EDCs are known to be linked to breast cancer, and several studies have found that cosmetologists are at a particularly elevated risk of Hodgkin’s disease, multiple myeloma and ovarian cancer.30 When occupational health researchers Jim and Margaret Brophy investigated the chemicals used in automotive plastics workplaces (where plastic parts for motorised vehicles are produced) ‘we could not find any substances that they were using that weren’t suspected’ to be either a mammary carcinogen, and/or an endocrine disruptor. ‘If you’re camping or around a campfire and somebody throws in a plastic bottle or a styrofoam cup people run away,’ Brophy points out. ‘The smell is enough to tell you it’s toxic. Well that’s what these women are doing on a daily basis. They’re working on moulding machines which heat up these plastic pellets which are full of all kinds of EDCs.’
After ten years working in a job where she is exposed either to mammary carcinogens or an EDC, a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer increases by 42%. But the Brophys found that after working for ten years in the auto-plastics industry a woman’s likelihood of developing breast cancer trebles. ‘And if you were under the age of fifty, so premenopausal breast cancer, it was a fivefold excess.’ Even a single year of working in this sector was estimated to increase the odds of developing breast cancer by 9%.31
The World Health Organization, the European Union and the Endocrine Society have all issued major reports on the dangers of EDCs, with the Endocrine Society in particular linking their use to the significant increase in breast-cancer rates in industrialised countries.32 And yet in many countries, regulation of EDCs is spotty at best. Phthalates, some of which have demonstrated endocrine-disrupting properties, are chemicals used to make plastics softer. They are found in ‘a wide range of products – from children’s toys to shower curtains. They are also used in nail polish, perfumes, and skin moisturizers, and can also be found in the outer coating on medicines and in the tubing used in medical devices’.
In Canada, they ‘are explicitly regulated only in soft vinyl articles for children; their use in the Canadian cosmetics industry is largely unregulated’. In the EU, as of 2015 EDCs can’t be produced unless authorised for a specific purpose – but they are allowed in products imported from abroad. In the US, there are no federal laws that require companies to list ingredients in their cleaning products (in the US women do 70% of household cleaning and make up 89% of home and hotel cleaners – most of whom are ethnic minorities), and a recent report found that even supposedly ‘green’ cleaning products contain EDCs.33 When Always menstrual pads were tested in 2014 they were found to include ‘a number of chemicals – including styrene, chloroform and acetone – that have been identified as either carcinogens or reproductive and developmental toxins’.34
It’s clear that we need more and better data about women’s exposure to chemicals. We need data that is separated and analysed by sex, and which includes reproductive status.35 And physical effects need to be measured for women themselves, rather than being restricted to foetuses and newborns, as is all too often currently the case.36 We need researchers to understand that because of their unpaid workload women often drop in and out of the workforce and work more than one job at a time (which can lead to, in Rory O’Neill’s words, ‘a cocktail of exposures’), and that this means that research which tracks only a single, current employment is likely to be sporting a significant gender data gap.37
There is no doubt that women are dying as a result of the gender data gap in occupational health research. And there is no doubt that we urgently need to start systematically collecting data on female bodies in the workplace. But there is a second strand to this story because, as the stickiness of the myth of meritocracy shows, closing the gender data gap is only step one. The next, and crucial step, is for governments and organisations to actually use that data to shape policy around it. This isn’t happening.
In Canada, even where sex-disaggregated data on chemical exposure exists, the government ‘continues to apply a mean allperson daily intake for many substances’.38 In the UK, where around 2,000 women develop shiftwork-related breast cancer every year, ‘breast cancer caused by shiftwork isn’t on the state-prescribed disease list’.39 Neither is asbestos related to ovarian cancer, even though it has the International Agency Research on Cancer’s top cancer risk ranking and is the most common gynaecological cancer in UK women. In fact, asbestos-related ovarian cancer cases aren’t even tracked and counted by the UK’s Health and Safety Executive.
Part of the failure to see the risks in traditionally female-dominated industries is because often these jobs are an extension of what women do in the home (although at a larger and therefore more onerous scale). But the data gap when it comes to women in the workplace doesn’t only arise in female-dominated industries. As we’ve seen, even when women worked in male-dominated industries, they were treated as ‘confounding factors’, and data on female workers went uncollected.
The result is that even in industries with a good historical health and safety record women are still being failed. In the US, where by 2007 there were nearly 1 million female farm operators, ‘virtually all tools and equipment on the US market have been designed either for men or for some “average” user whose size, weight, strength etc. were heavily influenced by the average man’.40 This has led to tools that are too heavy or long; hand tools that are not appropriately balanced; handles and grips that are not appropriately sized or placed (women’s hands are on average 0.8 inches shorter than men’s); and mechanised equipment that is too heavy or that is difficult to control (for example pedals on tractors being placed too far from the seat).
Little data exists on injuries to women in construction, but the New York Committee for Occupational Safety & Health (NYCOSH) points to a US study of union carpenters which found that women had higher rates of sprains/strains and nerve conditions of the wrist and forearm than men. Given the lack of data it’s hard to be sure exactly why this is, but it’s a safe bet to put at least some if not all of the higher injury rates amongst women down to ‘standard’ construction site equipment being designed around the male body.
Wendy Davis, ex-director of the Women’s Design Service in the UK, questions the standard size of a bag of cement. It’s a comfortable weight for a man to lift – but it doesn’t actually have to be that size, she points out. ‘If they were a bit smaller then women could lift them.’ Davis also takes issue with the standard brick size. ‘I’ve got photographs of my [adult] daughter holding a brick. She can’t get her hand round it. But [her husband] Danny’s hand fits perfectly comfortably. Why does a brick have to be that size? It doesn’t have to be that size.’ She also notes that the typical A1 architect’s portfolio fits nicely under most men’s arms while most women’s arms don’t reach round it – and again has photos of her daughter and her husband to prove it. NYCOSH similarly notes that ‘standard hand tools like wrenches tend to be too large for women’s hands to grip tightly’.41
Women in the military are also affected by equipment designed around the male body. In the course of my research I came across the impressively named tactile situation awareness system (TSAS): a vest designed for airforce pilots and fitted with thirty-two sensors that vibrate if the pilot needs to correct her position; pilots can sometimes lose track of where they are in space and cannot tell if they are heading up or down. I say her, because a review of ‘Tactile Sensitivity and Human Tactile Interfaces’ explained that ‘The TSAS allows the pilot to always know his orientation with respect to the ground’.42 The pronoun choice seems relevant given that the review later casually mentions that ‘[v]ibration is detected best on hairy, bony skin and is more difficult to detect on soft, fleshy areas of the body.’ Women make up 20% of the US airforce and given women have breasts and don’t tend to have particularly hairy chests, this sounds like it might be something of a problem for them.43