Female Royal Marine and Army recruits are suffering career-threatening injuries from wearing a kit-carrying system designed for men.
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7464293/Female-Marine-Army-recruits-suffer-injuries-79million-battle-kit-designed-men.html
In Criado-Perez's recent newsletter, Invisible Women she writes:
Anyway, this of course won't be news to readers of Invisible Women; I cover the issue of military kit designed for men in chapter 5...It was a difficult section to write, because I had a fair amount of anecdotal evidence, but there was very little hard data.
Still, what I did find was pretty shocking: stats from the British Army revealed that women of the same fitness and strength as men were up to 7x more likely than men to suffer from musculoskeletal injuries and ten times more likely to suffer from hip and pelvic stress fractures. (IW, p.123).
...
She engaged in some Twitter discussion around the issue and got this anon. response:
(A current member of the Canadian Army had an idea of why there was so much resistance from some men in the military...: "a common trope in the military is that issued kit has two sizes: too big and too small. So complaints from women about kit fitting wrong falls on deaf ears because everyone feels their kit doesn't fit." But, she added, "at least men's kit is built for their body.")
There's also an extensive discussion around why there's really no such thing as general issue 'gender-neutral' clothing and how it impacts women in the Navy. (It put me in mind of another thread that discusses 'neutral' clothing.) I recommend reading it - it's letter 4 in the archive:
tinyletter.com/ccriadoperez
And - I'm just back from 2 days of an outdoor activity where I had to use the centre's own kit (I have my own but I wasn't travelling from home so couldn't bring it and the event price included kit hire). This is a publicly funded centre - and there wasn't a piece of kit that fit me. I had to severely curtail my participation because everything was swamping me and, had I persisted, would have injured myself.
This is, of course, not troubling the centre. It's my problem because I didn't fit their kit. I'm slightly above average height for a woman. I'm not a small woman - I am only small if you take people in this activity as male by default.
Maybe there would be more women if we could develop competence with kit that fits us? (I am competent in my own kit - but public money is being spent on kit that doesn't fit women.)