It's nice to see an article like this provide a lot of source links, but it seems to be written to actively misrepresent a lot of that information. The crash te

It's nice to see an article like this provide a lot of source links, but it seems to be written to actively misrepresent a lot of that information. The crash test dummy section is badly misleading, and in places objectively false. The text is defensible rather than informative, so pervasively that it's hard to accept as accidental. > It wasn’t until 2011 that the US started using a female crash-test dummy "The US started using" here is at best misleading metonymy for US regulatory tests. The standard 5th percentile female dummy mentioned in the article went into production in 1988 - by a US company, on North American measurements, for North American carmakers. > For a start, this dummy is only tested in the passenger seat, so we have no data at all for how a female driver would be affected – something of an issue you would think, given women’s “out of position” driving style. "Only tested in the passenger seat" is accurate only with regard to the linked regulatory tests. The 5th percentile female dummy is used in driver's seat testing, and was in fact upgraded back in 1997 specifically to provide more accurate data for "out of position" driver's seat testing. The claim that "we have no data at all" for female drivers is again accurate only for these specific EU-mandated tests; the general statement in the article is simply untrue. > And secondly, this female dummy is not really female. It is just a scaled-down male dummy. Again, this is flatly false. Perhaps the writer was attempting to say that the dummy is not required to be specifically female, or that some of its unformalized ratios aren't proportional to women. But the standard Hybrid III 5th Female Dummy is not a scaled-down male dummy. The dummy's gross anatomy is visibly different and its formal technical specifications (e.g. height, chest circumference) are those of 5th percentile women. More importantly, it's been specifically designed (since 1991) to better assess gendered risks like 'submarining', where seatbelt force falls on soft tissues and causes injury. Much of the rest of the crash-test discussion is similarly bad. A dummy of a pregnant woman was created in 1996, but the failure to mandate its use was based on the conclusion that the dummy was inaccurate and wouldn't provide valid data. The ongoing lack of a pregnant dummy is a problem, but it's a matter of insufficient data and unsolved design issues. A legal mandate passed today would optimize for the safety of dummies, not humans of any kind. Gender bias in design, particularly in safety-critical settings like cars, is a topic that deserves more discussion. It's frustrating to see pieces on the topic choose emphasis at the price of systematically misleading readers.