Products Liability for a World Designed for Men

Automobile crashes are a routine feature of modern life, yet their consequences are not evenly distributed. Women driving most vehicles face substantially higher risks of serious injury and death than men in comparable crashes—a disparity linked to safety systems designed and tested around male bodies. Across a wide range of consumer products manufacturers continue to rely on male anthropometric and physiological data as the implicit design baseline, resulting in systematic disparities in safety outcomes for women.

Despite the prevalence and foreseeability of these harms, products liability law has never squarely confronted whether a product designed around male bodies, marketed as gender neutral, and foreseeably more dangerous for women constitutes a design defect. Prevailing design defect doctrine evaluates product safety in the aggregate, allowing strong performance for men to obscure systematic harms to women.

This Article identifies male-default design as an analytically distinct and underexamined source of design defect. It argues that existing products liability doctrine does not require courts to ignore subgroup harms where those harms affect a substantial and foreseeable class of ordinary users.

Building on this foundation, the Article develops a framework for incorporating distributional considerations into design defect analysis. It argues, first, that courts should more consistently account for subgroup outcomes to prevent aggregate safety metrics from masking systematic harms to women. It then advances a more robust approach that treats persistent sex-based disparities in safety as independently relevant to defectiveness, particularly where products are marketed to both sexes but designed around male bodies. By reframing design defect doctrine to attend not only to aggregate safety but also to the allocation of risk among users, the Article seeks to realign products liability law with its core commitments to foreseeability, fairness, and deterrence.