June 02, 2025 | Sara Matzinger | Feminism

We live in a world where everything is built on the male default. Think about it: We say, “Hi guys,” to any group of people, but “Hi girls” is no longer neutral, and we refer to just “soccer” for men, but clarify “women’s soccer” when talking about women. This mindset makes women, despite being 50% of the population, the exception to the rule.

The “male default” mindset isn’t just annoying or unfair, though; women are all too often ignored at best and hurt or even killed at worst because of it.

The male default deeply affects women’s lived experiences. It creates a society in which it’s harder for women to get promotions or even access certain jobs because of their gender. For example, some employers avoid hiring women out of the fear they may become pregnant and therefore exit the workforce. Countless studies have found that women students, even when equally qualified, are significantly less likely to get funding, mentorship opportunities, and job offers than their male peers receive. Even when women do get hired, it is harder for them to access the spaces where decisions about women are being made; because they are less likely to be promoted, they are also less likely to end up in leadership roles where those decisions happen. And if women are not in those spaces to speak up about their needs, there is very little chance those needs will be known, let alone met.

But the male default goes deeper; it can even affect our safety and well-being. For example, car safety wasn’t tested on female crash dummies for decades and women are more likely to die or be injured in a car crash than men. Most medicine is only tested on men, a phenomenon Caroline Criado Perez explores in her book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. Criado Perez also explores how health issues that affect men are more researched than those that affect women; for example, PMS, which affects as many as 75% of women, has been researched five times less often than erectile dysfunction.

The fact is, women have different bodies than men, and those bodies often require different needs that are not taken into account by the male default. Men will never experience what it is like to birth a child, to breastfeed, or to live on a menstrual cycle. Those differences do not make women weak or complicated; they just make us not men. And we are equally worthy of living in a world in which those differences are considered and in which our safety and well-being in daily scenarios are taken into account.

The most important thing that we can do to combat the male default is simple: ask women what we need. And once we start acknowledging those needs, start researching them, and then using what we find to create solutions – only then can we truly start building an equitable world.

Until then, I am done pretending that everything is fine. Done pretending that living in a world built by and for men does not matter because it does. It matters. Women matter. So listen to us. Talk to us and stop making assumptions about us.

Originally published by Women's Media Center.