I love pink and glitter as much as the next person, but I don’t need everything that I own, including razors, power tools and underwear, to be exuding femininity. I just want them to work well and not cost twice as much as the versions designed for men!
Women on Reddit have recently been calling out all of the products and procedures they have to deal with that were clearly designed by men for women. From the discomfort of getting a mammogram or IUD to the frustration of trying to find comfortable clothes that actually fit properly, you’re likely to relate to many of the replies down below if you’re a woman. But regardless of your gender, enjoy scrolling through and be sure to upvote the things you find most infuriating!
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Every single gyno procedure and lack of pain meds given for it.
Most women's shoes are shaped to be long, thin and pointy.
My feet are not long, thin and pointy, **they are** **foot-shaped**, and shoe shopping is a*s.
Someone PLEASE put more belt loops on my work pants!
Oh, and NORMAL pockets, please and thankyou.
I still maintain that the female pocket is deliberately small to keep the handbag business going. I don't believe the fashion designers that claim it destroys the line of the clothing...
Most pharmaceuticals, unfortunately.
Button down shirts that don't account for breasts and if you CAN button it all the way up you have these huge gaps and stretching between the buttons.
I had a dress shirt once that had a button on the inside as well, to help prevent the gap right across the boobs. It was great! More of that please
Women's Genital Wash. Summers Eve, for example, is a modern brand. The vagina is self-cleaning. The fragrances and chemicals in these washes can cause infections. Do not wash inside your vagina! Water only.
Women's power tools. They are just a pink version of the men's tools, or they are just a less powerful version.
No redesign of the weight, shape, or grip size to make them easier to hold for our body shapes, just a pink tax.
Car seat belts. Mine slips up all the time, and I have it on the lowest setting. I am 5'4" tall. So uncomfortable.
Maternity leave.
I’m in the US where you’re lucky to have it and even if you do there are often ridiculous stipulations like, leave starting only when you go into labor.
There’s no way a system where the expectation is that 100% of women will be able to work until a baby literally begins to fall out of them was designed by a woman.
And culture that screams “it’s not my problem, you should have thought of that before you got pregnant!” To any changes to the system. The US system doesn’t have any care for universally raising a healthy, well adjusted population. It’s not just incredibly sad, but short sighted.
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You get called a dirty commie or socialist by some hyper conservative groups in the US if you even mention longer maternity leave for women let alone universal healthcare. The U.S. is truly backward when it comes to things like this- they really don’t care about their citizens.
Socialist is not a bad thing in the rest of the world either. People taking care of each other, isn't too bad.
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Americans consider that to be communism and commies are baddies!
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USA, land of the free apparently, this is absurd, I seems everything is about money and squeezing everything they can out of a person, the mind boggles as to why Americans are abused so much by their government, it’s cruel
Is it really men-thing or more american-thing? Because this is something that many other countries managed to conquer successfully and especially in Europe is miles ahead...
Based on individual location more than men exactly.
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3 kids = lost 3 jobs. One TOLD ME they were going to give me maternity leave, but she came during the "busy season" and I had to train my replacement
USA maternity leave was not designed by a man. In fact, it was never designed at all.
Canada here. Maternity leave and EU (Employment Insurance) covers for one full year here.
Although in reality most women do exactly that cause they are gunna need a ton of money when its born.
This be feels badly worded. Maternity leave isn’t the problem, the lack thereof is.
Birth control - because most women even nowadays still don't know it is perfectly safe not to get a period when you are on it. The 7 day pill gap was invented by men and priests back in the day so the pill would look like it keeps the normal cycle. IT does not and you don't need a period when you are on the pill.
Ok, this is niche, but I hate it whenever I go to sit at a bar and there are no hooks under the bar. Double points if the stools don't have a back where I can loop my purse/coat over the seat back, and I am stuck piling my purse and/or coat in my lap. Same for public restrooms - pleaseee put a hook on the door so I'm not precariously balancing my purse on my lap or worse on the floor.
Razors. I just buy the regular man-version if I wanna use a razor.
Whoever designed auto-flushing toilets. The damn thing is throwing sewage water on the back of my thighs before I can get my pants up. Wtaf?!?!.
Wasn’t there some guys on shark tank or something like it that made gloves for women to use to change their menstrual products? They were single use and pink or something?.
When you get a needle biopsy, you have to lie on a cold formica table with a sharp edged hole w yr breast dangling through it. The first time I had to do this, we (me, women docs and nurses) all commented on the terrible design of the thing.
When I has another needle biopsy a few years later, the table had been redesigned. It was now pink. ❤️.
The chainsaw. I wish I never knew this fact.
It was initially supposed to be used to cut open the pelvic bone to assist with child birth. Barbaric, and I am a man, so I can only think how much worse it must be for women....
Every public restroom I've been to that doesn't have a little trash receptacle in the stall. Having to walk your soiled sanitary products to the main trash in the handwashing area is adding insult to injury when periods suck enough. .
They did it at my work, when building new restrooms. They forgot that women would appreciate a little bin in the toilet-stall for used period products (and not to walk to the general bin close to the sinks). It took them "only" half a year to "fix" that issue. Unfortunately the toilet-stalls are so narrow that you can't really place a bin in them. Now it is a constantly shuffling to open/close the door 🤗
There is a patent for labia glue that dissolves when you pee on it do use while on your period to hold the blood in. A male chiropractor invented and tried to sell it. So that.
Scented pads, especially mint "flavoured" ones.
Scented tampons are even worse, mostly purchased by people who think they're buying regular tampons and don't necessarily know scented tampons even exist. Because they shouldn't exist. Fragrance ingredients don't serve their purpose inside the vagina, and they can be very irritating.
I had a baby and we used bottles to administer formula. The numbers and oz indicator lines were in white.
WHITE.
Tampons, considering they didn't think to test them with actual blood until last year.
What? No. Tampons were originally plugs used to fill bullet holes in WW1. Nurses saw them, figured out they could have other uses and things went from there.
Sports shorts
Search for it on google and add men or women and see the difference.
Anything that is just a pink or purple variation of the men’s version.
Mammograms. Routinely squeezing boobs between two plates of plexiglass. Find a better way. Imagine if men had to put their balls between two plate and have their nuts painfully squashed every year.
And don’t even get me started on the people that do it… usually there’s two main categories, people that are weird and creepy about it and people that have done it so many times they don’t even pretend to care.
High heels, which after an hour resemble instruments of torture.
Clothes - hardly any pockets, if they do, it's rare they they a a decent size that actually holds the items in.
Handbags - many are too small and useless for any woman carrying more than 1 card and a little bit of cash.
Seatbelts - they don't fit right because they were designed for breast-less people apparently.
Why buy a SMALL handbag, then complain that it's TOO SMALL? Yesterday I made soup. So I took out my 1 gallon pot and poured 2 gallons of water into it. What a piece of s**t, it was too small. How dare they make such small pots. Must have been designe by men.
The IUD was invented by Richard Richter in 1909 and the design was updated by Ernst Gräfenberg.
Let's be real here: *most* things.
So this is pretty niche but I'm a fencer and the chest protectors that women are required to wear are shaped like a Barbie's boobs. I wrote a whole article about it which went absolutely viral in fencing spaces. We're working on a redesign but it's very hard to engineer something that works for all people and doesn't cost three times more.
[https://www.wfencing.org/post/the-problem-with-chest-protectors](https://www.wfencing.org/post/the-problem-with-chest-protectors)
The tl:dr is that they don't fit right and they don't scale well for larger people AT ALL (but they also don't scale well for small people). They are required because getting poked in the boobs really hard can give you a lump (not cancer, still bad). In the survey we did afterwards we also learned that they contribute to discomfort and dysmorphia among trans and nonbinary folks, and they lead to stupid comments and sometimes bullying among kids and teens.
Edit: I mean fencing as in the sport in the Olympics where we hit each other with blunted swords. Not the fence in your backyard or the person selling stolen goods on the black market.
Also, there are other styles of chest protectors beyond the barbie boobs but none of them really work for people who aren't very flat-chested. These are detailed in the linked post.
Many jousting based hema groups won't accept female students because if the breastplate isn't *perfectly* shaped to your breasts, it can and will paralyze or even decapitate you. It's a complicated issue. Stupid boobs being all booby and boobing around.
99% of women's clothing?
(no pockets, waist short enough for an oompa loompah that just gets wider never longer, underwear that scrunch up your a*s regardless of its modest size, pants that create muffin tops, pants that you can't bend your legs in because calf muscles apparently aren't fashionable, coochie splitting "jumpers" where the waist is never long enough, cold shirts with sleeves that track in everything, fragile s****y lacy shirts to be seen in / freeze in, jackets with no pockets, jeans and pants with no pockets, shoes you can't run in).
Society.
This! We're told equality is happening because now women can be elected too, but perhaps we would have designed a completely different system if we'd been included from the beginning. If we had to start again from scratch now, nobody could argue for this corrupt system that benefits corrupt money grubbers most and leaves those doing the most vital jobs struggling to feed and house themselves.
I'm pretty sure cars? Last I heard, most or all crash tests are used with a male model, but that might've changed semi-recently.
The whole healthcare system as a concept.
Underwear, because it nearly never fits. Always rides up. Especially when those high cut 80s things came out there were no proper fitting ones anymore, eventually I found boyleg undies, but they are still different from what they used to make. Plus the double fabric is in the wrong place. Definitely must be designed by men, women wouldn’t do that.
Tampax (and possibly other brands) tampons. It swells in length instead of getting wider when expanding. It's pushing you in spots nobody wants to ever feel pressure imo, it's just not correct anatomically speaking.
Apparently, many got genuinely sick from using them due to this (I haven't seen any official reports tbf, just reading it up on the internet and some anecdotal evidence) and it's causing pain for others, including me. It hurt like hell, and definitely was not comfortable at all at any point. You just cannot not feel it.
When I lived in the UK, I either had to spend a smaller fortune on buying OB tampons from various sites on the internet or ask someone to bring me some when they were visiting a country that had them, as they're not being sold in the UK. I tried several other brands, including Lidl and drugstores' own brands, and while OB was the best in my opinion, most were not as uncomfortable as Tampax was besides a few. I do apologise for not naming more, but Tampax is the most common as far as I've seen and I've tried so many brands I just can't remember their names.
Edit:typo.
Tampons in a cardboard applicator.
Eeeugh I felt those words deep in my soul. And my vagina.
Toilet cubicles - never enough room for sanitary bins.
I bought a last-minute dress for my father-in-law's funeral last week where the top bit was a wraparound with poppers to essentially keep your breasts in. I had to sit there in church praying they wouldn't pop open at possibly the worst occasion imaginable (although my partner said his dad would have actually found that hilarious).
Yeah, men please stop designing women's clothes, thanks.
Leggings with a seam in the crotch.
Any female outfit in mmorpg.
Lab coats.
Totally random, but mine makes me look awful. Like a teletubby. Also, the sleeves are too long in the size that fits me. Have to roll them up. The buttons pop open on the chest and hip every day.
My boyfriend, meanwhile, looks like a pinup.
We finally have custom Rx safety glasses! Where are the custom lab coats?!.
Not quite what you were looking for but skincare and cosmetics. It was still a largely male dominated industry up until the 90s. In many countries the key decision makers in “big beauty retail” is still men. Men still hold most of the purse strings in the industry people just don’t know it or are too lazy to recognise it.
The car park ticket machine thingys that you have to get juuuust close enough that you can still reach the machine without your wing mirrors hitting it. Men are simply taller and thus have longer arms whereas us short girlies must suffer. :(.
Not as much these days, but kitchens. More men cook now than previously, but kitchens are still used more by women, and mostly designed by men. My husband was a good cook, we shared the kitchen. But things I couldn't reach were no problem for him. We both hated the kitchen in this house, (I still do) but we never got around to changing it.
TBH, I don't know how well the average person, any make or model, would do at designing a kitchen. You'd have to build 'em and use 'em to find the flaws, and figure out how to do it better. Things don't always work in practice, as well as they looked on paper. Or in the computer program.
I have the opposite problem, kitchen counters are usually too short for me, making my back ache from bending. I custom built my kitchen and bathroom counters and the contactor was making comments like how will my children be able to reach the countertops (as if there aren't any stools they could use smh)
“Chick cars” that still don’t have anywhere to put your handbag if you have a passenger.
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Ah bless, the amount of triggered man children in the comments complaining that it’s always women’s faults for these things and we need to change them. I love how they are trying to speak for all of us. 😂
I think if they LISTENED to us and involved us in the creations, they could actually create decent products for us. I feel like it should become the norm for women to design products and not have their ideas dismissed, and if men could learn to give us the space for that, and create a safe environment for our voices to be heard, many of us wouldn't feel the need to create that space for ourselves. When men get upset about the generalizations that we make about them, it can be really frustrating for us, because they're completely missing the fact that we make those generalizations to create a safe space for ourselves and other women to share the hurt and pain that we feel and our desire to feel safe and valued in society. Yes, I can see why men see it as an attack, but many of us don't actually believe it's all men, what we're saying is that when we leave our safe circles (or if we don't really have much of one) and go out into society, we lose that feeling of safety, we are focused on
protecting ourselves because if we don't, and we get hurt, the system isn't designed to take our emotional, mental, and even physical safety into account. We have no way to know if the people who say they can help us, will or can help us. We have no way to know who is going to tell us "well you didn't do enough to protect yourself so you have to take responsiblity' while simultaneuously telling the man " we all make mistakes, just don't do it again"
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There's a s**t ton of grown men complaining in this comment section as well for your information..
Load More Replies... Ah bless, the amount of triggered man children in the comments complaining that it’s always women’s faults for these things and we need to change them. I love how they are trying to speak for all of us. 😂
I think if they LISTENED to us and involved us in the creations, they could actually create decent products for us. I feel like it should become the norm for women to design products and not have their ideas dismissed, and if men could learn to give us the space for that, and create a safe environment for our voices to be heard, many of us wouldn't feel the need to create that space for ourselves. When men get upset about the generalizations that we make about them, it can be really frustrating for us, because they're completely missing the fact that we make those generalizations to create a safe space for ourselves and other women to share the hurt and pain that we feel and our desire to feel safe and valued in society. Yes, I can see why men see it as an attack, but many of us don't actually believe it's all men, what we're saying is that when we leave our safe circles (or if we don't really have much of one) and go out into society, we lose that feeling of safety, we are focused on
protecting ourselves because if we don't, and we get hurt, the system isn't designed to take our emotional, mental, and even physical safety into account. We have no way to know if the people who say they can help us, will or can help us. We have no way to know who is going to tell us "well you didn't do enough to protect yourself so you have to take responsiblity' while simultaneuously telling the man " we all make mistakes, just don't do it again"
Load More Replies... There's a s**t ton of grown men complaining in this comment section as well for your information..
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