When Apple launched its health tracker app HealthKit in 2014, they promised users the ability to track everything from their blood pressure to their copper intake – but not their periods.

This seems like a startling oversight, but Apple aren’t alone in failing to consider women’s needs. For example, it wasn’t until 2015 that the EU required new cars to be tested on a female crash-test dummy.

Caroline Criado Perez, whose book Invisible Women (£16.99, Chatto and Windus) has been shortlisted for the 2019 Royal Society Science Book Prize, calls this the gender data gap, and it appears in everything from public policy to medical research.

In this episode of the Science Focus Podcast, we talk to Caroline about the gender data gap and how it causes everything from mild inconvenience to potential fatality.

She speaks to BBC Science Focus online assistant Sara Rigby.

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