Following up on our recent posts on representations of “person” (here and here), I found this post at All This Chittah Chattah where Steve Portigal is collecting images of signs with stick figures that represent person (men at work, walk/don’t walk, etc) from around the world. He has some observations on variations. From a gender perspective, however, they all look more or less like this one from Bali, Indonesia:
What is interesting for our purposes, though, is this example from Bangkok, Thailand:
Do you see it? In case you doubted it, the fact that the fourth panel includes a stick figure in a skirt (1) proves that the non-skirted stick figures are implicitly men and, on an entirely different note, (2) reminds us that men do not take care of children.
Umlud, in comments, points out that the text on the Thai sign is Chinese and that failing to mention that conflates Asian groups. I apologize for the oversight.
NEW! In these two pictures of warning signs for moving sidewalks (snapped in the Dublin airport), like the one just above, feature “neutral” stick figures, unless a child is involved:
ALSO NEW! Emanuelle took a photo of this sign in Malmö, Sweden:
Em says it’s the only time she can remember that she’s seen a silhouette figure like this with a kid where the figure isn’t clearly marked as female.
NEW! (May ’10): Sophie pointed out that in Holland, bike traffic lights only include images of what most people would recognize as a “men’s” bike, with the bar across the top, thereby managing to gender the traffic signals without including any figures of people at all:
Those that do include a person on the bike (which has the high bar across the top) have an outline of a person many would probably interpret as male:
Images found here, here, and here.
