Scientific American 201905

4 Scientific American, May 2019 Illustration by Nick Higgins

FROM

THE EDITOR Mariette DiChristina is editor in chief of Scientific American.

Follow her on Twitter @mdichristina

Unhealthful

Data Gaps

Have you heard about the “gender data gap”? I recently learned

the phrase in an ex cerpt published in March in the Guard-

ian from the book Invisible Women: Exposing

Data Bias in a World Designed for

Men, by Caroline Criado Perez

(Abrams, 2019). “The gender

data gap,” ex plains Criado Pe­

rez, “is both a cause and a conse­

quence of the type of unthinking

that conceives of humanity as al­

most exclusively male.”

With the world designed by men

and for other men, being a woman ac­

tually can be a health hazard. Criado

Perez writes about un comfortable, or

even dangerous, mismatches between men’s bodies, which are

larger and stronger on average, and women’s in such areas as seat

belts and car seating design, bulletproof vests for law­enforce­

ment officers, mobile phones that can’t be cupped with a smaller

palm—even the size of cement bags, which are too large and

heavy for the average women to heft but don’t have to be that way.

You may be, like me, struck by similar—and equally unhealth­

ful—gender data gaps as you read our annual special report on

“The Future of Medicine.” This year we focus on “Fertile Ground,”

women’s reproductive well­being. Take menstruation. As Virgin­

ia Sole­Smith writes in “The Point of a Period,” old taboos and

squeamishness have resulted in limited research on women’s

monthly cycles. Little is known about why periods can be pain­

ful and what is behind some related disorders. Although wom­

en historically had fewer periods over their lifetime because of

multiple pregnancies, today they have many

more periods on average. Is this harmful?

Should women use birth control to skip

their periods? We don’t know. Says

one source in the story: “ ‘What

we have now’ with women us­

ing birth control for long­

term [menstrual] sup­

pression ‘is the largest

uncontrolled medical experi­

ment on women in history.’ ”

Other stories in the report look at the science of mak­

ing babies (“Eggs on Ice,” by Liza Mundy), birth control (“Set It and

Forget It?,” by Maya Dusenbery) and the risks of childbirth (“How

to Reduce Maternal Mortality,” by Monica R. Mc Le more). More

than half the world will benefit from a better understanding of

female reproductive health issues: giving women more agency

over their reproductive lives is known as one of the most effective

solutions to global challenges such as economic inequality. Turn

to page 30 for an eye­opening look at what we know, and don’t

know, about the reproductive lives of half of humanity. A better

future for us all may depend on it.

BOARD OF ADVISERS

Leslie C. Aiello

President, Wenner-Gren Foundation

for Anthropological Research

Robin E. Bell

Research Professor, Lamont-Doherty Earth

Observatory, Columbia University

Emery N. Brown

Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical

Engineering and of Computational Neuro-

science, M.I.T., and Warren M. Zapol Prof-

essor of Anesthesia, Harvard Medical School

Vinton G. Cerf

Chief Internet Evangelist, Google

Emmanuelle Charpentier

Scientific Director, Max Planck Institute

for Infection Biology, and Founding

and Acting Director, Max Planck Unit

for the Science of Pathogens

George M. Church

Director, Center for Computational

Genetics, Harvard Medical School

Rita Colwell

Distinguished University Professor,

University of Maryland College Park

and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School

of Public Health

Kate Crawford

Director of Research and Co-founder,

AI Now Institute, and Distinguished

Research Professor, New York University,

and Principal Researcher,

Microsoft Research New York City

Drew Endy

Professor of Bioengineering,

Stanford University

Nita A. Farahany

Professor of Law and Philosophy,

Director, Duke Initiative for

Science & Society, Duke University

Edward W. Felten

Director, Center for Information

Technology Policy, Princeton University

Jonathan Foley

Executive Director and William R. and

Gretchen B. Kimball Chair, California

Academy of Sciences

Jennifer Francis

Senior Scientist,

Woods Hole Research Center

Kaigham J. Gabriel

President and Chief Executive Officer,

Charles Stark Draper Laboratory

Harold “Skip” Garner

Executive Director and Professor, Primary

Care Research Network and Center for

Bioinformatics and Genetics, Edward Via

College of Osteopathic Medicine

Michael S. Gazzaniga

Director, Sage Center for the Study of Mind,

University of California, Santa Barbara

Carlos Gershenson

Research Professor, National Autonomous

University of Mexico

Alison Gopnik

Professor of Psychology and

Affiliate Professor of Philosophy, University

of California, Berkeley

Lene Vestergaard Hau

Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and

of Applied Physics, Harvard University

Hopi E. Hoekstra

Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology,

Harvard University

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

Founder and CEO, Ocean Collective

Christof Koch

President and CSO,

Allen Institute for Brain Science

Morten L. Kringelbach

Associate Professor and

Senior Research Fellow, The Queen’s

College, University of Oxford

Robert S. Langer

David H. Koch Institute Professor,

Department of Chemical Engineering,

M.I.T.

Meg Lowman

Director and Founder, TREE Foundation,

Rachel Carson Fellow, Ludwig Maximilian

University Munich, and Research Professor,

University of Science Malaysia

John Maeda

Global Head, Computational Design +

Inclusion, Automattic, Inc.

Satyajit Mayor

Senior Professor,

National Center for Biological Sciences,

Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

John P. Moore

Professor of Microbiology and

Immunology, Weill Medical College

of Cornell University

Priyamvada Natarajan

Professor of Astronomy and Physics,

Yale University

Donna J. Nelson

Professor of Chemistry,

University of Oklahoma

Robert E. Palazzo

Dean, University of Alabama at

Birmingham College of Arts and Sciences

Rosalind Picard

Professor and Director,

Affective Computing, M.I.T. Media Lab

Carolyn Porco

Leader, Cassini Imaging Science Team, and

Director, CICLOPS, Space Science Institute

Lisa Randall

Professor of Physics, Harvard University

Martin Rees

Astronomer Royal and Professor

of Cosmology and Astrophysics,

Institute of Astronomy,

University of Cambridge

Daniela Rus

Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor

of Electrical Engineering and Computer

Science and Director, CSAIL, M.I.T.

Eugenie C. Scott

Chair, Advisory Council,

National Center for Science Education

Terry Sejnowski

Professor and Laboratory Head of

Computational Neurobiology Laboratory,

Salk Institute for Biological Studies

Meg Urry

Israel Munson Professor of Physics

and Astronomy, Yale University

Michael E. Webber

Co-director, Clean Energy Incubator,

and Associate Professor,

Department of Mechanical Engineering,

University of Texas at Austin

George M. Whitesides

Professor of Chemistry and Chemical

Biology, Harvard University

Amie Wilkinson

Professor of Mathematics,

University of Chicago

Anton Zeilinger

Professor of Quantum Optics, Quantum

Nanophysics, Quantum Information,

University of Vienna

© 2019 Scientific American