This isn’t just about comfort. Ill-fitting PPE hampers women’s work – and can, ironically, sometimes itself be a safety hazard. NYCOSH points out that loose clothing and gloves can get caught in machinery, while overly large boots can cause tripping.59 Of those surveyed for the 2016 Prospect survey, 57% reported that their PPE ‘sometimes or significantly hampered their work’;60 over 60% said the same in the Women’s Engineering Society survey. One rail-industry worker explained that the ‘regular’ size thirteen gloves she was issued were ‘dangerous for climbing on/off locos’ and she had complained to her manager. She doesn’t reveal how long it took for management to order her gloves that fit, but another woman who had been issued with the standard size thirteens told Prospect that it took her two years to convince her manager to order gloves in her size.
A 2017 TUC report found that the problem with ill-fitting PPE was worst in the emergency services, where only 5% of women said that their PPE never hampered their work, with body armour, stab vests, hi-vis vest and jackets all highlighted as unsuitable.61 This problem seems to be a global one: in 2018 a female police officer in Spain faced disciplinary action for wearing the women’s bulletproof jacket she had bought for herself (at a cost of€500), because the standard-issue men’s jacket did not fit her.62 Pilar Villacorta, women’s secretary for the United Association of Civil Guards explained to the Guardian that the overly large jackets leave female police officers doubly unprotected: they don’t cover them properly and they ‘make it hard for female officers to reach their guns, handcuffs and telescopic batons’.63
When it comes to front-line workers, poorly fitting PPE can prove fatal. In 1997 a British female police officer was stabbed and killed while using a hydraulic ram to enter a flat. She had removed her body armour because it was too difficult to use the ram while wearing it. Two years later a female police officer revealed that she had to have breast-reduction surgery because of the health effects of wearing her body armour. After this case was reported another 700 officers in the same force came forward to complain about the standard-issue protective vest.64 But although the complaints have been coming regularly over the past twenty years, little seems to have been done. British female police officers report being bruised by their kit belts; a number have had to have physiotherapy as a result of the way stab vests sit on their female body; many complain there is no space for their breasts. This is not only uncomfortable, it also results in stab vests coming up too short, leaving women unprotected. Which rather negates the whole point of wearing one.
CHAPTER 6
Being Worth Less Than a Shoe
It was in 2008 that the big bisphenol A (BPA) scare got serious. Since the 1950s, this synthetic chemical had been used in the production of clear, durable plastics, and it was to be found in millions of consumer items from baby bottles to food cans to main water pipes.1 By 2008, 2.7 million tons of BPA was being produced globally every year, and it was so ubiquitous that it had been detected in the urine of 93% of Americans over the age of six.2 And then a US federal health agency came out and said that this compound that we were all interacting with on a daily basis may cause cancer, chromosomal abnormalities, brain and behavioural abnormalities and metabolic disorders. Crucially, it could cause all these medical problems at levels below the regulatory standard for exposure. Naturally, all hell broke loose.
The story of BPA is in some ways a cautionary tale about what happens when we ignore female medical health data. We have known that BPA can mimic the female hormone oestrogen since the mid-1930s. And since at least the 1970s we have known that synthetic oestrogen can be carcinogenic in women: in 1971 diethylstilbestrol (DES) – another synthetic oestrogen which had been prescribed to millions of pregnant women for thirty years – was banned following reports of rare vaginal cancers in young women exposed to DES while in their mothers’ wombs.3 But BPA carried on being used in hundreds of thousands of tons of consumer plastics: by the late 1980s, production of BPA in the United States ‘soared to close to a billion pounds per year as polycarbonates found new markets in compact discs, digital versatile discs (DVDs), water and baby bottles, and laboratory and hospital equipment’.4
But the story of BPA is not just about gender: it’s also about class. Or at least it’s about gendered class. Fearing a major consumer boycott, most baby-bottle manufacturers voluntarily removed BPA from their products, and while the official US line on BPA is that it is not toxic, the EU and Canada are on their way to banning its use altogether. But the legislation that we have exclusively concerns consumers: no regulatory standard has ever been set for workplace exposure.5 ‘It was ironic to me,’ says occupational health researcher Jim Brophy, ‘that all this talk about the danger for pregnant women and women who had just given birth never extended to the women who were producing these bottles. Those women whose exposures far exceeded anything that you would have in the general environment. There was no talk about the pregnant worker who is on the machine that’s producing this thing.’
This is a mistake, says Brophy. Worker health should be a public health priority if only because ‘workers are acting as a canary for society as a whole’. If women’s breast-cancer rates in the plastics industry were documented and recognised, ‘if we cared enough to look at what’s going on in the health of workers that use these substances every day’, it would have a ‘tremendous effect on these substances being allowed to enter into the mainstream commerce’. It would have a ‘tremendous effect on public health’.
But we don’t care enough. In Canada, where women’s health researcher Anne Rochon Ford is based, five women’s health research centres that had been operating since the 1990s, including Ford’s own, had their funding cut in 2013. It’s a similar story in the UK, where ‘public research budgets have been decimated’, says Rory O’Neill. And so the ‘far better resourced’ chemicals industry and its offshoots have successfully resisted regulation for years. They have fought government bans and restrictions. They have claimed that certain chemicals have been removed voluntarily when random testing has shown that they are still present. They have dismissed studies and other evidence of the negative health impacts of their products.6 between 1997 and 2005, 115 studies were conducted on BPA in labs all over the world; 90% of those funded by government found the BPA had effects at exposures at or below the reference dose. Of the eleven studies funded by industry, none reported any effects.7
The result is that workplaces remain unsafe. Brophy tells me that the ventilation he found in most auto-plastics factories was limited to ‘fans in the ceiling. So the fumes literally pass the breathing zone and head to the roof and in the summertime when it’s really hot in there and the fumes become visible, they will open the doors.’ It’s the same story in Canadian nail salons, says Rochon Ford. ‘It’s a Wild West here. Anyone can open a nail salon. It’s only recently that you even needed a licence.’ But even this is ‘pretty lax’. There are no ventilation requirements, there are no training requirements. There is no legislation around wearing gloves and masks. And there is nobody following up on the requirements that do exist – unless someone makes a complaint.
But here we run into another difficulty: who is going to make a complaint? Certainly not the women themselves. Women working in nail salons, in auto-plastics factories, in a vast range of hazardous workplaces, are some of the most vulnerable, powerless workers you can find. They are poor, working class, often immigrants who can’t afford to put their immigration status at risk. And this makes them ripe for exploitation.