouse.
― Michael Crichton
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...
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.
That's shockingly large to me. I knew Americans were obese, but wow.
Specifically, the media rarely shows fat people. Not the truly fat ones, with the exception of the freakshow genre of TV specifically about extremely fat people. In recent years they've started to show more and more fat people, but not nearly fat enough to give you an accurate impression of average Americans. Just fat enough to give token representation of fatness.
Truth is, the hugely fat people on freakshow TV aren't on freakshow TV because they're freakishly fat. People that fat are common, you can see them yourself any day at walmart. The people on those shows are freaks because they have freakishly little shame and agree to be on TV.
Not really. Truth is, the hugely fat people on freakshow TV are pretty rare even in America; if they were at all common then there wouldn't be much of a market for such shows in the US ("you're just gonna show me ordinary people like me? yawn.") You might see one or two hugely fat people at Wal-Mart, but they'll be surrounded by dozens of people who are plump but otherwise mobile, and they'll be surrounded by dozens of people who are fit by European standards.
Have you been to Ohio? That ratio is flipped. "Plump" is merely overweight but not obese. In states like Ohio, plump seems athletic because the massively obese are very common. You can easily see several 500lb people a day, fat enough for any TV freakshow.
Yes. Have you? Because no, that ratio is not "flipped". It ain't even flipped in Texas - and everything is bigger in Texas.
> several 500lb people a day
Yes, "several" meaning single digits. The average Wal-Mart has anywhere from double to triple digits of people in it at any one time. All but the tiniest of US towns have quadruple or quintuple digits of people in them.
Thus, even by your own accidental admission, people in the 500lb range are an extreme rarity. This really shouldn't be surprising; the human body can only take in so much nutrients and can only reduce its energy expenditure by so little, so at some point even an entirely sedentary lifestyle with an entirely unhealthy diet will result in a stopping point far short of 500lb. The people you see on TV are that fat because they are outliers, not the norm. That's also - again - what makes them interesting enough to be worth televising to an audience that's already disproportionately obese.
Put differently: if 500lb+ people were the norm, then Wal-Mart would sell clothes that actually fit them instead of them having to be limited to overstretched sweatpants. The fact that Wal-Mart does not should make it patently obvious that they are far too small of a market segment to be worth catering to, even in the very store in which you seem to disproportionately see them.
This is my point. If you can see several 500lb people a day going about your everyday errands around town, then the people on the 500lb TV freakshow are not freaks for being 500lbs, they're freaks for agreeing to be on the TV show. And how often are such massive people on TV shows that aren't specifically about 500lb people? Almost never.
If you judged America just by the TV shows, you'd think that 500lb people are very uncommon. But in reality you can see them every single day without even trying.
Compared to how many people you see total going about your everyday errands? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands? That is my point: you're deliberately ignoring the overwhelmingly vast majority of the people you encounter in favor of a very tiny minority solely for the sake of asserting that tiny minority to be far more common than they actually are.
> And how often are such massive people on TV shows that aren't specifically about 500lb people? Almost never.
Exactly. Shows have to go way out of their way to find 500lb people, because they are exceedingly rare. If they were anywhere near as common as you assert, then they would be far more prevalent on American TV.
In attempting to refute my point you've accidentally proven it, twice in the same comment. I rest my case.
DC-proper and Arlington VA usually rank highly on most fitness rankings.
Traveling around to various cities, you see this variation city-to-city, too. Some cities are just fitter (and, in some cases, way "hotter" all around—like you gotta re-calibrate your "10" scale, to use a crude but illustrative example, or you won't see anyone under a back-home "8" your whole visit) than my home city. Others are even fatter (largely in the deep South). Though in all cases you have to take into account that you may only be seeing their equivalent of the "hot" part of town and that may be skewing your overall impression.
> In 2016 in the US, adult women averaged a weight of 170.3 lb. The median adult woman weighed 161.3 lb.
> For men in the United States 18 or older in 2016, average weight was 197.1 lb. Men had a median weight of 189.4 lb.
I guess it makes sense that even the median weight would lead to an overweight BMI (assuming average height), since 74% of the US is overweight or obese.
[1] https://dqydj.com/weight-percentile-calculator-men-women/
So it's a bit surprising to see that in these official US numbers, men are indeed around that, but women are somewhat above it.
Even if there's an unexpected distribution, that's no way around there being a massive number of very obese women to pull the average to 38".
I thought my wife was pretty normal/average-ish at 5'4" and size 6/8, which is a full 10" smaller waist than the web is claiming as the average.
1. lower control forces
2. shorter legs
3. shorter bodies (need to see over the dash)
With the lower control forces, Boeing was concerned that men would then overcontrol the aircraft, but as far as I know this hasn't turned out to be a problem.
Women were not strong enough to handle the control forces in WW2 aircraft under emergency conditions. Those airplanes were designed around the limit of a man's strength.
Then again, I'm an American male (who wears size 44 pants), so needless to say my perspective might be skewed.
You could probably get closer to an accurate model by identifying the fixed weight of an adult's skin/bones/organs. Going from critically emaciated to fit would mostly entail adding muscle, which is denser than fat.
From there, the proportion of added muscle v. added fat when increasing waist circumference would be the deciding factor in accurately estimating weight; that proportion is highly dependent on the individual and one's level of daily activity.
At my current 150lbs and 5'7", I have a <30" waist. When I was 180lbs (got fat in college) it was near 38". That 30lb difference took me from athletic to obese. Granted, I'm male, but I'd think that on a 5'4" women, that 38" waist was visibly even larger.
Certainly not an athletic build, and a borderline-obese BMI, but well short of ball chair territory.
While the kind of Americans whose careers put them in front of cameras are rarely so mighty, from what I've seen of the real American population those photos look about average.
Like, if you're literally incapable of recognizing the difference between those photographs and, say, the folks on My 500 Pound Life or whatever "Learning" Channel drivel you watch, then maybe you ain't the one to be lecturing anyone about "constantly moving the goalposts".
Sorry that we don't all live in towns entirely populated by bulemic supermodels. It's frankly an indictment of you and numerous other commenters that y'all would look at these photos v. the fat people televised for entertainment and decide "yes, these are entirely indistinguishable and therefore warrant the exact same terminology and scorn".
Get a grip.
Then why would you police my language and demand I use the exact same terminology for a very wide range of body sizes/masses?
> There's levels from fat to hambeast to "their movement influences tides".
And there's likewise levels from thin to fit to bulky to curvy to plump to fat.
> That doesn't make the first category acceptable.
And who, pray tell, are you to decide what is or is not "acceptable"?
I never said anything about the language you should use. I said "that is really fat though". This is all pure projection on your end.
> it's frankly an indictment of the US that people try to sweettalk this sort of behaviour with words like 'curvier' and 'plumper'
Your words, not mine.
Of course, it wouldn't be good for your dating life if you considered 50% of women 'obese' so it's good you've got more sensitive language.
Centers For Disease Control:
> "The age-adjusted prevalence of severe obesity among U.S. adults was 9.2% in 2017–2018. Women had a higher prevalence of severe obesity (11.5%) than men (6.9%)."
It shouldn't be hard to spec and built crash test dummies with simulated fat.
Some possible downsides would be overwhelming the airbags capacity, and larger overall volume of space which needs to be protected from intrusion/crushing/etc. I Wonder how much this has been studied, hard rubber and steel dummies probably don't reflect conditions at the extremes very well...
That is in part also why it is so important to have a properly tightened seat belt and why we have explosives to tighten it up further when a collision is detected.
Do they reflect average american body though, male or female.