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Why Carmakers Always Insisted on Male Crash-Test Dummies

Aug. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Beginning with 2011 model-year vehicles, federal regulators have required automakers to use petite female crash dummies in frontal automotive crash tests.

Several news outlets have picked this story up. Yet they haven’t recognized that it’s part of a longer struggle in business-government relations -- and the product of a long-held cultural resistance to considering gender differences in design.