A new report [2] by the Ploughshares-funded Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) [3] calls on government agencies in charge of radiation protection to step up their efforts to develop a more realistic standard that recognizes women's and children's increased vulnerability to radiation-induced cancer.  The report says that current levels are still too heavily based on “Reference Man,” a 5-foot-7, 154-pound man of Western European or North American origin.  “Using a white Caucasian male model is too narrow a brush for the world we live in,” said Arjun Makhijani [4], IEER's president and author of the report, noting that women face a risk about 50 percent higher than the Reference Man from the same amount of radioactive material, while the risk for children is several-fold higher.