In the U.S. men’s and women’s bikes are built differently, with women’s bikes lacking the bar that goes from the handlebar to the base of the seat.
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Andrea at Bike City Recyclery explains that the lack of the bar is a matter of tradition. When women began riding bikes in the 1800s, they were required to wear heavy skirts. The low bar allowed them to mount the bikes “modestly” and was a space for their skirts to go. Back then, bikes also had “clothes-guards” that would keep women’s skirts from being caught up in the mechanics of the bike. This picture is from the 1890s:
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Today most women riding a bike do not wear heavy skirts and clothes-guards are rare, but the low bar persists. This ad from 1971 assures parents that bikes can be converted to boy bikes because, even though the upper bar is purely “decorative,” boys apparently must have it.
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Selected:
A popular 16-inch beginner’s bike. Top bar removes easily to convert it from a boy’s to a girl’s bike in minutes… The perfect first bike that’s built to last from child to child.
This goes to show how strongly we invest in purely symbolic gender differentiation. There is no need for a high bar and there is no need to differentiate bikes by gender in this way. We could do away with the bar distinction in the same way that we did away with the clothes-guard. But the bar is a highly visible signal that we are committed to a gender binary (men and women are “opposite” sexes) and our collective investment in that commitment means that bikes remain gendered.
As a kid I was super-proud to ride a boys bike. Why? Because I figured out early on that girl things were devalued and I wanted nothing to do with them. Collapsing the gender differentiation means collapsing a devalued category into a valued category. For individuals who embrace the valued category, this is a disaster. A male-coded bike frame is just one way to preserve the distinction and the hierarchy.
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For more on androcentrism, or the valuing of masculine things over feminine things, see here, here, here, here, and here.
