In 2019 the phrase “a world designed for men” saw print when the Brazilian-English activist Caroline Criado Perez put it into the subtitle of a book. Criado Perez may not have been the first to notice the pattern of extraordinary unfairness documented in Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men but she wrote the most devastating report on the phenomenon I’ve ever seen, and I have been paying attention. Products Liability in a World Designed for Men by Melissa F. Wasserman connects this problem of gendered “who benefits? who pays?” with a careful, well-argued, and scientifically informed call for law reform.
The neutral-on-the-surface biases favoring men that Professor Wasserman examines in this article fit within design defect as a subset of products liability doctrine. The category may seem narrow. It’s not. Products Liability in a World Designed for Men takes 52 pages to document the issue it addresses, review the governing law, and offer recommendations. Limited space rather than any lack of urgent examples, I am sure, shortened what Professor Wasserman shares here.
That many products hurt women and fail to protect them from foreseeable injury (P.4) aligns with a larger pattern of disadvantage. Builders of homes mount kitchen cabinets too high for the gender that toils more in this room. Gamers’ headsets fit women poorly. Smartphones, already too big in most women’s hands, continue to get bigger. The problem expands for women who venture from their homes. If they work in healthcare or construction, they often receive personal protective equipment sized for men, paying a price in safety for that misfit. At the moment, starting to write this Jot in an airplane seat too low for my shorter-than-male torso and longer-than-male legs (see P.10), I feel strain in my quadriceps and lower back that I probably wouldn’t feel if I were a guy. (I’m in coach. First or business class would be no friendlier.) As far as I can tell—and again, I’m paying attention—the only instance of this problem that has won notice in public discourse is the overrepresentation of men in studies of drug safety and effectiveness (see P.6 n.15). Efforts to bridge that gender gap have been scant.
Professor Wasserman starts with crash test dummies. Due in significant part to bias in safety studies, she writes, the same collision will hurt women in the same vehicle more often and more severely than men. (A 2025 book rates women’s increased odds of dying in a car crash at 17%, increased odds of nonfatal injury at 70%.) Replicas of the adult human body that guide crashworthiness look more like men than women. One size can’t fit all: “On average, women have less upper-body mass, shorter sitting heights, lower body weight, wider pelvic measurements, and shorter torsos” (P.10).
Man-like crash test dummies and the exclusion of women from pharmaceutical studies are significant sources of detriment, Professor Wasserman continues (Pp. 3-4). I’d add that although we who teach products liability would struggle to cover doctrine without our beloved cars and drugs, these two categories fill only a fraction of the gendered body count. Let’s stick with these two examples for a moment, however, as if the problem documented in Products Liability in a World Designed for Men extended only to everyday transport and medicines.
Women’s staying out of, and deprivation of access to, cars leaves them three quotidian alternatives. They can remain at home, a perilous locus. They can get around on public transit … which they’ll find dimly lit, supportive of sexual harassers, and typically built and priced to burden and punish women’s “trip chain” approach to travel, which features short errand-supporting increments more than the hub-and-spoke trips men favor. Or they can use sidewalks, which are often missing. Sidewalks when they’re present tend to thwart the strollers that women push, forcing female pedestrians into the road. A Stockholm study found another pertinent data point: Sidewalks that women use more than men get their snow cleared later and slower. As for drugs, doctors prescribe them and thus their dangers to women more than men. Women could insist on a prescriptions-free life but that resistance won’t save female patients from the worse care they get in emergency rooms and doctors’ offices.
Facing the data, Professor Wasserman turns to law for help. Gender-mindful federal safety regulation could make women safer (Pp. 11-13, 19-20) but was elusive even back when fairer and more competent leaders held the reins of American national government. Regulations, moreover, necessarily “operate at a high level of generality, establish minimum floors rather than optimal design targets, and cannot anticipate every design choice that allocates risk among users” (P.19). “The drawbacks of statutes and regulations suggest a residual role for tort law,” Professor Wasserman continues (id.).
Her review of the two leading tests for design defect used there, risk-utility and consumer expectations, steers Professor Wasserman to cautious optimism. Products Liability in a World Designed for Men finds in both tests a “doctrinal blind spot,” presumably correctable, “rather than a doctrinal constraint” (P.5). Consumer expectations could enlarge to accept what Professor Wasserman calls “subgroup analysis,” where “courts may consider whether the product fails to meet reasonable safety expectations for a substantial class of ordinary users” (Pp. 40-41). Numerous enough to count as “a substantial class,” women would qualify for consideration. The same turn can rescue risk-utility: “Rather than relying exclusively on aggregate utility, courts may evaluate whether the product’s utility falls below acceptable levels for a particular subgroup” (P.36).
Judges could follow Professor Wasserman’s lead. They just might. State courts applying state tort law doubtless offer a likelier venue for that progressive shift than any institution of our national government, where capital-f Federalist values and individuals are ascendant in the executive and judicial branches. But even the likelier venue doesn’t look to me very likely to deliver gender equity in product design. Professor Wasserman, ever intellectually honest, seems to stipulate that unless courts choose to care about women as a subgroup, her fix won’t work: “Under risk-utility analysis, higher benefits to men can offset serious risks to women; under the consumer expectations test, lower injury rates among men can render elevated risks to women legally invisible” (P.31).
And even if Products Liability in a World Designed for Men wins the reception it deserves, judges will not necessarily know what to do with design defect claims that point out a gender gap. Take the crash test dummy problem that centers this article. If manufacturers fire their current crew and bring in replacement dummies of “less upper-body mass, shorter sitting heights, lower body weight, wider pelvic measurements, and shorter torsos” (P.10, again), won’t men be worse off when they get into the resulting vehicles? They outnumber women there, which suggests that well-intentioned reform could lead to loss in the aggregate. Professor Wasserman recognizes the problem (Pp. 42-44). Regard for women as a subgroup applies pretty well to other gendered design possibilities—for example ones involving disparities in “hand size, grip strength, and force requirements” (P.13)—where manufacturers of products like surgical gloves do the right thing by offering “multiple sizes or configurations” (P.44). Because crashworthiness lacks a clear counterpart to the universal design ideal of disability law and policy, someone may have to suffer even when sellers like Volvo, whose leadership on whiplash has made the interior of vehicles safer for women while also benefitting men (Pp. 49-50), proceed as if all bodies matter.
That small misgiving noted, Products Liability in a World Designed for Men should be required reading for the American products liability community: Professor Wasserman’s analysis and recommendations are scientific in the best sense of the word. Readers with any level of interest (including none) in gender or feminism will find in this work an invigorating commitment to the truth.
