I'm pretty sure the third picture up there, the one with the deodorants, is from Target. They have the red signage and, having worked there for 9 months, I can recognize most of the other signage in the background.

Oddly enough, I was in a target the other day that did have a separate section labeled Men's Grooming, with "manly" deodorants, body washes, face stuff, etc.

I'm pretty sure the women's was the generic. First time I've EVER seen anything like that. I was quite happy, as I tend to prefer men's deodorants, razors, and like products. I also found a super-happy body wash that smelled like cedarwood, and had no artificial colors!

that bothers me so much. Aren't there actually MORE females on this planet than males? Pitiful.

What do you think the difference is between a women's sleeping bag and a sleeping bag?

On the ESPN menu:

I began teaching "social issues in sport" classes in 2005. In 2005 & 2006, I used the ESPN website's differentiation between "basketball" (men's basketball) and "women's basketball" as an example of normalizing male sport. In 2007, ESPN changed their site and listed "men's college basketball" and "women's college basketball." In 2009, however, they went back to "college basketball" and "women's basketball."

Why wouldn't it be NBA and then WNBA? I mean, let's leave aside the issue that there's the regular NBA and then the women's NBA, but why would they use the acronym title for the NBA but not for the WNBA?

Or does "Women's Basketball" also encompass college?

i think in the case of specific products (deodorant, sports equiptment etc), the irritating trend of making more things unnecessarily designed for "women" is resulting in driving up the demand (from the idiots who can't read labels and see things have same ingredients... one just smells like flowers or is pink). more women go into stores looking for "women's" items, so the stores logically make it easier for them to find and buy them, plus there is an obscene amount of them out there now- sometimes there's no choice but to make more room (an entire aisle) for them. i blame marketing for this one, not the retailers.

One of my number one pet peeves is that, when filling out a form, male always comes before female. Everything else is in alphabetical order except when you get to gender, then magically M comes before F!

I took this to mean that the women's products were specifically for women, as in they need a category of items separate from everyone else, while the unlabeled products were meant for everyone (except the deodorant. I don't think most women are wearing Old Spice). This is just a personal interpretation. I know I would be buying my kid the "neutral" or "boy's" (whichever interpretation you prefer) T-ball set and the "neutral" or "men's" magazines. But that's mostly because I hate pink and Cosmo. So who knows.

There was a lot in the toy store to raise my hackles, but the t-ball sets were the only thing I really stopped to stare at and, obviously, photograph. It really astounded me that someone thought this was necessary or a good idea and then executed on it.

I suppose the counter-argument would be that they are simply attempting to take any approach to increase sales and therefore market equipment specifically toward girls who might not be interested in t-ball unless it is awash in pastels. Fine. They're in the business to make money. But the last time I checked, if kids are interested in something like a game, they aren't too terribly wrapped up in the color of, say, the t-ball stand, so I think this is not only unnecessary but also another thing that tells girls they're "non-standard."

Just one more thing to bitch/bastard about. There are more important things in life to worry about than this.

I didn't say making pink legos is making fewer girls participate, I said the new gendering of them is, and pinkifying them is just adding fuel to the fire.

Or do you think pinkifying things is the only way in which things become gendered artificially?

I'm against pointlessly gendering a product, but in the case of a sleeping bag there are very good reasons for women-specific designs. As such, this isn't really a great example to use.

If you actually look at a women's bag and a unisex bag, you'll find that the women's bag is wider in the hips, has more room in the bust area, and is generally shorter. Nowadays the fill is often redistributed to account for warmer/colder spots on a woman's body (compared to a man's). A women's bag with an equivalent temperature rating to a unisex bag will also generally have more fill/insulation, since many women run colder than men do.

All of this becomes *very* significant when you're camping out at 25 below. A sleeping bag that insulates you as efficiently as possible is the difference between a good camping experience and a bad or even dangerous one.

In short, this isn't a case of 'shrink it and pink it'-- it's a case of sleeping bag designers realizing that female anatomy is different than men's, and because women can and do play outdoors, we ought to have products that work for us. That ought to be something to celebrate, not denigrate. Especially because from the looks of that picture, you can get the women's one in a non-gendered color like orange!

Regarding the magazines - I do however prefer that categorisation to the ones I've seen here where all my favourite magazines (film mags, sci-fi, etc) are chucked under "Men's".

There's a reason for this, and it's quite simple. It's just good marketing and distribution strategy. I'm not saying it's good, or right, but it is what it is.

The reason for this is not that the manufacturers of these products think that the default is masculine, but that the default is unisex (I'm referring to the actual products - the t-ball set, deodorant, and sleeping bag). No one would bat an eye if a girl picked up the (unspecified) t-ball set, a unisex stick of deodorant, or the sleeping bag. However, can you imagine a boy picking up the pink "girl's t-ball set?" A man purchasing the "Women's sleeping bag?"

It's a marketing tactic. You release your product genderless first to capture the majority of the market. Second, if the product sells well enough to warrant an attempt to capture more of the market, you release a 'for women' product. It might be the exact same product, but labeling it 'for women' is a psychological ploy to get women to think "oh, this product is especially for me." For whatever reason, marketing studies have shown this to be more effective on women than men. If the product is exceptionally popular, then a 'for men' version is released.

In short:

T-Ball, deodorant, sleeping bag: Marketers label a special 'for women' version because it makes women more likely to buy the product. It's not sexism, it's simple psychologically-based marketing.

Perhaps this is an example we can use to discuss our gendered culture, though.

The basketball example is, once again, marketing. Market analysis shows that men aren't interested in watching women play sports, and that women are often interested in watching men play sports. Also, men tend to watch more sports than women. Therefore, to capture the largest market, they highlight and feature the divisions and sports played by men.

---------------

A change of perspective on this might also be interesting.

Imagine that instead of 'deodorant' and 'women's deodorant' sections, they were labeled 'deodorant' and 'deodorant for whites.' People would be outraged that white folk are getting special treatment. Why would 'deodorant for women' not indicate special treatment for women?

With regard to the gendering of the deodorant isle; this example is particularly weird since I'm most often used to seeing male skincare products separated from woman's either buy physical partitions or by very clear colored markings e.g. orange, blue, black, dark green and red as opposed to pink, light blue, light green, cream and clear orange (think pastels). In most drug stores female is the default unless we're talking about "feminine hygiene" or feminine paper" products. My partner studied hair design at a school where he was required to market and sell hair care products and skin care products. The company had a range of hair and skin care products specifically marketed to men which featured darker packaging and muskier smells. He said the hair care stuff was essentially the same but some of the skin stuff was different because women and men do have some different skin care requirements. The reason that the hair care products were gendered male and not unisex, he said, was because market research said that while women will have no problem choosing a unisex product men will opt out of buying a unisex skin/hair care product even if the packaging is not obtrusively gendered (the rest of the line is pretty neutral, drawing its color pallet from "naturals", with the exception of the smoothing products which are a light "girly" blue). So they have to be targeted directly with "men's" lines. Go figure! My interpretation of this is that hair/skin care products are so deeply coded as female that men automatically see them that way.

I went shopping for boxing gloves and a punching bag yesterday, and the store sold gloves in black, and women's gloves in pink. They sold wrist wraps in black, yellow, and red, and women's wrist wraps in pink. They even sold a women's punching bag in pink.

About bike helmets:
I was shopping for one this week and saw one that said "Specially designed with women's shapes in mind", or something along those lines. And I thought "but it's for your head... since when are men's and women's heads not the same shape?" (or size, for that matter? I usually use my dad's helmet and it fits me perfectly). And then I looked at the side of the box, and it said "extra room to fit a ponytail!"
Ah, that's why women's heads have a different shape....

ESPN Menu -- it's maybe 200 px wide, so you can't actually fit "Women's College Basketball" on the menu -- or at least I'm pretty sure you can't. Given than I am sure it is a huge menu, they had to shorten it.

This is making me angry, for some reasons... I see these everyday, like most of us, but seing them altogether is just making me upset.
Boys need plain stuff, but we girls need flowers, colourful, pink stuff... for anything!
I'm wondering if I'd be OK if there were an equivalent for men...

Here in France, there's been a huge trend for a few years that is really ridiculous: selling pink hammers, drills, and so on... The worst thing is that... it works.

Welcome to 2010. :-(

This kind of double standard is all over the place in the world of cycling. Every single major manufacturer of high end and racing bicycles makes "ordinary" models and "women's specific" models, as if the "ordinary" models weren't just "men's specific."

Trek is a great example (see: http://www.trekbikes.com/us/en/bikes/road/#). You can buy their ultra high end "regular" Madone, or you can buy the "Madone WSD," which stands for "Women's Specific Design."

(One thing that can be said in Trek's favor is that they do have a much larger selection of WSD bikes than most other manufacturers.)

The helmet example is a poor one, since the helmets are from different manufacturers. On the Giro web site, most of their helmets are ungendered, with the Skyla only being described as for women if you click through to it:
"Our Universal Fit sizing for women is tailored to fit, and our Acu Dial fit system has been designed to accommodate ponytails."

There actually are differences in head size and shape between men and women, though most hat and helmet sizing is flexible enough that a small number of different sizes suffices for most people. My wife and I have almost the same hat size, but she finds it nearly impossible to wear most women's hats---they are made too small.

Nice job on the google search result. Yowza. I'll start taking screenshots of searches I do for my job and sending them in.

I just felt it worth while to note that Kohl's as a store always assumes the customer is female in their in-house literature. So a minor blow for stopping the assumed he. Though I wonder why not try to evenly switch between male and female(because we have no small number of male customers) as long as it grammaticality made sense and done randomly so that there weren't gender characterizations built in

Uh, I am an adult, and I play plenty of browser games, a fair few of which have the bubblebox logo, so I disagree that they are all aimed at children (though I suppose that could be the case on bubblebox, I don't know). I do know that browser games that are labelled as 'for girls' are generally REALLY TERRIBLE. There are a few games that are on par with the rest of their genres that are aimed at girls because of their setting being seen as particularly 'girly'. Pretty sure loads of people of all genders have played Shopping City (above) on sites that haven't tagged it as 'for girls', as it is one of the few where the gameplay is adequate and the setting isn't too 'girly'. When large portions of the gaming industry are making some progress on the sexism front it boggles my mind that browser gaming is still so far behind.

This is definitely correct. It is also the same scenario for white people, too. White is seen as the default, while EVERYONE else's race and ethnic background is explicitly stated. 

I don't know how common this phenomena is because I honestly just don't pay enough attention to notice. It wouldn't surprise me though. But a couple of these are outdated. Go to ESPN right now. Click on the "More Sports" tab at the top bar and you'll see "Men's Basketball" and "Women's BB" listed. On the "More Sports" page you also see Men's Basketball and Women's Basketball as two separate categories:  http://espn.go.com/sports/. The screen-grab you have is outdated. Also, when I type in "men's specific road bike" Google has no problem and delivers me Google shop results with the words "men's road bike" in it. You should probably double-check that your examples are still relevant before posting them. 

Two additional notes though. One, classifying "Maxim" as a "Lifestyle Magazine" is hilarious. Two, I went to the REI website to see what makes a "women's sleeping bag" specifically for women. Usually when companies say something is for women, they mean it comes in "pretty princess colors!," but orange isn't really a gendered color, so I was curious what made it a woman's sleeping bag. Apparently, it's designed specifically for a woman's shape. If a sleeping bag is so tight that it needs to accommodate the slight shape differences between men and woman's bodies, then that has to be the most uncomfortable sleeping bag ever. 

Two words: male nipples.

Case closed.

I shan't belabor the already plentiful commentary about this particular incident, but if you're interested in exploring the concept of gender binary in general, Helene Cixous goes into great depths in her exploration of the oscillating gender binary in Western culture, as introduced by Derrida, and Camille Paglia is nothing  short of illuminating in her characterization of it as a binary of the Apollonian and Cthonian genesis. Fascinating stuff, and a tad more relevant to the study of actual sociology. 

This really is irrelevant. This article nitpicks at roles that have existed since the beginning of time. Furthermore the reason why some of them specify female over male is because the male type product/label is more generalized (e.g. blue) whereas the female product really is specifically female. You won't see the little boys playing with the pink t-ball set or owning the pink shirt. But it's okay (because of the rise of the feminist movement) for girls to play with the blue sets etcetera. At least they aren't confined to playing the pink set if they really wanted the blue set!
Seriously this isn't a big deal. And I'm a girl. What our culture is doing now is breaking down the gender barriers which is causing the clear cut lines between female and male to be destroyed. No wonder more people are becoming more gender confused...

"Tall" Sleeping bag also costs less than "Women's" sleeping bag...although "Tall" probably uses more material.

To be honest, I'd rather have this state of affairs than what we have on halloween where the gender-neutral costume is labeled as male. 
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/10/25/boy-and-girl-toddler-cookie-monster-costumes/

And yet it is women who enjoy greater freedom to move between "male" and "female" designated items than men.

Case in point - your daughters can freely move into "default" "male" toy sections to buy pokemon stuff, for example.

But just try dragging your son into the "pink rows." Especially in front of other boys.

In other words, women aren't so much the "default" as another opportunity for marketing departments to market. A big difference between the two concepts, obviously.

I don't think it's a matter of accepting or rejecting parts of Irigaray's work-- it's a matter of there not being anything there to reject.  There are plenty of honest historians and philosophers of science out there, and undoubtedly some of the arguments that have ever been presented for some interpretation or another of a particular episode in the history of science will turn out to be wrong.  You need not have a 100% success rate in order to do good work as a scholar.  

But Irigaray's comments on fluid dynamics are far beyond mere disagreement or even wrongness on the merits; she was just making stuff up because it sounded radical.  I don't know what more one could do if one's goal were to discredit oneself as a scholar.  

I'm glad you got something out of her other writings, but a single episode of deliberate falsification on a topic about which an author knows nothing is enough to disqualify them as "required reading for humans".  With Irigaray, unfortunately, there are several such.

The real problem isn't just Irigaray--it's the state of the field in which Irigaray is tolerated, which makes it much harder for honest scholars to do good work.  How can one expect to be taken seriously when one's colleagues are denouncing fluid mechanics as a vestige of the patriarchy?

The ironic thing about road bikes is that although the manufacturers say they build them "for a women" the "women's specific" bikes are usually just less aggressive men's bikes. The geometry of them means you sit up higher, and they are geared towards recreational riders, not racing. It's pretty much the same as a small men's bike, same as all the other examples noted here. 

This is my first time commenting on this blog, but I had to submit the page I was just on (http://portlandbasketball.com/Reg_New.php). Sadly, it fits perfectly with this post.

It includes this gem:

Day you want to play(Sun, Mon, Womens, Wed, Thu)

i feel i should point out that some of these comments are themselves quite biased... for example at one point you quote google as saying "Don't you mean..." which is really rather implicative, when it quite clearly says right below it "did you mean", this is not implicative its a suggestion rather than an interrogation and thus I don't think it helps your point.

May I add something too?
This is just not in our products or in our language, but looks like we want to tell even the aliens that the male is superior.
Notice how this illustration on the Pioneer plaque shows the man in front and waving a friendly arm, whereas the woman stands submissively beside.
Always angered me, this.

In British rowing, you have open events and women's events. In regattas the classifications will be eg. "Elite 8" and "Women's elite 8."

VERY interesting.

Alright this is ridiculous. Things that are specified to be for women are done so because the item is pink or purple. There's absolutely nothing wrong with a girl wanting to have the same item in pink. *GASP* in fact, I'm a girl, and I am not at all offended by any of these items! Everyone needs to calm down. Also the REI sleeping bags: obviously it was labeled as "long" because if a short person bought that they would be extremely uncomfortable. People need to get over this whole thing. Everyone is equal, but products are labeled to make them more accessible and easy to find.

Thank you for this article!

The science has changed...new research:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/embryos-kill-male-tissue-become-female

The only male comments I've seen here only talk about how there are more important things to worry/talk about. I've seen many people describe men as more prone to science, more curious, more see-through (unfortunatelly, this is part of my environment, even as a college student). They actually are capable of showing interest towards multiple things, at all varying degrees of importancy, yet almost every man I know will roll their eyes at ANY gender-associated study or observation, stop listening immediately, tell a couple of random discouraging phrases and go back to talk about something 'more important' such as, idk, cars, or drugs, or shit. I know it has to do with the fact that it affects their privilege directly, but I am a white woman and I'm perfectly able to see my privileges without making a scene, and work towards their abolition, so I don't know why almost every man I know will do the exact opposite. It's so pitiful.

thank you for the humor of not being educated on the sociological principle to communicate that which you know, that all people talk about each other, except under the duresses of strength and power over others without the humor to laugh about the injustice of robots like this one i use meant to hold a sociological gestalt which is reflective of character and not personality which brings deathto the humanity of my life's existence as a person expressive of such relations as you are denying in the possibilities thereof.

Excellent stuff; I'll let my friends know about it and have them check it out. I appreciate you sharing! Whenever you have more time, go to: quordle

Even though it's not in our language or products, it appears that we want to convey to even aliens that men are better.
Observe how the woman is positioned submissively next to the male in this illustration on the Pioneer plaque, who is waving a kind arm. More info about this you can find on  gamblorium