Why women feel colder in shared workspaces…

And what about workplace health and safety? Some roles, traditionally populated by women, such as carers or cleaners, are not seen as physically taxing jobs. Yet when the former has to lift a whole other person into a bath or bed, and when the latter has to carry full buckets of water up several flights of stairs, this is inaccurate. According to Hazards Magazine, women in these roles ‘can often lift more than a construction worker or miner’, but who would believe that? As a result, nothing is done. No protection or support is designed or implemented.

The world is designed by men, for men…mainly because men tend to be in positions where they’re tasked with design, creation and innovation. Whilst I don’t believe their thought processes are malicious or their decisions consciously made to keep women at a disadvantage, male bias occurs because they don’t automatically see the world from a female’s perspective (despite the fact we represent 50% of the population). For gender balance to take place, they need to be prompted to do this, or better still, the world needs to place more women in positions of influence.

Women, if contemplating walking home on an evening, think about their route, defence strategies, their footwear and more, to ensure they arrive there safely. In comparison, men simply…walk home. In the recent Sarah Everard case, her murderer, policeman Wayne Couzens, was well-known amongst his colleagues and peers as someone with an agenda against women. His words and behaviour were worrying; he would purposely target women for non-existent traffic offences, and he regularly sat outside women’s houses. His employers/the authorities clearly felt this wasn’t a concern, however, and so he was allowed to carry on—which resulted in a horrific crime. What was deemed dangerous by the police were women, tired of such bias, holding a candlelit vigil in a London park. These ladies were forcibly arrested. Who, really, was the most dangerous, though: Couzens or a handful of protestors?

There’s undoubtedly bias on the other side, where women seem to have the better deal over men, but, as demonstrated in Perez’s book and numerous other sources, the workings of the world seem to be heavily weighted in men’s favour. There’s so much more I could have put into this article (for example, I haven’t even touched gender inequality in religion), but I think you’ll agree that I’ve made enough of a point.

I just want to ask: how do we gain equal balance between genders? Will it ever happen? In whose lifetime?