Tanglehead Productions

12/06/2026

It starts with a crash test dummy.
For decades, the standard crash test dummy used to design car safety systems was modelled on the average male body — the weight, the height, the proportions. Cars were tested for safety using that dummy. Safety ratings were issued based on that dummy. Millions of cars were sold on the strength of those ratings.
Women, on average, have different proportions. Different weight distribution. Different seated posture in vehicles.
When female crash test dummies were eventually introduced and studied, the data showed something that should have been obvious from the beginning: women were significantly more likely to be injured or killed in crashes that the male-modelled safety systems had rated as safe.
The cars weren't designed to be dangerous to women.
They were designed without women in mind at all.
That distinction — between deliberate exclusion and invisible exclusion — is the heart of what Caroline Criado Perez documented in her 2019 book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. It won the Royal Society Science Book Prize. It became an international bestseller. It changed how researchers, policymakers, and ordinary readers understood the architecture of a world they had always assumed was built for everyone.
It wasn't.

Invisible Women exposes the gender data gap — a gap in knowledge that sits at the root of perpetual, systemic discrimination against women, creating a pervasive but invisible bias with profound effects on women's lives. Carolinecriadoperez
The mechanism Criado Perez identified is what she calls the Default Male: the conscious and unconscious societal practice of treating men's bodies and experiences as the model standard, with women's bodies and experiences treated as abnormalities, niche use cases, or afterthoughts. American University
It sounds abstract. The examples make it concrete — and the examples are everywhere.

Smartphones were designed for average male hand sizes. The result is that the standard iPhone is difficult or impossible to operate with one hand for a significant proportion of women. Voice recognition software was trained predominantly on male voices and consistently performs worse for female ones. Piano keys were standardised to a width optimised for average male hand spans — quietly disadvantaging female pianists from the beginning.
These are not conspiracies. They are the predictable outputs of design processes that did not think to ask: does this work for women too?
The consequences range from inconvenient to fatal.
In medical research, women have largely been excluded from clinical studies and textbooks, leaving them chronically misunderstood, mistreated, and misdiagnosed. Heart attack symptoms present differently in women than in men — but the male presentation is the one taught in medical schools as standard. Women experiencing heart attacks are more likely to be sent home, told their symptoms are anxiety, told they are overreacting. Amazon
The data gap, in those cases, kills people.

Cities prioritise men's needs when designing public transportation, roads, and even snow removal, neglecting to consider women's safety or unique travel patterns and responsibilities. Amazon
When one Swedish city studied how people actually moved through their urban environment, they found that men typically made simple point-to-point commutes while women made complex multi-stop journeys — dropping children at school, visiting elderly relatives, running household errands — before arriving at their own workplaces. Snow clearance had historically prioritised main roads and commuter routes. When the city redesigned its snow clearance schedule to prioritise pedestrian paths and local routes first, injuries dropped significantly.
The original schedule had not been designed to disadvantage women.
It had been designed without asking how women moved.
The result was the same.

Criado Perez argues that women aren't being excluded intentionally — it is a natural outcome of men holding influential positions in government, business, and society, and defaulting, unconsciously, to their own experience as the universal standard. Readingraphics
That framing matters. It moves the conversation from accusation to systemic diagnosis. The problem is not that individual designers, researchers, or policymakers are malicious. The problem is that a world built primarily by one group, without systematically collecting data on the other, will inevitably — invisibly, persistently — serve that one group better.
The solution is also systemic: collect the data. Disaggregate it by s*x. Ask, at every design stage, whether this works for women too. Make the invisible visible.

Before Invisible Women, Criado Perez had already demonstrated what one woman armed with evidence and determination could accomplish. She successfully campaigned for women to be represented on British banknotes when all non-royal women were about to be removed from the currency. She campaigned for a statue of suffragist Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square — the first statue of a named woman to stand there.
She was awarded an OBE for her services to gender equality.
She kept going.
Invisible Women was not a theoretical argument. It was a documented case — built on hundreds of studies across dozens of countries — that the world as currently designed is costing women their time, their money, their health, and their lives.
The data was always there.
Someone just had to make it visible.

10/06/2026

22 Jul – 29 Aug

07/06/2026

06/06/2026

In 2012, a Nigerian novelist named Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie walked onto a small TEDx stage in London and gave a talk called We Should All Be Feminists.
It was thirty minutes long. It did not have charts or statistics. It was, mostly, stories — small ones, from her own childhood and adulthood, told the way an older sister might tell them to you over tea. Two years later she published it as a book. It was sixty-four pages. It became a bestseller in 32 languages. In Sweden, the government distributed a copy to every 16-year-old in the country.
What the talk did, and what the book did after it, was something deceptively quiet. Adichie listed, one by one, the small daily rules that girls and boys are taught in almost every culture she had ever lived in or visited.
Girls, she said, are taught to be likable. To shrink themselves to be pleasing. To swallow anger. To worry, constantly and from childhood, about what boys think of them. "We don't teach boys to care about being likable," she wrote. "We spend too much time telling girls that they cannot be angry or aggressive or tough, which is bad enough, but then we turn around and either praise or excuse men for the same reasons."
Girls are taught to cover. Boys are not. Girls are taught to aspire to marriage, and to begin imagining it from childhood. Boys, as Adichie observes, are rarely taught to plan their lives around a wedding in the same way. Girls are taught to be careful with their bodies, careful with their voices, careful with their ambition. Boys are taught, in Adichie's careful phrasing, to feel comfortable around their own power.
And here is where Adichie's argument turns — quietly, and devastatingly.
She does not stop at saying this is unfair to girls. She says it is also unfair to boys. "Masculinity," she writes, in one of the lines that has been quoted thousands of times since 2014, "is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage."
The cage looks like privilege from the outside. From the inside, she suggests, it is a place where boys are quietly forbidden to be vulnerable, to be soft, to be confused, to be the kind of complete human being that any small child, regardless of gender, naturally is at the age of three. They learn to perform an idea of manhood that has nothing to do with who they actually are. They are praised, often, for things that are not really good for them — and rarely held to the kind of expectations of emotional skill, kindness, and self-reflection that girls are taught from birth.
Both lessons, Adichie argues, are a loss. Girls lose their full voice. Boys lose their full self.
What gave the essay its long shelf life was not anger. It was the absence of anger. Adichie writes the way she talks — calmly, often with humor, the way an aunt might tell you something hard you needed to hear at the dinner table. She does not blame any individual man or any individual woman. She is naming a system of training that almost every culture has inherited and almost every culture, she insists, is capable of slowly setting down.
She offers a definition of the word feminist that she has now repeated in dozens of interviews. "My own definition," she writes, "is a feminist is a man or a woman who says, yes, there's a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better. All of us, women and men, must do better."
This is what made the essay travel. It does not ask anyone to be ashamed of their childhood. It asks everyone, gently, to look at the rules they were handed as a child and to notice — really notice — which ones were good for the human being inside them, and which ones were not.
What changes, Adichie asks, if we raised both of our children the same way? If we taught both of them to be brave and gentle, ambitious and kind, expressive and careful with other people? If we let the cage open on both sides?
Some of the most lasting books are the ones that simply tell you what you already half-knew, in a sentence you couldn't have written yourself.

19/05/2026

Don’t forget - applications for our next Education Grant close at midnight on 26 May 2026 ⏰

Whether you’re deepening your skills within the industry or exploring a completely new path, retraining and up-skilling can open doors to exciting opportunities.

Equity Charitable Trust offers small grants to support professional performers with the costs of courses, qualifications, and creative development.

To learn more about how ETC supports performers, or to apply, tap the link in our bio 🔗

18/05/2026

Acclaimed American artist and activist Nan Goldin is coming to the Hayward Gallery 📸

'You Never Did Anything Wrong' marks Nan's first institutional exhibition in the UK in over 20 years 👏 Closing out our 75th anniversary, this exhibition is a raw and unflinching look at personal relationships, addiction and q***r communities - 'a record of my life that no one can revise'.

🗓️ 24 Nov 2026 - 7 Mar 2027

More info will be announced in Summer 2026! Who's looking forward to this one?

13/05/2026

Research from UCL suggests visiting art galleries or museums, singing and painting can help improve health outcomes

12/05/2026

In 1979, Angela Carter published a small, furious book called The Sadeian Woman.
It was not a comfortable book. It was not meant to be. Inside it sat one sentence that has been quoted, argued over, and underlined more than almost anything else she wrote.
The piety, the gentleness, the honesty, the sensitivity, all the qualities she has learned to admire in herself, are invitations to violence; all her life, she has been groomed for the slaughterhouse.
Read it again, slowly.
Carter is not talking about a woman's failures. She is talking about her virtues. The very traits a girl is taught to cultivate — sweetness, patience, modesty, deference, the instinct to apologize for taking up space — these, Carter wrote, are not protections. They are the opposite. They are what makes her easier to harm.
The image of the slaughterhouse is brutal on purpose. Carter wanted readers to feel the violence of the metaphor, because she believed the violence of the system it described had been carefully hidden under softer words. Demure. Well-behaved. A good girl. A nice young woman. These were not, in her reading, neutral compliments. They were a vocabulary of training. They described how well a person had learned to make herself convenient.
What made Carter so dangerous, and still so contested, is that she refused to flatter her own readers. She did not say women were simply victims of bad men. She said the whole culture — including women's own internalized sense of virtue — was the problem. The trap was not just outside. It had been carefully installed inside.
But here is the part of Carter most posts about her leave out.
She was not asking women to abandon tenderness. She was not asking them to become hard, or cruel, or cynical. She was asking them to recognize the difference between virtues a person chooses and virtues a person has been quietly trained to perform. The first build a life. The second build a cage.
The work, in Carter's view, was to take back authorship. To ask, of every trait we have been praised for, a simple question. Did I choose this? Or was it chosen for me, and did I learn to call it mine because the alternative was being unloved?
That question does not have a tidy answer. It is not supposed to. Carter was a writer of fairy tales, and she knew that the most useful stories leave the reader at the threshold of a forest, not at the door of a finished house.
She died in 1992, at fifty-one, far too early. The sentence about the slaughterhouse outlived her, and so did the work it asks of anyone who reads it.
To look at the qualities you have been most praised for, and ask, honestly, who taught you to be proud of them.
And then to decide, for yourself, which ones to keep.

29/04/2026

7 May - 27 June