Valerie Pavilonis

ALT The asymmetry of pregnancy is the most obvious difference between men and women, but it isn’t the only important distinction. Women are biologically different from men, and that shows up in our heights, our hand size, our hormonal cycles, whether you ever have a baby or not. Caroline Criado Perez, the author of Invisible Data, has excellently chronicled the ways that the built world is often designed with men as the default and women as the defective user. You don’t have to have children to be endangered or inconvenienced as a woman by drugs that ignore your hormonal cycles, tools the wrong size for your hands, or an airbag that was never calibrated with a female-sized crash test dummy. Criado Perez might not describe herself as a “sex-realist,” but all her work is informed by a practical realism about the biological asymmetries between men and women.