There is one more trend I kept coming across while writing this book: the excuses. Chief amongst these is that women are just too complicated to measure. Everyone was saying this, from transport planners, to medical researchers, to tech developers: they were all knocking their heads up against Freud’s riddle of femininity and coming away baffled

Routinely forgetting to accommodate the female body in design – whether medical, technological or architectural – has led to a world that is less hospitable and more dangerous for women to navigate.

Women account for 10% or less of parliamentarians in thirty-one countries, including four countries that have no female parliamentarians at all.

When women are included in trials at all, they tend to be tested in the early follicular phase of their menstrual cycle, when hormone levels are at their lowest – i.e. when they are superficially most like men. The idea is to ‘minimise the possible impacts oestradiol and progesterone may have on the study outcomes’.57 But real life isn’t a study

Women tend to sit further forward than men when driving. This is because we are on average shorter. Our legs need to be closer to reach the pedals, and we need to sit more upright to see clearly over the dashboard.49 This is not, however, the ‘standard seating position’. Women are ‘out of position’ drivers.50

In a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) paper, economist Cheryl Doss points out that it also depends on how we define and value ‘food’: by caloric value (where staple crops would come out on top), or by monetary value (where coffee might win)? Given women ‘tend to be more heavily involved in the production of staple crops’,

while men’s upper body strength is on average 50% higher than women’s, the average gap in lower body strength is about half that.

Boulanger is not a one-off. Women working as carers and cleaners can lift more in a shift than a construction worker or a miner.9 ‘We only got a sink upstairs three years ago,’ a cleaner at a cultural centre in France told the Equal Times.10 ‘Before that, we had to carry buckets of water upstairs, and down again when the water was dirty. Nobody

Brilliance bias is in no small part a result of a data gap: we have written so many female geniuses out of history, they just don’t come to mind as easily.