Uncounted Lives, Unseen Impact

Historically, the roles of women in Quarry Hill—as caregivers, workers, tenants—were erased from official records. Today, we see these patterns replicated in new forms:

1.Have you ever been misdiagnosed in a hospital and the doctor said "you're just a little stressed"?

In a study published in Contemporary Clinical Trials (2022), researchers analyzed gender participation in 1,433 drug and medical device clinical trials in the United States between 2016 and 2019. Of the more than 300,000 participants, only 41% were women. This was also true in key areas such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. Even more ironic is that although women make up 60% of patients with mental illness, the average participation rate of women in related psychiatric clinical trials is only 42%.

Behind this, it may be because medical research is mostly based on male samples, and insights into various diseases and discoveries about drugs are often extrapolated from men and applied to women. But women are not just short men. Women's bodies are very different from men's bodies, with unique organs, genes, hormones, and other key differences.

2.Have you ever put on your seat belt and found that the design of the car's seat, headrest, and seat belt does not really fit your body?

A study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found that even when using seat belts correctly, women are still 73% more likely to suffer serious personal injury and 17% more likely to die in similar car accidents than men.

This gender difference is not accidental, but stems from deep-rooted bias in the automotive safety testing system. For a long time, most crash test dummies have been designed based on the "average male" body shape. This single-gender standard ignores the differences in women's body shape, sitting posture, physiological structure, etc., resulting in a lack of data collection and safety assessment of women's effectiveness.

3.Have you ever pushed a stroller across the sidewalk and found that the city space was not designed for you?

When some people's lives are not recorded, they will not appear in social policies or design priorities（D’Ignazio,2020)）. The difficulty of strollers passing through sidewalks, the scarcity of maternity rooms, and the lack of safety guarantees for women traveling at night are all the consequences of being "not counted". This is the continuation of historical neglect today: Quarry Hill did not record how women took care of their families, and today's cities still ignore the mobility needs, spatial safety and convenience of caregivers.

This sets of data clearly show that even in an age where we think we have been "seen", women continue to be "absent" from scientific research data.