One Size Fits Men, 2021
Concept, Design & Production: Friederike Wurlitzer & Freya Mathilda Tiarks
In
medicine, scientific studies have been and still are conducted exclusively on
cis men. For decades, there were either no medical studies involving women as
participants or too few. Likewise, with medication, there is often a lack of
sufficient data on the dose-effect relationship and on side effects in women.
Many package inserts are based on the fact that the drugs have only or
primarily been tested on men.
The aim of this project is to draw attention to the Gender Health Gap and to educate on it. A series of nine colourful posters displayed with four different objects attract the viewer's attention and allow a playful approach to a serious subject. The informative texts on each poster convey important knowledge on the subject of Gender Medicine, while the abstract objects have a primarily thought-provoking purpose.
One Size
Fits Men addresses various aspects of Gender Medicine – from different symptoms
of the same disease to lack of participation in studies, errors in medication
dosage, and the understudied disease endometriosis. The first object is a
sculpture of a uterus depicting the painful disease endometriosis, which
affects approximately 10% of women and those assigned female at birth.
The
second object is a heart, illustrating that heart attack symptoms differ
significantly between people assigned female at birth and those assigned male at
birth. The third object illustrates how the brain responds differently to the
same pain depending on sex and gender – the Gender Pain Gap. The last object
illustrates three different facts about Gender Medicine using petri dishes.