The Gender Data Gap Is Not an Accident. It Is a Habit.

There is a statistic I come back to a lot. The standard office temperature in most buildings was set using a formula developed in the 1960s, calibrated to the metabolic rate of a 40-year-old man weighing around 70 kilograms. Women, who tend to have a lower resting metabolic rate, have been freezing in offices ever since. Not out of malice. Out of the assumption that the default data applied to everyone.

That story matters because it is small enough to seem absurd and big enough to stand in for something enormous. The crash test dummy was male. Most clinical drug trials excluded women until 1993. The smartphone was sized for a man's hand. Heart attack symptoms in women present differently from the textbook version, the one written from data collected predominantly on men, and as a result women are significantly more likely to be misdiagnosed.

None of this was intentional. It was a habit. A long, accumulated habit of treating male experience as the universal and female experience as a variation on it.

This is why Morwenna and I built MOOD.

I have spent the last six years in formal research and the last two decades in marketing and brand strategy, a lot of it focused on the sectors that affect women most directly: health, media, careers, family. What I kept seeing, over and over again, was organisations genuinely trying to reach women, design for women, serve women, and working from data that simply did not reflect them.

The gender data gap is not just an academic problem. It has practical consequences for every organisation that makes decisions affecting women's lives. Which is most of them.

This week PwC published its Women in Work Index for 2026. The UK moved up one place to 17th globally. Progress, technically. But the index also found that improvement across the OECD has slowed to its weakest rate since the pandemic. The same week, WPP published its UK gender pay gap report showing women hold 55% of their workforce overall but only 42% of executive leadership positions globally. These are not isolated data points. They are symptoms of the same structural problem.

The UK government published new guidance this month requiring large employers to publish equality action plans from 2027. That is a meaningful step. But action plans built on incomplete data will only take organisations so far. You cannot close a gap you cannot accurately measure.

MOOD is a research business built to help close that gap from the source. We start with a survey. A real, unfiltered picture of women's everyday experience across work, health, money, relationships and all the invisible load that sits between those things. Not curated for comfort. Not framed through the lens of what organisations already expect to find. Real.

I want to be clear about what MOOD is not. It is not a campaign. It is not a gender war. It is not about women being better or worse or more deserving. It is about making women visible in the data in a way they have not always been. That is it. That is the whole thing.

Because here is what happens when you do that: better products get built. Better policies get written. Better decisions get made. The organisations that are serious about understanding the women they serve do not just get better outcomes for those women. They get better business outcomes full stop.

Morwenna brings 15 years of consumer and brand insight experience across health, media, careers and family to MOOD. Between us we are not guessing at this problem. We have lived it professionally for a long time. We built MOOD because we got tired of the workaround.

The survey we are running right now is the starting point. It covers the full picture of a woman's life, not just the parts that fit neatly into existing research categories. We want to know what it actually feels like to navigate the workplace, the health system, money, relationships and the invisible load that nobody formally measures.

Soon we will open the MOOD panel, inviting women to become part of the research itself rather than just the subject of it. To help shape the questions, surface the truths and be part of building something useful. Not because it is a nice idea. Because better research comes from having the people whose lives you are researching actively involved in asking the right questions.

The habit of treating male data as the default took decades to build. It will take time and consistent, high-quality research to undo.

We are starting now.

If you are a woman and you want your voice in this, the survey is open. It takes two minutes. It matters more than that.

Sev is co-founder of MOOD Insights, a research business built to close the gender data gap. She has a Masters in Psychology, six years of formal research experience and a career background in marketing and brand strategy.

Sources: PwC Women in Work Index 2026. WPP UK Gender Pay Gap Report, March 2026. Caroline Criado-Perez, Invisible Women (2019). UK Government equality action plan guidance, March 2026.