I know shes talking about jars but she really means that everything is like this. Shelves are too high. Stairs are too deep. Chairs and tables are too high. Spoons are too big. Women do not fit in...
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I know shes talking about jars but she really means that everything is like this.
Shelves are too high. Stairs are too deep. Chairs and tables are too high. Spoons are too big. Women do not fit in cars and are forced to sit hazardously close to the steering wheel in order to operate a car.
Edit:
the poster below me has presented the bad faith argument that by accommodating others, things that the main group engages in comfortably now will become uncomfortable. Thats a basic bad faith argument that minorities and disabled folks everywhere have been hearing their whole lives, its not true, and presenting that argument is selfish and offensive, and I was nice at first by telling them this instead of being offended because hey sometimes people just really haven’t thought about it but then this poster doubled down on their dumb argument and offended the entire platform.
I mean....I'm 6'3. Just about everything is too short/small for me by default and it's caused me posture problems all my life, since the average US male is 5'9. I know women ranging from my height...
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I mean....I'm 6'3. Just about everything is too short/small for me by default and it's caused me posture problems all my life, since the average US male is 5'9. I know women ranging from my height to 4'ish (average US woman is 5'3 for ref).
There's, literally, not a one size fits all for these things. You can try to make everything dynamic or bespoke, but that's very expensive, causes other problems (ADA compliance being the main one), and i'm still not sure what you're going to do about stairs.
Big and tall guy here too, so I feel your pain, but the issue isn’t that we can’t accommodate everybody everywhere, it’s that in WAY too many instances of design, testing, and implementation,...
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Big and tall guy here too, so I feel your pain, but the issue isn’t that we can’t accommodate everybody everywhere, it’s that in WAY too many instances of design, testing, and implementation, women haven’t even been considered.
I highly recommend Caroline Criado Perez’s book Invisible Women for a data-driven look into the issue at large.
One thing that stuck out to me from it was that female crash test dummies weren’t used until the 2010s(!) in the US, and when they finally were implemented, safety scores for cars plummeted. It highlighted a significant safety issue for women that was previously unknown because nobody was testing for it.
The book is very illuminating and I highly recommend it. This issue is so much deeper than “not everybody fits the average.”
Responded to snake_case here but I think short version is "i know that's what's being said, I know it's true in some cases, i think people over attribute ignorance and malice on some of these...
Responded to snake_case here but I think short version is "i know that's what's being said, I know it's true in some cases, i think people over attribute ignorance and malice on some of these things".
As for the book, i'm aware of it, i'll give it a read, but the crash test example is one I'm very skeptical of. I've no doubt women are more injured in car crashes (actuaries have known as such for basically the existence of car insurance), but I do question the correlation/causation of what's being claimed. I'll have to read it though.
Its not that I think they should cover 4ft tall tiny women, thats not the case the blogger is making either. The problem is that “average person” is a man, and the average woman is too far away...
Its not that I think they should cover 4ft tall tiny women, thats not the case the blogger is making either.
The problem is that “average person” is a man, and the average woman is too far away from their measurement of “average person”
I understand that, but my point is that there's still not a great solution. So No, the author is arguing about difficulty opening canned products. And while there is some discussion of that in...
I understand that, but my point is that there's still not a great solution.
So
No, the author is arguing about difficulty opening canned products. And while there is some discussion of that in here, I think it's one of the hardest to solve and has very little to do with "wasn't designed for women" so much as "physics is physics". No one said "oh that's loose enough for a man, stop it there" for many of those kinds of products.
The difference in the US average is 5". That is enough to already make things awkward. 2.5" "less" of everything doesn't translate easily to "okay now everyone is happy.
For example, you mention stairs. Stair's are around 7" (there's a min and a max which that is neither, and I think the only other safety rule is you can't adjust them).
They're 7"s mostly because of material efficiency. You could make them 5"'s, but then you're going to have more horizontal length on a staircase and need more steps to cover the height you're going.
So why am I rambling about height when you mentioned depth (well you said deep, so i'm assuming you mean the tread not the riser)? Well obviously if they don't want stairs to be horizontally longer (and not even going into landings) they're going to make them as short as possible.
The legal minimum is 10/11", and in this case, you MUST look at the high of the average, not the low. Yes it's going to be worse for women who are, on average, smaller, but it's a safety thing. Smaller means you will, on average, have more people falling down stairs because you need at least 10 inches for the average adult gait to not trip and fall.
Ideally you'd mandate the max. Don't want Shaq falling and hurting himself just because he's got bigger feet (4-6" longer than mine I believe). Realistically you draw the line somewhere, and for that you're going to pick the high end of the median, which, yes, is going to be the on average larger male.
So in short, even considering women, that's a perfect example of a case where it'd be absurd to adjust for it. You want to help as many people as you can stay safe. It may have just been luck that it worked out that way, I'm well aware rampant sexism exists, but the law is correct here in attempting to protect as many people as possible, and shorter treads are more dangerous.
Tables and chairs could be discussed as they're obviously not regulated (although I'd argue decent evidence designers have taken average female height into account), and I have to say I heavily question "spoons are too big". Are you really saying you or someone you know needs something smaller than a cutlery teaspoon (not measuring, it's a whole mess of standards)? You can buy those in bulk in just about any dinnerware set?
Finally, ALLLLLL of this has "US average" in it because that's just what it is. Shocking nobody, products are made globally and the average for countries can vary A LOT. Japanese and European cars are much smaller than American ones, as is their furniture. I got to travel to eastern europe and suddenly everything was my size, because the average height in the region is about 3" higher.
When you consider that stuff is made all over the world these days to different standards, yeah, the cheapest bidder amazon chair that really came from temu which came from indoneisa that the store bought is probably not made to ANY spec for you. Cheap sells.
To be clear, i'm not saying that this kind of oversight doesn't happen. Anyone studying business these days hears all about how many people made fortunes by just not being sexist and realizing you can build stuff for women too. .
Still people often underestimate just how focus grouped and overengineered some of this stuff is (obviously not the temu chair), and attribute sexism to what often boils down to in the modern age simple economics or safety. Things that make it through shitty shipping conditions and can last weeks outcompete things that don't. There's still a lot of growing to be done in the sciences when it comes to properly including female representation in the data, but a lot of this comes off as "well obviously everyone who's ever worked on these things is an idiot" and it's not that simple.
Edit-
I may have meant coffee spoon not teaspoon. I refuse to reinsert this knowledge into my brain though.
Just going through these claims one by one; apologies, sourcing these takes a while. It's been solved for about fifteen years, at seemingly insignificant/unnoticeable price increase to consumers....
Just going through these claims one by one; apologies, sourcing these takes a while.
And while there is some discussion of that in here, I think it's one of the hardest to solve and has very little to do with "wasn't designed for women" so much as "physics is physics".
It's been solved for about fifteen years, at seemingly insignificant/unnoticeable price increase to consumers. Presumably, saving a couple pennies per jam jar is not perceived as a good ROI vs. a potential increase in sales. I wouldn't call that physics, though.
No one said "oh that's loose enough for a man, stop it there" for many of those kinds of products.
Many is a weasel word. Furthermore, considering that this sort of bias is absolutely everywhere (example for racial inequality), I'd go so far as to say that the production staff/engineers say "this is fine for everyone on the engineering team, stop it there" (editor's note: the entire engineering staff are 20-40 something dudes).
Here's a lighthearted anecdote: the universal pipe colour for recycled water (non-potable use only) is purple. Although the precise history is debated, one retelling indicates that this unusual colour was chosen because one of the people involved happened to be colourblind, and thus the product/engineering team realized that colourblind people exist and probably shouldn't accidentally plumb the urinals into the fountains.
[stairs anecdote]
I'd need more information about the original commenter to know what their concerns are w.r.t. stairs. Working backwards from your argument, though, it sounds like your claim is that tread and riser dimensions were selected empirically in order to improve ergonomics for a country's population. Furthermore, you note how there are population-level differences in height across countries. This would imply that building codes differ across the world, based on their heights.
To my eye, that's practically identical given a ~4" average population height difference, after taking nosings into account (the Philippines NBC doesn't seem to). Ergo I disagree with your statement, unless you'd like to provide further evidence.
[...] and I have to say I heavily question "spoons are too big".
Generally, it's rude to question someone's observed reality. Regardless, data indicates that female mouths are ~22% smaller in volume than male mouths, and I expect absolute dimensions are also smaller too.
Shocking nobody, products are made globally [...]
I'm not sure I understand. I think you're saying that it's possible to support a diverse array of appropriately sized products without the global economy collapsing, while also using that as an argument against providing appropriately sized things.
For the spoons, I think the question is whether small spoons are still too big. Most cutlery sets come with large and small spoons. The small spoons should be easy for children to use.
For the spoons, I think the question is whether small spoons are still too big. Most cutlery sets come with large and small spoons. The small spoons should be easy for children to use.
This is fully unrelatead to the discussion, but I actually hate every single spoon. Give me a small ladle instead (sob). Spoons are so bad to eat with. Why are they 1/100th of a millimeter deep?...
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This is fully unrelatead to the discussion, but I actually hate every single spoon. Give me a small ladle instead (sob).
Spoons are so bad to eat with. Why are they 1/100th of a millimeter deep? Please just let me scoop up a reasonable amount of liquid without spilling half of it, because my hand isn't as steady as surgeons.
May I ask if you've tried a Japanese ramen spoon before? They're effectively more ergonomic, smaller ladles, and do a fantastic job of conveying tasty broth into one's soup hole. Plus they come in...
May I ask if you've tried a Japanese ramen spoon before? They're effectively more ergonomic, smaller ladles, and do a fantastic job of conveying tasty broth into one's soup hole. Plus they come in a lot of lovely patterns, and often have a matching plate to set them down upon.
I have! And that was the catalyst of my intense dislike for western spoons. I yearn for the ladle. Now that you mention it though, I realised nothing stops me from simply buying ramen spoons and...
I have! And that was the catalyst of my intense dislike for western spoons. I yearn for the ladle.
Now that you mention it though, I realised nothing stops me from simply buying ramen spoons and using them at home.^
I recently came across the concept of “if nobody is coming to save you/help you, probably nobody will be stopping you either” as a fantastic motivational idea :D
I am unstoppable.
I recently came across the concept of “if nobody is coming to save you/help you, probably nobody will be stopping you either” as a fantastic motivational idea :D
No one said "oh that's loose enough for a man, stop it there" for many of those kinds of products. They did though. And smart phones are the same way. Made for big hands. Jars. Phones. Power...
No one said "oh that's loose enough for a man, stop it there" for many of those kinds of products.
They did though. And smart phones are the same way. Made for big hands.
Jars. Phones. Power tools. The weight of a bag of mulch. All of these things are as large as they can get away with and we’ve been letting them get away with too large.
But they literally didn't? Phones are large because customers want larger screens. Hell i believe data shows women care more about larger screens on average because they care more about photos on...
But they literally didn't?
Phones are large because customers want larger screens. Hell i believe data shows women care more about larger screens on average because they care more about photos on average.
Jars and mulch bags are large because of product to container ratios. It's why bulk products are cheaper, you're paying less for packaging (and arguably better for the environment. More packaging is more energy wasted on trash).
Power tools are large mostly because of physics behind making something that can drive a screw into wood with a battery that lasts long and doesn't break the first time you drop it. No one is making these things heavier than they need to be because it's more expensive too, almost all the tech has been focused on making them smaller and more efficient.
Handles are larger because you need grip on some of these tools and they want to make sure anyone grabbing it has plenty of space, so in that case bigger is safer and smaller is more dangerous.
If you want something with less power, plenty of those things exist, but if you're driving into metal studs, well there's just a limit to what physics allows.
How tall are you? I ask because I'm short enough to wear XXS and still fit in children's clothing, yet I've never struggled with power tools. I wear small gloves too. I exercise regularly to keep...
How tall are you? I ask because I'm short enough to wear XXS and still fit in children's clothing, yet I've never struggled with power tools. I wear small gloves too. I exercise regularly to keep my body from aching, but I'm definitely not an elite athlete.
There are smaller power tools, but they're more expensive because it's hard to miniaturize a high-torque motor.
I really need one of those powered hedge trimmers but I tried all the ones at the store even the ones without batteries are too large, theres no reason to make the motor smaller cause smaller is...
I really need one of those powered hedge trimmers but I tried all the ones at the store even the ones without batteries are too large, theres no reason to make the motor smaller cause smaller is worse, so they’re just all as large as they can get away with.
The weight and the size, I could handle the weight if it were small enough and I could handle the size if it were light enough Handles being hard to grip doesnt bother me, I’m left handed, all...
The weight and the size, I could handle the weight if it were small enough and I could handle the size if it were light enough
Handles being hard to grip doesnt bother me, I’m left handed, all handles are wrong lol
Are you using the models with two handles? They should be held like a chainsaw with all the weight resting against your waist or stomach. If you're trying to hold them above your head and...
Are you using the models with two handles? They should be held like a chainsaw with all the weight resting against your waist or stomach. If you're trying to hold them above your head and struggling then that's expected (unless you're strong).
So I can operate a chainsaw because of how its meant to be held, at the hip, but I cant start a chainsaw, the pull cord is too tough. Its super annoying.
So I can operate a chainsaw because of how its meant to be held, at the hip, but I cant start a chainsaw, the pull cord is too tough. Its super annoying.
I've always had a hate for pull-cord starts because it feels like my arm isn't quite long enough to get the necessary momentum at full extension. Chalk that up as another...
I've always had a hate for pull-cord starts because it feels like my arm isn't quite long enough to get the necessary momentum at full extension. Chalk that up as another less-than-male-average-height complaint.
It’s everything about it, the weight, the cord length, the amount of times it takes. When I was a teenager I just hoped that id get bigger and be able to do it as an adult but it just never...
It’s everything about it, the weight, the cord length, the amount of times it takes. When I was a teenager I just hoped that id get bigger and be able to do it as an adult but it just never happened I stayed kid size in the eyes of the manufacturer.
I'm just as happy to dispense with hauling or pushing the weight of ICE tools - even heavy battery packs are easier for me to handle. Button starts are an amazing improvement. [Though spouse...
I'm just as happy to dispense with hauling or pushing the weight of ICE tools - even heavy battery packs are easier for me to handle. Button starts are an amazing improvement. [Though spouse provided warnings about electric chainsaws - those motors produce enough torque to tear and melt Kevlar pants...]
But being at one end of the bell curve in either direction sucks for most products and designs.
Should he just keep his objection to himself because he's a man? As tired as you may be, I'd wager a substantial portion of other people share his objections, and you may be better served by...
Should he just keep his objection to himself because he's a man?
As tired as you may be, I'd wager a substantial portion of other people share his objections, and you may be better served by adressing why you think those objection don't track (which is the point if having a conversation on tildes) rather than trying to bully him into silence.
We know we have to explain in painstaking detail why we're not being considered and that power tools could indeed be made just as sturdily with handles that fit our hands. But there are tons of...
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We know we have to explain in painstaking detail why we're not being considered and that power tools could indeed be made just as sturdily with handles that fit our hands. But there are tons of articles out there for someone to read, and instead I'm going to do all that labor for someone who probably won't read this or care because they are already arguing with an article that makes this same point.
Also I personally find being told how women should respond to the repetition of "obviously we're being ridiculous and we're not being excluded" with explaining to the person why they're wrong as patronizing. We know. We're tired. And it feels like we're trapped in an absurdist play.
But here are a bunch of things people can read. I've even summarized and pulled links out of it to click more easily than having to click into two articles. Certainly this will be read and change minds.
The argument often made is that it's stupid not to make money off women and thus obviously the market will work it's stuff out or that necessarily the things are the way they are because they have to be for other reasons. The former is disproven through both a long history of discrimination against groups of consumers for social reasons and both are demonstrative of implicit bias in product design.
It reflect the lack of women in these professional spaces and in spaces of authority to change things. Firefighting equipment doesn't have to be designed only for men with women forced to adapt. Surgical tools don't need to be sized for men's hands. PPE in health care is sized for men despite most healthcare professionals being women.
Just because designers are not cackling manically while they think about how they can exclude women doesn't mean they're not operating off of assumptions, like "shrink it and pink it" or "firefighters are men" that ultimately damage not just women's experiences but women's health and safety.
And this is such a binary way of thinking about it, though it does not have to be. Universal design should make things more accessible for everyone, not for the "average man."
Look, I know this is all tired etc, and I don't want to add to the dog piling, but that PPE link is just an article with almost zero facts or information, and I do not buy it at all. I've worked...
Look, I know this is all tired etc, and I don't want to add to the dog piling, but that PPE link is just an article with almost zero facts or information, and I do not buy it at all. I've worked in healthcare for decades, and yes, majority of nurses and healthcare staff are women. PPE absolutely positively includes and considers them. You can walk into any hospital and see that nurses stations and stools adjust down properly for short stature, gloves fit snuggly and for surgery, specific glove sizes are available for smaller (and larger) hands. Gowns and bunny suits are all pretty massive, which fits everyone but is annoying I'll admit.
When you say someone is arguing in bad faith but link what feels like extremely low quality evidence (in the PPE case) it weakens the thrust of the rest of your argument. Again I don't prefer nitpicking but healthcare definitely factors in female workers, it'd be suicide not to
The references linked in the article you mention References ↵World Health Organization. The impact of COVID-19 on health and care workers: a closer look at deaths. 2021....
The references linked in the article you mention
References
↵World Health Organization. The impact of COVID-19 on health and care workers: a closer look at deaths. 2021. https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/345300.
↵World Health Organization. Delivered by women, led by men: A gender and equity analysis of the global health and social workforce. 2019. https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/311322
↵Stevenson A. Shaved heads, adult diapers: Life as a nurse in the Coronavirus outbreak. The New York Times. 28 Feb 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/business/coronavirus-china-nurse-menstruation.html
↵India’s army of 600 000 virus hunting women goes on strike. Bloomberg. 6 Aug 2020. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-06/india-s-army-of-600-000-virus-hunting-women-goes-on-strike.
↵Women in Global Health. Fit for women? Safe and decent PPE for women health and care workers. 2021. https://www.womeningh.org/fitforwomen
↵
Criado Perez. Caroline. Invisible Women: Data Bias in A World Designed for Men.Harry N Abrams, 2019.
Google Scholar
↵
van Daalen KR, Bajnoczki C, Chowdhury M, et al. Symptoms of a broken system: the gender gaps in COVID-19 decision-making. BMJ Glob Health2020;5:e003549. doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2020-003549. pmid:33004348
FREE Full TextGoogle Scholar
↵UNECE. Declaration for Gender Responsive Standards and Standards Development. 2019. https://unece.org/DAM/trade/wp6/AreasOfWork/GenderInitiative/UNECEGenderDeclaration_English.pdf.
↵
Yong E. Why health care works are quitting in droves. Atlantic. 16 Nov 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/11/the-mass-exodus-of-americas-health-care-workers/620713/.
Google Scholar
↵International Council of Nurses. International Council of Nurses COVID-19 Update. 13 Jan 2021. https://www.icn.ch/sites/default/files/inline-files/ICN%20COVID19%20update%20report%20FINAL.pdf.
In short the British Medical Association disagrees with you. And while this was during COVID so it also addressed the general shortage, it was a time when well fitting PPE was absolutely critical. (Finding modern sources that don't reference COVID or aren't impacted by it would be quite difficult. ) Maybe it's been fixed since then. I doubt it.
The lead for infection prevention at the RCN
One-size-fits-all protective equipment has been a problem for frontline healthcare workers who have to wear this specialist life-saving equipment for up to 12 hours at a time.
The PPE link was a citation from the first article I linked, and it cited the report here and while I'm not an expert in PPE it did not take a long time to run down this information. So if the complaint is that I didn't do even more labor by sharing all the specifics well you're welcome to that opinion but I think the sources were viewable and speak for themselves. I get your disagreement and at no point do they say "nothing" is adjusted (though I know nurses who have a hard time getting gloves in their size in stock for example) but overall there is a disparity where women in healthcare could be safer and more comfortable if PPE was designed more intentionally.
And for the record if I think someone is arguing in bad faith, I'll say it. I didn't. I made no personal attacks either. I expressed exhaustion. The most I said is that I don't like putting effort into replying to someone who won't read or won't care. I wasn't speaking about anyone specific, including the person leading the chain of replies in this thread; it was rather more of a general statement. Even if it weren't I don't think it rises to accusing someone of arguing in bad faith.
You're not doing this for the ones who don't care, you're doing it for those who do (or will, once they see it laid out one more time). Shifting mainstream opinion is hard and slow. sometimes so...
I'm going to do all that labor for someone who probably won't read this or care. [...] We're tired. And it feels like we're trapped in an absurdist play.
You're not doing this for the ones who don't care, you're doing it for those who do (or will, once they see it laid out one more time).
Shifting mainstream opinion is hard and slow. sometimes so slow that it feels like nothing changes at all. but just a few years back: car crash dummies now include female bodies, research now includes more and more female subject, "shrink it and pink it" is at least getting called out.
it's not enough or fast, but the direction is correct.
As unfair as it is, it is unrealistic to expect people to change their minds spontaneously. most humans don't work this way. contradictions have to stare us in the face before we'll consider updating our beliefs.
So, just repeat and explains, ad nauseam.
Universal design should make things more accessible for everyone, not for the "average man."
I wholeheartedly agree.
But here are a bunch of things people can read. I've even summarized and pulled links out of it to click more easily than having to click into two articles.
Thank you, I'll personally read all of them over next week, so at least one person will and it wasn't completely for nothing.
I understand all of this. That's why I did it despite being frustrated that unless I perform all of my labor, people will just argue that I'm not experiencing the thing being described. (And they...
You're not doing this for the ones who don't care, you're doing it for those who do (or will, once they see it laid out one more time).
Shifting mainstream opinion is hard and slow. sometimes so slow that it feels like nothing changes at all. but just a few years back: car crash dummies now include female bodies, research now includes more and more female subject, "shrink it and pink it" is at least getting called out.
it's not enough or fast, but the direction is correct.
As unfair as it is, it is unrealistic to expect people to change their minds spontaneously. most humans don't work this way. contradictions have to stare us in the face before we'll consider updating our beliefs.
So, just repeat and explains, ad nauseam.
I understand all of this. That's why I did it despite being frustrated that unless I perform all of my labor, people will just argue that I'm not experiencing the thing being described. (And they still will!)
I really would prefer not to have this explained to me again and again. I find it patronizing.
I’m sorry that landed as patronizing. That wasn’t my intent, but intent doesn’t change how it reads. I do appreciate the links and the labor you put in.
I’m sorry that landed as patronizing.
That wasn’t my intent, but intent doesn’t change how it reads.
I do appreciate the links and the labor you put in.
So on the one hand I didn’t know I hadn’t unsubscribed from life women when I posted all this. I’m aware of the rough idea of the tags from such groups and I get it. I remove these spaces because...
So on the one hand I didn’t know I hadn’t unsubscribed from life women when I posted all this. I’m aware of the rough idea of the tags from such groups and I get it. I remove these spaces because I don’t think my method of communication helps that much and don’t want to cause trouble, and I assumed this was in somewhere else. That’s on me. I’ve fixed it.
On the other hand though, I find it wildly hypocritical that I can get personal attacks and snide passive aggressive comments here for simply agreeing things could be better but maybe we shouldn’t just ignore physics and safety standards.
I took time to explain why I felt the examples given were bad, now I’m just performance art or someone who won’t read the data and never will and never understood.
No actual response to anything I’ve said. I have read the data. I do care about it. I have met people who work on some of this stuff professionally but hey fuck me right? Must be a dog whistle or a sea lion or a misogynist or whatever because I’ve taken the time to try and understand some of these root causes and think if you want change you should actually address why you think it’s more than just those.
I'd like to politely point out that this is ~life.women. Regardless of whatever was said in the comments, it's generally considered poor form to show up to a space like this and say, "Hey, I'm a...
I'd like to politely point out that this is ~life.women. Regardless of whatever was said in the comments, it's generally considered poor form to show up to a space like this and say, "Hey, I'm a man, here's why you're wrong."
Is this really the purpose of tags? I always though they were just there to categorise the topic and filter (edit: also mods sometime change the tags after creation), not to create some kind of...
Is this really the purpose of tags? I always though they were just there to categorise the topic and filter (edit: also mods sometime change the tags after creation), not to create some kind of safe space free from any conflicting views, or reserved for some demographics...
It's not like a subreddit with dedicated mods and everything.
I don't see many people restraining from posting strong anti AI sentiment in ~tech.
I don't really want to engage with this conversation, and admittedly, didn't read most of it, just showed up on my feed and thought I'd respond to your question. They are. This isn't reddit.
I don't really want to engage with this conversation, and admittedly, didn't read most of it, just showed up on my feed and thought I'd respond to your question.
Is this really the purpose of tags? I always though they were just there to categorise the topic and filter
I can't find anything in the site documentation one way or the other. Has Deimos started the intent? Saying "this isn't reddit" seems to argue that discussion should be open to all. In any case,...
I can't find anything in the site documentation one way or the other. Has Deimos started the intent? Saying "this isn't reddit" seems to argue that discussion should be open to all.
In any case, discussions get filed away by certain empowered users according to category. I suppose you could make anti posts in ~tildes or ~talk once the original post was made. But if someone posted this article because they wanted to discuss how incorrect it was, it would still probably end up in ~life.women.
Plus, almost everyone is subscribed to almost every group. I highly doubt that the vast majority of users even check which group something is posted to. It's not like a post about how the transportation industry affects the environment could only talk about either ~enviro issues or~transport issues.
It's a fundamental flaw design choice that comes with this style of website. Reddit comes with echo chambers enforced by subreddits; Tildes comes with the entire website's user base having an easy view and ability to respond to everything.
To be honest, I don't know. There have been a lot of discussions about this over the years, and while I personally can't recall any specific established rule, I think the overall attitude and vibe...
To be honest, I don't know. There have been a lot of discussions about this over the years, and while I personally can't recall any specific established rule, I think the overall attitude and vibe leans in that direction when it comes to ~life.women.
We don't see a lot of activity in this subgroup, but we do in ~lgbt, and I would confidently say that ~lgbt isn't a place for cis/straight people to show up and debate whatever topic is posted there. Technically, this entire site is a safe space, but I would consider identity-based groups as...I don't know, extra safe. When it comes to those groups, I think of it less as a classification for organizing posts, and more of a way to frame the article and discussion in a way that centers people whose voices are typically underrepresented here.
This article could've been posted in ~design, and if it was, then the design aspect of it would come first. But it wasn't posted there, it was posted in the group about women.
Edit: I think this comment from a meta post about this group sums it up. However, there more opinions in that post that are just as valid and worth reading.
His original argument was that by accommodating women things that he, as a large man, uses comfortably now would become uncomfortable for him to use. Thats like the basic bad argument for...
His original argument was that by accommodating women things that he, as a large man, uses comfortably now would become uncomfortable for him to use.
Thats like the basic bad argument for accommodating anyone with anything and minorities and disabled people everywhere have been hearing it their whole lives.
It’s an obvious bad faith argument that we can pick out cause we’ve heard it so many times. It wasn’t “just an objection” it’s an insult, and I was being nice by telling him that at first instead of being offended, but then he doubled down on it and now the whole platform is offended.
No. Smartphones was allegedly a "consumer choice." The sizes of cellphones from between 1996 and 2015 were perfectly reasonable. It's the 'large flat glass slab' war that phones got overly...
No. Smartphones was allegedly a "consumer choice."
The sizes of cellphones from between 1996 and 2015 were perfectly reasonable. It's the 'large flat glass slab' war that phones got overly gigantic. I have giant hands and it's still uncomfortable for me to use any cellphone larger than the Pixel 3.
If you halved the size of a bag of mulch/dirt, you'd more than double the plastic waste. I already practically fill a week's trash can doing the front garden....that's why I usually just order by the truckload.
And when it comes to power tools...it's much easier for a small person to grip a large tool than a large person to grip a tiny tool. If my cordless drill was 1/3 smaller, I'd have to stick my pinky out. Tolerable for a drill, less so for a saw.
Just thinking through the problem -- if a variety of hand sizes were the norm, wouldn't we wind up with grip adapters, or interchangeable grips? It would definitely impact the tool's design and...
[...] than a large person to grip a tiny tool.
Just thinking through the problem -- if a variety of hand sizes were the norm, wouldn't we wind up with grip adapters, or interchangeable grips? It would definitely impact the tool's design and weighting, but it doesn't seem like a hard impossibility, just a design challenge.
Even accepting that this could increase costs, it's the sort of thing that I'd hope that society would happily eat the price of, e.g. by mandating it at the federal level and providing incentives to encourage faster uptake (same as any other accessibility standard).
We end up with multi-size tools but then they're more expensive because each requires dedicated tooling to manufacturer. It's one possible reason "women's tools" are more expensive.
We end up with multi-size tools but then they're more expensive because each requires dedicated tooling to manufacturer. It's one possible reason "women's tools" are more expensive.
Raising my hand right here I dont mind if womens tools are more expensive thats fine I get im a minority user in a capitalist society I just want it to exist at all
Raising my hand right here I dont mind if womens tools are more expensive thats fine I get im a minority user in a capitalist society I just want it to exist at all
I would also note that the DeWalt LiPo batteries are extremely light, that the Milwaukee M12 line tends to be smaller than most, and that Japanese import tools are a fair bit slimmer. I like...
I would also note that the DeWalt LiPo batteries are extremely light, that the Milwaukee M12 line tends to be smaller than most, and that Japanese import tools are a fair bit slimmer. I like Ridgid's subcompact drill/driver, too.
Also, sidebar, but this totally underlines why affordances are good for everyone: lighter tools lower fatigue. People who need to work over their head frequently apparently love the newer, lighter tech in power tools.
Mmhm. That's similar to what snake_case said three posts ago in this thread (this whole discussion is huge, so it's probably gotten lost in the fray). My personal ideology is to buy once/cry once...
Mmhm. That's similar to what snake_case said three posts ago in this thread (this whole discussion is huge, so it's probably gotten lost in the fray).
My personal ideology is to buy once/cry once for equipment that can harm me severely, and having already suffered a few RSI-adjacent injuries, the investment seems wise. I pinch pennies on basically everything else in my life though.
I'm speaking to why big and bulky are the default for most home power tools. The default is "cheap" which usually means not optimizing for size and weight.
I'm speaking to why big and bulky are the default for most home power tools. The default is "cheap" which usually means not optimizing for size and weight.
Perhaps! Sorry, I was going to do a bunch of searching for sources, but I kinda crashed this afternoon and needed to take a break. I guess what I had in mind, moreso, would be modular tooling?...
Perhaps! Sorry, I was going to do a bunch of searching for sources, but I kinda crashed this afternoon and needed to take a break.
I guess what I had in mind, moreso, would be modular tooling? Either on the user side -- as in, you can easily snap on a new, appropriately sized handle -- or on the manufacturing side, whereby the majority of the tool is identical except for a mating section which would bolt in to a differently sized handle.
Tools like the hedge trimmers we're discussing are more challenging, since weight distribution is more of a problem, but you can still get creative with flex drives (such as the articulated/flexible drill extensions) and/or battery extenders to move motors/batteries closer to the user's centre of mass. Although it still would weigh the same overall, carrying the weight on your hips is dramatically easier for the average person, regardless of physical build.
It really does just come down to rethinking design. It's possible there will be some things that just cannot be designed "better" or are prohibitive in cost or materials at least for now. But new...
It really does just come down to rethinking design. It's possible there will be some things that just cannot be designed "better" or are prohibitive in cost or materials at least for now. But new materials get created and new ideas occur to us.
The problem lies when no one (the predominant majority in the room) even thinks there is a problem and there aren't women (and disabled people and POC, etc.) in the spaces where the conversations are happening to say "hey, that grip is uncomfortable," "that product doesn't work well on my hair type," "a hinge here lets people in chairs use it better" etc. and then you need people not to dismiss those ideas because they're foreign to them. You need teams and bosses to listen to your ideas.
I mean, that's almost expected given you are (at least in the United States) top 2% of men's heights. That's the upper extreme - not really comparable to furniture not fitting an average height...
I mean, that's almost expected given you are (at least in the United States) top 2% of men's heights. That's the upper extreme - not really comparable to furniture not fitting an average height (5'3 or 5'4) woman.
For shortness, that's the equivalent of a woman being under 5 feet tall - and once you consider that children exist, being under 5 feet is probably even more common.
You don't even have to be that tall, I'm 5'11 and still find things that don't quite work. For example I find most bathroom shower heads and mirrors are placed overly low, and rolling...
You don't even have to be that tall, I'm 5'11 and still find things that don't quite work. For example I find most bathroom shower heads and mirrors are placed overly low, and rolling luggage/toolboxes are almost universally made with handles too short to walk normally. Plenty of tables and chairs are set too low, and a lot of cars are made with a driving position that is meant for someone with shorter legs (or longer arms I guess) so I too have to compromise on comfort.
That's not even getting started on things which are made for right handed people and are various degrees of awkward to use as a left handed person...
Amen brother. I hit my head on everything and I have serious back problems. I get really annoyed by the people that are always like "must be nice to be so tall". It's okay.
Amen brother. I hit my head on everything and I have serious back problems. I get really annoyed by the people that are always like "must be nice to be so tall". It's okay.
There should never be a person coming into ~life.women and then telling women that their experiences aren't valid because men sometimes have a slightly hard time too about things.
Exemplary
There should never be a person coming into ~life.women and then telling women that their experiences aren't valid because men sometimes have a slightly hard time too about things.
Haha yeah like I’m sure its not on purpose at this point, its just that men still design most of our things and their view of whats reasonable comes from their own experience and thats just how...
Haha yeah like I’m sure its not on purpose at this point, its just that men still design most of our things and their view of whats reasonable comes from their own experience and thats just how humans work.
Woman are totally justified in complaining about this reality even if the men don’t do it on purpose.
I think that car safety tests may be starting to include women sized mannequins, so progress.
The thing that really bothers me is researchers purposely excluding women in medical studies cause it’s inconvenient to include that data. That shit is so unethical.
The rationale for excluding women from medical (or at least for drugs) studies was that they might get pregnant, and suddenly you'd be doing research on developmentally fragile pre-humans, too....
The rationale for excluding women from medical (or at least for drugs) studies was that they might get pregnant, and suddenly you'd be doing research on developmentally fragile pre-humans, too.
Which is just as infuriating an assumption in its own right, and scientifically indefensible because things that affect embryos and fetuses have been shown to damage adults as well.
And pregnant women need medicine too! Else when we are on lifesaving meds, including mental health meds, we will not get pregnant or terminate a pregnancy. Which upset some people unduly.
And pregnant women need medicine too! Else when we are on lifesaving meds, including mental health meds, we will not get pregnant or terminate a pregnancy. Which upset some people unduly.
Yes/no....but like benadryl is deadly while breastfeeding. Huge liability exposure, especially in early trials. I'd say excluding pregnant people from initial studies is reasonable.... but not...
Yes/no....but like benadryl is deadly while breastfeeding. Huge liability exposure, especially in early trials.
I'd say excluding pregnant people from initial studies is reasonable.... but not women as a whole.
as a 6'2", broad shouldered and long-legged, male I don't fit in airplane seats, driving position in cars is a toss up, I can't get my legs under tables, hit my head on things that are the "right"...
as a 6'2", broad shouldered and long-legged, male I don't fit in airplane seats, driving position in cars is a toss up, I can't get my legs under tables, hit my head on things that are the "right" high for other people.
I know where the author is coming from, but it really feels like a less of a "women" issue (don't get me wrong, there are a lot of those in the world) but an issue of everything being designed for the "average person".
There are lots of jobs around the house and in the garden where I trade off with my partner; she does the stuff that is low down, or demands small hands or getting in small spaces and I do the high-up stuff and high torque/strength things.
Women do not fit in cars and are forced to sit hazardously close to the steering wheel in order to operate a car.
A frustrating amount of cars, Italian ones being some of the worst, seem to assume short legs and long arms (from my perspective). I assume there are some people that fit comfortably, getting an ideal driving position in many European cars just isn't going to happen if you are too tall or too short. I looked at buying a (used) first generation Porsche Boxster many years ago, my partner was all for it but I had to point out I my head touched the roof when closed and my shoulder was pressed hard against the door.
I kind of wonder if the average height would drop if it wasn't just "man" and then things would be even worse for us talls. Not that perhaps we shouldn't, but as another tall man that frequently...
I kind of wonder if the average height would drop if it wasn't just "man" and then things would be even worse for us talls.
Not that perhaps we shouldn't, but as another tall man that frequently bangs his head on things, can't fit into airplane seats, etc, I'm curious what that would look like.
Average male height is 68.9 inches (~5' 8.9") and average female height is 63.5 inches (~5' 3.5") so in the middle, it'd be roughly 66.2 inches (~5' 6.2"). Source for male/female heights But I...
Average male height is 68.9 inches (~5' 8.9") and average female height is 63.5 inches (~5' 3.5") so in the middle, it'd be roughly 66.2 inches (~5' 6.2"). Source for male/female heights
But I wonder if the average white male's height is significantly higher than non-white males. Perhaps the default design caters to the average white male's height and not just all males?
I mean, the default in places where it's mostly white people. As many (relatively tall) white people who have gone to Japan realize, other countries do not build things to fit the height standards...
Perhaps the default design caters to the average white male's height and not just all males?
I mean, the default in places where it's mostly white people.
As many (relatively tall) white people who have gone to Japan realize, other countries do not build things to fit the height standards of white people.
I'm 5'8, and I feel like the world is pretty much designed for me. Yeah, there are some high shelves I can't reach, and there are some tight places I can't squeeze into, but it's rare. I've been...
I'm 5'8, and I feel like the world is pretty much designed for me. Yeah, there are some high shelves I can't reach, and there are some tight places I can't squeeze into, but it's rare.
I've been in relationships with very short women who need my help reaching everything, and most of my friends are very tall men who hit their head on stuff constantly, can't fit into the back of cars, and just generally knock things over.
I think that's unfortunate, but it's a natural tendency to design around the average instead of the extremes.
I don’t think it would be an issue, the pressure to make tight spaces as small as they can get away with would stay the same, since the proportion of tall people is still the same. It’s like how...
I don’t think it would be an issue, the pressure to make tight spaces as small as they can get away with would stay the same, since the proportion of tall people is still the same.
It’s like how making things accessible for disabled people didn’t ruin any building architecture or any fun experience for anyone else, it just allowed more people to engage in spaces that were previously limited.
Being more inclusive doesn’t exclude the people who were already included.
Your height, in the United States, is at the 96th percentile. The chairs in my work building leave my feet dangling and I am around the 30th percentile for a woman. These things are not the same.
Your height, in the United States, is at the 96th percentile. The chairs in my work building leave my feet dangling and I am around the 30th percentile for a woman. These things are not the same.
The correct answer for seatbelts is 5-point harnesses like we use in baby seats. But short of mandatory legislation it'll never happen. They don't want cafeteria chairs to be comfortable. They...
The correct answer for seatbelts is 5-point harnesses like we use in baby seats. But short of mandatory legislation it'll never happen.
They don't want cafeteria chairs to be comfortable. They want you to take shorter lunch breaks.
I'm a woman who is 5'10". Front seat seatbelts are ok for me in a car I fit into if I lower the adjuster all the way. Back seat seatbelts don't usually have that so they ride up and cut my neck. I...
I'm a woman who is 5'10". Front seat seatbelts are ok for me in a car I fit into if I lower the adjuster all the way. Back seat seatbelts don't usually have that so they ride up and cut my neck. I can fix this temporarily by holding it loose with a clothespin, but I can't leave it that way or the seatbelt will end up hanging out the door.
I don't think it's a height thing, I think it's a body shape thing. I imagine it's worse while pregnant.
For me it's the "having large breasts" part that makes every seatbelt slide up and try to choke me. The height makes that worse , if I were taller the curve wouldn't hit the belt in the same spot.
For me it's the "having large breasts" part that makes every seatbelt slide up and try to choke me. The height makes that worse , if I were taller the curve wouldn't hit the belt in the same spot.
Gosh that sucks I’m so sorry. Thats so freaking dangerous in a wreck. A hard enough impact could tear your jugular, destroy your wind pipe, I had to make an airway for a lady in that situation a...
Gosh that sucks I’m so sorry. Thats so freaking dangerous in a wreck. A hard enough impact could tear your jugular, destroy your wind pipe, I had to make an airway for a lady in that situation a lifetime ago and I’m sure shes permanently damaged but, alive at least. Such a shit situation.
Well that's only mildly terrifying. But yeah I spend a lot of time trying to adjust it back down. My primary vehicle is probably the best right now on the ones I've had, but I do need to get an...
Well that's only mildly terrifying. But yeah I spend a lot of time trying to adjust it back down. My primary vehicle is probably the best right now on the ones I've had, but I do need to get an adjuster thing... clip ...something.
I also had to get an extender for the wheelchair van seat belt because of how the modifications change how the seat well sits (both front passenger and driver captains seats are removable and the floor is lowered I think. I'm not sure how they do it.) But it works better to have an extender on the seat belt and be able to sit closer to the steering wheel.
At 5'4 I am the pinnacle of my maternal family's female evolution in height. My 4'10 Nonna had a hell of a time, especially in the cars available when she was driving/alive.
These seatbelt adjusters should be included in car accessories when you buy a bar. These things should just be everywhere, gas stations, grocery stores, you name it, as ubiquitous as a tire...
These seatbelt adjusters should be included in car accessories when you buy a bar.
These things should just be everywhere, gas stations, grocery stores, you name it, as ubiquitous as a tire pressure checker. They’re so easy and cheap to make its just a triangle piece of fabric. Totally ridiculous that such a simple piece of required safety equipment is so rare.
And when they do make them available they're often for kids (or were) and are like stuffed animal adjacent! It's just one more thing to adjust. Like the extender and, and, and.
And when they do make them available they're often for kids (or were) and are like stuffed animal adjacent!
It's just one more thing to adjust. Like the extender and, and, and.
IIRC it's a serious issue with pianos as well. Before puberty, men and women perform about equally; afterwards, men have a significant advantage, because the standard piano keyboard size was...
IIRC it's a serious issue with pianos as well. Before puberty, men and women perform about equally; afterwards, men have a significant advantage, because the standard piano keyboard size was designed for men.
Ironically, the family came to me from like age 10 til I moved out to open jars, because I played piano and I had hand muscles. My dad had meaty hands and we were about on par. He also taught me...
Ironically, the family came to me from like age 10 til I moved out to open jars, because I played piano and I had hand muscles. My dad had meaty hands and we were about on par. He also taught me that metal lids opened easier when you run them under hot water (as his engineering, and later my experience understood).
Also I never had any issues playing piano, and could reach some of Chopin's 13ths on a good day. I've been 5'9 (175cm) since age 14 and actively played until 16.
What I'd like to discuss is acceptable office temperatures though...
I played piano for over 10 years, but being a skilled pianist doesn't magically make you better at opening jars, and no amount of practice is going to make my hands physically larger. I probably...
I played piano for over 10 years, but being a skilled pianist doesn't magically make you better at opening jars, and no amount of practice is going to make my hands physically larger. I probably have to do all the same work and flexibility you use to reach a 13th in order to reach a 9th or 10th. Granted, I have particularly tiny hands even compared to most women, but still. I think it's faulty to attribute everything to practice or skill when the causation can often be in the opposite direction.
That's what I'm saying though, I just had the body feature for opening things easier coupled with the strength from playing piano. I don't feel that it's because I'm a woman though, which is where...
and no amount of practice is going to make my hands physically larger.
That's what I'm saying though, I just had the body feature for opening things easier coupled with the strength from playing piano. I don't feel that it's because I'm a woman though, which is where my issue with the topic lies.
I completely agree that many things should be reconsidered in their designs to make them more accessible, but not because I'm a woman.
Ultimately I think when it comes to women specifically, it's simply differences in where the bell curve on a particular feature falls compared to men and who a particular feature is designed for....
Ultimately I think when it comes to women specifically, it's simply differences in where the bell curve on a particular feature falls compared to men and who a particular feature is designed for. There's plenty of variation in hand sizes independent of gender, with plenty of overlap in the bell curves, but presumably the peak of the curve for women is at a smaller size than the peak of the curve for men.
Yes, statistically speaking: stereotypes exist for a reason. But I'd rather see things addressed at the statistics level instead of for the stereotypes.
Yes, statistically speaking: stereotypes exist for a reason.
But I'd rather see things addressed at the statistics level instead of for the stereotypes.
Not who you replied to but medical gloves actually fit me so weird, I have tiny hands but long fingers so every glove basically puts webbing between my fingers. I had to learn to just be used to it
Not who you replied to but medical gloves actually fit me so weird, I have tiny hands but long fingers so every glove basically puts webbing between my fingers. I had to learn to just be used to it
My wife is 5'3" and I am 6'3". One day she stood on a stepstool and we were eye level in the kitchen. "Oh god this is terrifying! The counter is so far away, how can you possibility use a knife!...
My wife is 5'3" and I am 6'3". One day she stood on a stepstool and we were eye level in the kitchen.
"Oh god this is terrifying! The counter is so far away, how can you possibility use a knife! No wonder you can never find anything!"
The reality is high shelves exist because otherwise it's a wasteful void. You accommodate the largest feet on stairs because a small person (like a child) having to cope with deep stairs is safer than a person with larger feet using tiptoes.
Spoons...that's a shop around problem. I have a really big mouth and I rarely ever use any spoon other than the teaspoon. The full-size spoon is approximately large enough to use as a weapon.
Relatedly, I rather like this instagram account of a woman in the trades who talks about this sort of stuff! So on top of everything else, this also discourages women out of pursuing entire career...
Relatedly, I rather like this instagram account of a woman in the trades who talks about this sort of stuff! So on top of everything else, this also discourages women out of pursuing entire career paths.
I was really sad one day in the hardware store browsing all of the powered hedging tools picking up one after another and there wasn’t a single one I could use comfortably. I have to cut my bushes...
I was really sad one day in the hardware store browsing all of the powered hedging tools picking up one after another and there wasn’t a single one I could use comfortably.
I have to cut my bushes manually with old fashioned scissor style hedge trimmers dude. It takes weeks to get through it. But operating one of the powered ones would be unsafe.
I have a corded electric one, much lighter than either the gas or battery versions. Downside is that I have accidentally snipped the cable a few times.
I have a corded electric one, much lighter than either the gas or battery versions.
Downside is that I have accidentally snipped the cable a few times.
I’ll look harder, I really only went to my local hardware store and then their website and gave up. I just figured if they existed they’d be carried at fkn Lowes.
I’ll look harder, I really only went to my local hardware store and then their website and gave up. I just figured if they existed they’d be carried at fkn Lowes.
They will be, but they're expensive. Corded tools require heavy-duty electrical cables to use safely, and those suckers cost a pretty penny. There's an old stereotype about lesbians and home...
They will be, but they're expensive. Corded tools require heavy-duty electrical cables to use safely, and those suckers cost a pretty penny.
There's an old stereotype about lesbians and home improvement stores, so they definitely carry stuff that works for women!
Black and decker, $50. 3.9 lb. The lack of battery really drops the cost. Being able to share the cable with other tools helps. 15 or lower gauge extension cord should do fine, can find those for...
When I was 7 months pregnant I could not drive, because I had to have the seat so far back I could not reach the pedals. It wasn't just hazardously close to the steering wheel, it was physically...
When I was 7 months pregnant I could not drive, because I had to have the seat so far back I could not reach the pedals. It wasn't just hazardously close to the steering wheel, it was physically impossible.
Jars and things that require strength I get and agree with, but I don't really know what you mean for the rest. As a guy who's 5'3", shelves, stairs, chairs, tables, etc. have not really been a...
Jars and things that require strength I get and agree with, but I don't really know what you mean for the rest. As a guy who's 5'3", shelves, stairs, chairs, tables, etc. have not really been a problem in my experience. Sure every now and then there's an outlier, but not on average.
Another short guy! I'm 5'4". The place where I've noticed tables and chairs being a problem is restaurants. Not so much my legs dangling when sitting down, but like the table or bar-top being too...
Another short guy! I'm 5'4". The place where I've noticed tables and chairs being a problem is restaurants. Not so much my legs dangling when sitting down, but like the table or bar-top being too high. It's not every restaurant. But it's just common enough that I (and my other short family members) notice it.
But everywhere else, like in the office or at home, yeah not a problem.
I think this can also vary a lot between homes. I can reach the lower two shelves of the three-shelf cabinets with ease here at my parents' home, and get stuff from the third shelf if I'm on my...
I think this can also vary a lot between homes. I can reach the lower two shelves of the three-shelf cabinets with ease here at my parents' home, and get stuff from the third shelf if I'm on my tiptoes. But in my apartment in Germany I was basically stuck only using the lowest shelf of my cabinets because they were hung so high. I similarly struggled with hand-holds on public transit when I lived in Germany, so this may be something that's just worse there because their average heights are taller? But it did genuinely hurt my quality of life a lot.
Ohh that's a good point about the handholds on trains and such. In some cities, they used like straps/loops that hang down. And those usually are just within reach for me. It's uncomfortable, but...
Ohh that's a good point about the handholds on trains and such. In some cities, they used like straps/loops that hang down. And those usually are just within reach for me. It's uncomfortable, but I can use them if I can't grab a handhold on the back of a seat or a pole. Which is rare, all things considered.
But here in DC, in some of the older train cars, the handholds retract upwards. So I'd have to jump up like a child, or stand on the seats to grab one. Which, no, not doing that. And even then, pretty sure I'd be swinging from it like I'm on a jungle gym, lol...
I'm going to Japan later this year. I wonder if their public transit is built more for shorter Asians, such as myself.
At home, in my apartment, I ended up getting a step ladder. My experience is like you at your parents house, so I really only use it for that highest shelf or two. But I could see that being really annoying if you had to constantly use a stepladder or step stool for even the lowest ones every time. Or just not using the space you're paying for at all.
Yeah, I think issues on public transit are particularly egregious examples of this because plenty of shorter people and children ride public transit and it can be extremely difficult to safely...
Yeah, I think issues on public transit are particularly egregious examples of this because plenty of shorter people and children ride public transit and it can be extremely difficult to safely support oneself if handholds are too high. But given the relatively affluent, US-based population here and at the focus of the article, I understand why that hasn't been a centerpiece of the conversation.
I got a stepstool at my previous apartment, but when the cabinets are hung high enough that this is a regular issue, it's pretty exhausting to have to pull it out so frequently and thus I mostly just avoided storing anything I used frequently in those cabinets. This cost me money in buying separate shelves to add to my kitchen storage in addition to more abstract costs like "I never use my blender because I have to dig out a stepstool to even get it out" type things.
Ceiling-based handholds are limited because you ideally need them to be high enough that taller people won’t constantly hit their heads, and low enough that shorter people can use them. If they...
Ceiling-based handholds are limited because you ideally need them to be high enough that taller people won’t constantly hit their heads, and low enough that shorter people can use them. If they obstruct the space too much for taller people, then their primary advantage over more generally useful and inclusive handholds, like poles, is lost.
This is likely why more modern transport often seems to make less use of them. I expect the intention is that taller people will use the handholds, while everyone else will use rails and poles. That requires that there are sufficient numbers of poles, of course, but I expect that is the better option than lowering ceiling handholds.
For jars, there is a trick! If you put your hands together with fingers intertwined (kinda sorta like for praying or imploring), you can then place the jar lid between your palms with the edge of...
about jars
For jars, there is a trick! If you put your hands together with fingers intertwined (kinda sorta like for praying or imploring), you can then place the jar lid between your palms with the edge of the lid at the base of your palms. More or less in the prolongation of your arm bone (don’t know the name of it).
Then you look at the lid, it has little indentations that grab onto the glass thread. Rotate the jar so that the area of the lid with one of these indentations is where your palms contact the lid (if you line it up on one palm it will also match one on the other palm)
And now, press the sides of the lid with your palms, getting leverage from your intertwined fingers.
This usually gets enough force to slightly bend the lid and break the airtight seal. you’ll hear a little phhht as outside air enters the jar. The contents are no longer under negative pressure and pulling the lid down, which makes the lid is much easier to open. Works every time. Gets a bit of practice to understand the orientation but once you get it it’s pretty reliable. Works best with larger jars.
Or you can get tools to help, like these triangles with a rubber side that also give leverage.
I have these little rubber grip things I use but Ive got carpal tunnel in my right wrist and I recently broke my left one so its been a struggle, been wondering how people with no arms operate.
I have these little rubber grip things I use but Ive got carpal tunnel in my right wrist and I recently broke my left one so its been a struggle, been wondering how people with no arms operate.
The exemplary label is very (ab)usable, but thankfully it doesn't stick so giving it out like candy under a post like this isn't that damaging. It definitely loses its intended meaning for the...
The exemplary label is very (ab)usable, but thankfully it doesn't stick so giving it out like candy under a post like this isn't that damaging. It definitely loses its intended meaning for the entire post though.
Maybe there should be a way to remove an exemplary label if enough people find it "unexemplary"?
To be honest I just don't think there's any reason at all to have a public "Exemplary" label. This thread is an absolute highlight in how it is used the same way downvotes were used on reddit - to...
Exemplary
To be honest I just don't think there's any reason at all to have a public "Exemplary" label. This thread is an absolute highlight in how it is used the same way downvotes were used on reddit - to push visibility of agreed with opinions. I've also seen some users publicly state they will just use it because, well, they thought it is exemplary to state a particular type of opinion. And unsurprisingly it usually gets Exemplary status. I don't know how many users exactly operate that way, but this just seems counter to its intended purpose.
For that reason I think it would be better to have it just be a private notification for the poster and nothing else.
It's nice as a "thank you" for amazing responses in the less controversial areas of the site. Maybe a "controversial" or "emotional topic" tag could be applied to certain threads that requires 2...
It's nice as a "thank you" for amazing responses in the less controversial areas of the site.
Maybe a "controversial" or "emotional topic" tag could be applied to certain threads that requires 2 exemplary tags for it to actually apply, or something.
Not a terrible idea on the surface, but I feel like that would take things from bad to worse. As you point out the exemplary label is already being used to mean something more like "I agree with...
Maybe there should be a way to remove an exemplary label if enough people find it "unexemplary"?
Not a terrible idea on the surface, but I feel like that would take things from bad to worse. As you point out the exemplary label is already being used to mean something more like "I agree with you" instead of "good post", but that's not as bad as the community being able to dictate what's acceptable and what's not.
imo it's absolutely not you that performed the ruffling. I swear, if there were a post titled "women should not be able to open things", it'd have less controversy.
imo it's absolutely not you that performed the ruffling. I swear, if there were a post titled "women should not be able to open things", it'd have less controversy.
This article highlights the difference in grip strength between men and women, and it points out that many containers require an inordinate amount of force to open. Considering half the population...
This article highlights the difference in grip strength between men and women, and it points out that many containers require an inordinate amount of force to open. Considering half the population are women, maybe businesses should be more receptive to their needs and design easier to open containers. It would be an accessibility win and provide an overall better experience for everyone.
The comments on that post made me realize how absurd it is that you might need to pull off some special trick just to open a container. I've experienced containers that just feel clunky to open and it's always a slight point of frustration against that company.
Have you experienced any points of frustration when opening something?
When I transed my gender I was shocked by how quickly I lost the ability to open containers. I knew the medicine makes trans women lose a lot of muscle but I didn't expect it to really affect my...
When I transed my gender I was shocked by how quickly I lost the ability to open containers. I knew the medicine makes trans women lose a lot of muscle but I didn't expect it to really affect my daily life like that. Had to learn all the alternative methods for jars, and in general add exercise to my routine so that I wouldn't lose my ability to, like, carry a jug of milk for a few blocks.
Oh my god, me too, this just became an issue in my house. I can't open the pickles for my partner any more, we had to wait for a guest to come by and open up a jar before. I've even started to...
Oh my god, me too, this just became an issue in my house. I can't open the pickles for my partner any more, we had to wait for a guest to come by and open up a jar before.
I've even started to struggle with Gatorades as the article refers to, they hurt my hands now, in part bc they're softer as well.
I found our rubber grippies for helping with jars, but I should get into our home gym.
As a woman that exercises occasionally, it fixes a lot of problems! Lots of exercise equipment has knurling that toughens your hands too (the knurling is to prevent slippage).
As a woman that exercises occasionally, it fixes a lot of problems! Lots of exercise equipment has knurling that toughens your hands too (the knurling is to prevent slippage).
Pickles are easy, stick a butter knife in between the jar and lid where the seam is and put slight pressure on it by lifting the bottom of the knife up laterally. This releases the seal and it’s...
Pickles are easy, stick a butter knife in between the jar and lid where the seam is and put slight pressure on it by lifting the bottom of the knife up laterally.
This releases the seal and it’s very easy to open after. The lid will still function as intended.
Oh! 100% yes, and on top of a gender-thing it's also an accessibility-thing -- once you get older (or injure a thumb), it becomes infinitely harder to take care of yourself. I learned about these...
Have you experienced any points of frustration when opening something?
Oh! 100% yes, and on top of a gender-thing it's also an accessibility-thing -- once you get older (or injure a thumb), it becomes infinitely harder to take care of yourself.
I learned about these adjustable jar openers the other day, though, which seem way better than the standard set of tricks (I tend to rotate through tapping with a spoon, hot water, and using a dish towel; eventually it comes off and I haven't had one explode in my hands yet 😅). Admittedly I'm the type to carry a mini-multitool with a pair of pliers for tearing into other types of packaging which require too much pinch/grip strength, so this might only be an outlier opinion.
(re. redesigning packaging so that it's easier to open -- I expect that there are probably a fair number of ways to do this that the commentors didn't discuss, such as forming extensions/flats on the lids in order to provide physical purchase on it for turning (example). Ultimately the tightness is (probably?) a food safety/package integrity issue, so giving better mechanical leverage somehow sounds like a safer idea)
On a new jar, you've got to maintain a vacuum seal or it's useless. Making it easy to break that seal makes it easier to accidentally break it. We just need to go back to old mason jars. Once the...
On a new jar, you've got to maintain a vacuum seal or it's useless. Making it easy to break that seal makes it easier to accidentally break it.
We just need to go back to old mason jars. Once the seal is made, you can unscrew the metal ring entirely if you wish. then you pop it with leverage.
Totally reasonable take, and that was mine before I started to search for counterexamples in order to challenge my biases. I wound up finding Duerr's marmalade, which has been using easy open lids...
On a new jar, you've got to maintain a vacuum seal or it's useless. Making it easy to break that seal makes it easier to accidentally break it.
Totally reasonable take, and that was mine before I started to search for counterexamples in order to challenge my biases. I wound up finding Duerr's marmalade, which has been using easy open lids for fifteen years, and costs about the same as a typical marmalade. Presuming an efficient market, they should've pulled them off the shelf if the return rate from grocery stores was too high, so I'm going to make the inference that it's fine -- making the lid easier to open does not, in fact, cause a sufficiently large failure rate to be a problem.
We just need to go back to old mason jars. Once the seal is made, you can unscrew the metal ring entirely if you wish. then you pop it with leverage.
Oh sick, yeah, although I'd go further and say that we should use something like weck jars (as another commenter noted): they are actually reusable for canning, and they can also stack!
I really wish they were both easier to get a hold of and that the recipes in the US that are considered safe to use would include metric for usage with those jars. Given the overall jar opening...
I'd go further and say that we should use something like weck jars
I really wish they were both easier to get a hold of and that the recipes in the US that are considered safe to use would include metric for usage with those jars.
Given the overall jar opening situation, I do find it funny that overtightening the rings on Mason style jars before processing will ruin the seal. Overtightening uses a lot less torque than you'd think.
Oh absolutely. Relatedly: I veto'd the idea really quickly, since it's insanely cost prohibitive, but it would've been really cool to get a bunch of people together to fund a Weck-compatible jar...
Oh absolutely. Relatedly: I veto'd the idea really quickly, since it's insanely cost prohibitive, but it would've been really cool to get a bunch of people together to fund a Weck-compatible jar line manufactured in North America. The original company got bought out, too, so it's only a matter of time before the (presumably) leveraged buyout forces them to start dropping quality :/
I live in a rare household where my husband asks me to open things - roughly 9/10 times I can do it, but sometimes I'm tired or the lid chews up my hand skin and I just don't have the will to get...
I live in a rare household where my husband asks me to open things - roughly 9/10 times I can do it, but sometimes I'm tired or the lid chews up my hand skin and I just don't have the will to get to the end. I have relatively good grip strength (I need to use a lot of different kinds of pliers at work), but I also have several injuries that limit my arm functions - at a recent function test I think I scored "average" for a 5'6 woman. I think to some degree it's a case of technique for jars, but as mentioned above there is a general issue where seat belts, kevlar vests, life vests, and other safety items that are supposed to be form fitting are not designed for women at all - they are designed for men, and it genuinely leads to increased hazards for women, because the designers never took boobs into account. It's scary to think about and frankly unconscionable. I'm glad to hear that finally they're using female "shaped" crash test dummies, but it really should not have taken this long to get there. I do worry that my car's airbags might kill me or seriously mess me up if I get into an accident.
On the other hand, when I broke my wrist a few years ago I no longer had the manual dexterity to open jars while I was wearing a cast, and it felt very foolish to call a friend to come over and open something for me. I figured out a technique where if I placed the jar between the arches of my feet, it would hold the jar firmly and I could twist easily with my good arm. The fact that this was the necessary way for me to open thing when alone brings up a whole new set of questions, especially for people with disabilities, but for anyone out there struggling and who doesn't have a gripper pancake, the foot-anchor method may work for you? (Also put less strain on my wrists and messed up my skin less.)
They're also finally using CPR dummies with breasts to reduce the "I don't want to make her uncomfortable so I won't put the AED pads in the right spot or remove her bra." Literally saw a trend of...
They're also finally using CPR dummies with breasts to reduce the "I don't want to make her uncomfortable so I won't put the AED pads in the right spot or remove her bra." Literally saw a trend of people posting "please save my life instead of my modesty .... It's bullshit we need to post this."
I mostly solve my issues with rubber bands but we may get an under the shelf/cabinet jar opener soon. Difficulty level is finding a spot my partner can easily reach without having to elevate his chair. Just solves the problem for future disabilities too.
Yes!! This came up recently at a CPR class I was taking and I was completely horrified. My family will not throw me in the trash if a boob pops out for all to see! Please save my life before my...
Yes!! This came up recently at a CPR class I was taking and I was completely horrified. My family will not throw me in the trash if a boob pops out for all to see! Please save my life before my propriety!
Among my other extracurriculars, I'm a BLS instructor for the hospital system I work for. The AHA releases curriculum updates every five years, the 2025 AHA instructor update for BLS specifically...
They're also finally using CPR dummies with breasts to reduce the "I don't want to make her uncomfortable so I won't put the AED pads in the right spot or remove her bra." Literally saw a trend of people posting "please save my life instead of my modesty .... It's bullshit we need to post this."
Among my other extracurriculars, I'm a BLS instructor for the hospital system I work for. The AHA releases curriculum updates every five years, the 2025 AHA instructor update for BLS specifically named that instructors should call this out as behavior that needs to be corrected.
In 2011 when I worked as a medic fully seasoned medics would misplace a 12 lead on women on the regular bc you gotta lift up a boob and place 3-4-5 leads UNDER the boob on most women. The Pitt...
In 2011 when I worked as a medic fully seasoned medics would misplace a 12 lead on women on the regular bc you gotta lift up a boob and place 3-4-5 leads UNDER the boob on most women.
The Pitt just called out that behavior on its latest season THIS YEAR so I guess we’re still letting women die of heart attacks because these mfs dont wanna lift a boob.
Yeah the Pitt brought it to my attention, and caused a bunch of social media posts saying "this is dumb and I shouldn't have to say it but please don't let me die because you're a prude." It was...
Yeah the Pitt brought it to my attention, and caused a bunch of social media posts saying "this is dumb and I shouldn't have to say it but please don't let me die because you're a prude." It was similar to "just for the record I don't consent to being kept alive to incubate a fetus" you know, just in case.
I just recently had to have an EKG and the nurse put the leads on correctly, using the back of his hand to lift and place the leads where they actually went. (I don't recall if it was 12 or how many, ER for hypertension).
Oh yeah Ive never seen a nurse do it. Maybe like on their first day or something. The issue is, even back then, a seasoned medic has only been working there for like 6 mos.
Oh yeah Ive never seen a nurse do it. Maybe like on their first day or something.
The issue is, even back then, a seasoned medic has only been working there for like 6 mos.
I used to be super strict about this and call people out for not using the correct anatomical landmarks for lead placements… so much so that I actually had done repeat EKGs to see the difference...
I used to be super strict about this and call people out for not using the correct anatomical landmarks for lead placements… so much so that I actually had done repeat EKGs to see the difference it makes because I learned that it mattered..
What I found was they were exactly the same pretty much every time (and no I wasn’t just checking normal sinus rhythm, I did a good variety including nstemi, vtach, SVT, etc). Not even an increase in artifact… I still do correct placement every time for my own peace of mind but I gave up harassing my coworkers about it after that.
Part of me wonders if the technology is just better now than it used to be, I have no idea tbh.
I noticed it once or twice in women cause for some reason tombstones look really weird in women sometimes and if you don’t get leads t5/t6 right you’ll miss it This was 15 years ago though so...
I noticed it once or twice in women cause for some reason tombstones look really weird in women sometimes and if you don’t get leads t5/t6 right you’ll miss it
This was 15 years ago though so maybe you’re right
Replying from the AFAB/intersex/disabled sides here... I used to have very good grip strength, helped by having large hands for my height (5' 4", men's medium glove size). It was enough to give...
Replying from the AFAB/intersex/disabled sides here...
I used to have very good grip strength, helped by having large hands for my height (5' 4", men's medium glove size). It was enough to give right back on guys who enjoyed giving crushing handshakes. I had very little difficulty opening jars or using hand tools. I didn't really think about gendered grip differentials applying to me, even though I did engineering coursework in ergonomics.
Though I didn't know it at the time, sudden trouble opening containers was an early symptom of rheumatoid arthritis. Upper body strength was fine, but gripping anything hurt like heck. These days, I use all the assistive devices/opening tricks and pass anything really stubborn to my spouse. On a bad day, just turning a doorknob can be a problem (all due praise for ADA door handles!).
Both degenerative and inflammatory hand/wrist arthritis are more common in women by a factor of 2:1, with lifelong use of ergonomically bad designs as a contributor. Everything from jar lids to keyboard pitch to car steering wheel diameters contributes just that little extra bit of strain to daily life for a significant fraction of the population, and it adds up over time.
(Small gloves wearer!) I've always gripped bars/cylinders overhand without my thumb on the opposite side due to limited joint mobility. Conveniently/coincidentally, that's also how I learned to...
car steering wheel diameters
(Small gloves wearer!)
I've always gripped bars/cylinders overhand without my thumb on the opposite side due to limited joint mobility. Conveniently/coincidentally, that's also how I learned to grip high bars in gymnastics. For steering wheels, it's actually safer too because your thumbs won't be broken if the airbag goes off!
Definitely have struggled, and I wish more lids at LEAST had ridged grooves or something to have a better grip. I never struggle with peanut butter or water bottles. At worst I'd end up using a...
Definitely have struggled, and I wish more lids at LEAST had ridged grooves or something to have a better grip. I never struggle with peanut butter or water bottles. At worst I'd end up using a towel or my shirt to twist stubborn caps because the ridges begin digging into my palms a bit painfully (or my hand gets sweaty), but those ridges also let the fabric grip more easily. But any glass jar with a smooth metal lid is awful.
On that note, the difficulty varies by individual jar—not brand or product, but jars. My last major struggle was trying to open a jar of pasta sauce for probably five minutes, until I decided to try another unopened jar of the exact same sauce. It popped off almost instantly, no tricks needed. Just... GAH.
There is a way to avoid the impossibility of jars: use a knife. (This only works for metal lids on glass jars.) Take a (dull pointed / butter) knife and slip it up under the rim of the lid, where...
There is a way to avoid the impossibility of jars: use a knife. (This only works for metal lids on glass jars.)
Take a (dull pointed / butter) knife and slip it up under the rim of the lid, where the threading of the glass meets metal. Apply slight pressure up (like a lever) to break the vacuum seal of the lid. It will hiss on the seal is broken, then the lid will be easy.
Yeah i'm not sure how much of this is "you're dealing with physics and food safety". Pickle jars are the "trope" and that's mostly due to canning hot items pulling a vacuum. You could design the...
Yeah i'm not sure how much of this is "you're dealing with physics and food safety".
Pickle jars are the "trope" and that's mostly due to canning hot items pulling a vacuum. You could design the product to have some breakable seal, but not sure how you're going to do that without potentially causing other problems.
From the article itself:
Yes, strength required to open packaging ranges across a wide distribution, but I note that very few are impossible for anyone to open, so it seems like some effort somewhere goes into keeping them in the feasible range, and that effort does not seem to care about it being reliably feasible for people like me. I don’t imagine Bonne Maman wants to stop women getting to their jam—I imagine that nobody cares.
I'm really not sure what Bonne Maman can do to ensure a tight and shippable seal that meets all safety compliance. They aren't "Making sure some people can open it" and designing it that way. It's basically just the physics of the vacuum you're pulling when you process Jam. Processing it then transferring it to an easier to open container is not only going to WAY up the price for obvious reasons, but also nuke shelf life and a bunch of other things.
Like look if i'm wrong and some of this can be easier, go for it. The "obvious" solution to me is probably a total redesign of lids to have a leveragable handle, but then you'll see price increases. Retooling machinery and larger shipping costs being the main issue. One's an up front but you'll be able to fit fewer jars per shipment and a larger % will spoil and that's not going away (and is technically a larger carbon footprint).
Honestly it'd probably be easier to just go back to cans that REQUIRE a can opener.
... I can't believe I've been nerd sniped by jam jar lids. Well. That's a way to spend Friday evening. A cursory internet search turned up Orbit lids (requires 50% of the effort to remove vs....
... I can't believe I've been nerd sniped by jam jar lids. Well. That's a way to spend Friday evening.
A cursory internet search turned up Orbit lids (requires 50% of the effort to remove vs. regular lids), which have been used by Duerr's marmalade jars for about fifteen years. From a brief look at marmalade options at a UK grocer, I've come to the conclusion that it's some sort of orange peel jam eaten by bears. Er, rather, that Duerr's is in the middle-to-low end of the cost spectrum, thus it doesn't seem like making your lid openable by more than just burly giga chads is cost prohibitive.
Anyways. I expect that this argument was intended to generalize out of jam jar lids and into all accessibility concerns, but I can only address the argument in front of me.
It's not always canning though - it's possible the breakaway perforation on a bottle of soda could be more generous, or a bag of chips could use weaker glue.
It's not always canning though - it's possible the breakaway perforation on a bottle of soda could be more generous, or a bag of chips could use weaker glue.
Maybe? I think some of these are just tolerances and QA? Some % of the product doesn't meet spec, so you toss it. They could tighten up the spec and lower the acceptable tolerances, but you're...
Maybe?
I think some of these are just tolerances and QA? Some % of the product doesn't meet spec, so you toss it. They could tighten up the spec and lower the acceptable tolerances, but you're still looking at retooling and probably more waste as a larger % fail QA?
Again i'm not against it if it's actually easy, but like...most times I can think of a woman not being able to open a soda bottle or bag of chips...none of us could without destroying the damn thing.
Given these are usually popular brands it pretty clear these are outliers, but it kinda just gets back to it maybe being easier if you just expect your users to carry small tools. I've got a minuscule knife/screwdriver thing (2ish" i think?) on my keyring and it'll make quick work of pretty much any packaging in anyone's hands.
Weck glass jars use something like this. The rubber seal sits between the jar and the glass lid. Metal clips handle the tension to keep the lid on. You can remove them all easily without breaking...
You could design the product to have some breakable seal, but not sure how you're going to do that without potentially causing other problems.
Weck glass jars use something like this. The rubber seal sits between the jar and the glass lid. Metal clips handle the tension to keep the lid on. You can remove them all easily without breaking the vacuum seal. The gasket has a little poke out bit that you can pull pretty easily. I think the key is making it so that breaking the seal doesn’t require expanding the volume of the vacuum like with a twist off lid.
So those look like what I was roughly thinking of( lids like these ) I believe in both cases though you're looking at more parts, materials, shipping, failure. That's a guess? It could be as dumb...
So those look like what I was roughly thinking of( lids like these )
I believe in both cases though you're looking at more parts, materials, shipping, failure. That's a guess? It could be as dumb as "customers don't like blah" or "focus group said blah" and i'd buy it, but in general i'm all for society finally getting behind reusable containers anyway.
Something like "Drop off your old one for sanitization and refilling and you pick up a new one" which solves many of these issues because you can have more complex containers.
Yeah, that’s pretty similar to my weck jars. The most frustrating thing is that we used to have all the infrastructure in place to use reusable bottles. It was normal to return soda bottles to the...
Yeah, that’s pretty similar to my weck jars.
The most frustrating thing is that we used to have all the infrastructure in place to use reusable bottles. It was normal to return soda bottles to the store and they would be cleaned and reused. But cans became a thing and all of that was undone.
Yeah, I feel like this is just reality. I deliberately train grip strength, so I'm probably on the higher end of the grip strength curve, but I've also been defeated by some jars. I always thought...
Yeah, I feel like this is just reality. I deliberately train grip strength, so I'm probably on the higher end of the grip strength curve, but I've also been defeated by some jars.
I always thought the classic way was just to pry the edges of the lid away from the jar slightly with a church key or similar tool. Eventually the vacuum breaks and the lid loosens. If the threads are still too tight, you just keep prying around until it's not so tight. There are many other "life hack" tricks to loosen the lid such as tapping the lid, rubber bands, tools with longer levers etc., but this way works every time, even with manufacturing defects. Jar lids are made of a relatively soft metal compared to other common kitchen tools, after all.
I’ve seen a different jar design first in Switzerland and now sometimes on some products in Europe. Basically the ring that goes on the thread is separate from the lid. So turning the ring isn’t...
I’ve seen a different jar design first in Switzerland and now sometimes on some products in Europe.
Basically the ring that goes on the thread is separate from the lid. So turning the ring isn’t as difficult because you’re not fighting the lid friction (and negative pressure in the jar). And once the right is unscrewed enough it applies leverage to the lid as you’re turning it, helping break the seal effortlessly. It’s brilliant. I guess it’s patented and that’s why not every product uses it but I don’t really know.
It seems like a modern, slightly more convenient (the ring and lid remain attached) implementation of the same principle behind the standard Mason jar lid in the US that has likely been around and...
I guess it’s patented and that’s why not every product uses it but I don’t really know.
It seems like a modern, slightly more convenient (the ring and lid remain attached) implementation of the same principle behind the standard Mason jar lid in the US that has likely been around and quite common for over a century (I don't know the exact date, but the inventor died in 1948)?
The specific tool is just a bottle opener. Lift the edge of the lid until the air comes in and it is easy to open afterwards. This won't work for plastic caps of course, but I don't think those...
The specific tool is just a bottle opener. Lift the edge of the lid until the air comes in and it is easy to open afterwards. This won't work for plastic caps of course, but I don't think those are particularly a problem, at worst you gotta grab a towel.
For containers that are too tight: strap wrench . Extremely cheap, and since I got one I had not had to ask again. But the general point of the world being made for the average man excluding the...
For containers that are too tight: strap wrench . Extremely cheap, and since I got one I had not had to ask again.
But the general point of the world being made for the average man excluding the rest of us, stands.
As an aside, the development of the can opener followed the development of canned foods by decades. Kind of nuts when you think about it. For vacuum-sealed jar lids, nothing (IMO) beats a simple...
As an aside, the development of the can opener followed the development of canned foods by decades. Kind of nuts when you think about it.
For vacuum-sealed jar lids, nothing (IMO) beats a simple can punch style can opener. That shape has the most success in gripping the sides of varieties of jar lids. I like OXO for being easier to grip with limited hand functionality, but any of this type should work fine.
The way you use it is to juuuust lift the side until you hear the vacuum release, so you're not actually poking through the lid. Once that happens, it'll become as easy to open as any other pre-opened jar. One of my PTs taught me this trick when I was in a cast for several months, and it was a real life-saver.
I already commented as a reply elsewhere talking about this type of tool, but I guess it's a pet peeve of mine so I'm commenting again. It drives me crazy that there are so many life hacks and...
I already commented as a reply elsewhere talking about this type of tool, but I guess it's a pet peeve of mine so I'm commenting again. It drives me crazy that there are so many life hacks and weird specialized tools when something so simple and so old and so effective like this exists. Works 100% of the time, although you might have to pry in a circle around the lid a few times for very tight lids.
Fully agreed. I had already gone through several other assistive opening tools that all more or less sucked until this one particular lady shared this tip. I made sure to thank her personally once...
Fully agreed. I had already gone through several other assistive opening tools that all more or less sucked until this one particular lady shared this tip. I made sure to thank her personally once I realized she had the actual answer!
Okay, so I commented earlier about being able to open things just fine (that is, related to jars or whatnot), but this whole thread kinda went another way... I still can open a lot more things but...
Okay, so I commented earlier about being able to open things just fine (that is, related to jars or whatnot), but this whole thread kinda went another way... I still can open a lot more things but now I have the arthritis, and also, I just feel the need to say...
The point is the need for more universal design..I can manage to open most things but it's definitely harder for me with smaller hands and less leverage. I have to adapt to it. I have to adapt to...
The point is the need for more universal design..I can manage to open most things but it's definitely harder for me with smaller hands and less leverage. I have to adapt to it. I have to adapt to a lot of things.
It would just be nice to be considered in design (and not just by making things pink ಠ_ಠ)
You mean you don't immediately feel that making something pink or purple means it's for you?! What else are they supposed to do??? (I feel similarly, and if a product "for women" only comes in...
You mean you don't immediately feel that making something pink or purple means it's for you?! What else are they supposed to do??? (I feel similarly, and if a product "for women" only comes in those colours usually I look to see if there's another brand available...)
The Bic pens "for women" reviews were peak comedy for a while on Amazon. Might still be! But look I even like purple. I'll pick up a purple screwdriver over a yellow one if they're the same. I'll...
The Bic pens "for women" reviews were peak comedy for a while on Amazon. Might still be!
But look I even like purple. I'll pick up a purple screwdriver over a yellow one if they're the same. I'll even pick up a purple pen. But if you sell a screwdriver "for women" fuck off, ya know? Now if it's like "screwdrivers for smaller hands and larger hands" and I can pick my color and comfort, sure.
It's the "don't patronize me" thing really. AND it would help guys with smaller (than whatever the standard is) hands too. Assuming people don't get weird about it.
I get this. It's a situation where it's not that anyone is incapable because of their gender it's that there's a disparate impact on women caused by systemic issues in representation in design and...
I get this. It's a situation where it's not that anyone is incapable because of their gender it's that there's a disparate impact on women caused by systemic issues in representation in design and leadership.
I don't expect anyone to agree because of their gender. My gender, squishy as it is, informs my experience.
Those plastic clam shell packages are not all that common now that most stuff is sold online. For food it’s mostly safety. Jars have to be vacuum sealed to keep bacteria out.
Those plastic clam shell packages are not all that common now that most stuff is sold online. For food it’s mostly safety. Jars have to be vacuum sealed to keep bacteria out.
Can you give some examples of packaging you feel are class warfare? On the whole, poorer people are more likely to have blue collar jobs, so I'd actually expect them to be better at opening...
Can you give some examples of packaging you feel are class warfare? On the whole, poorer people are more likely to have blue collar jobs, so I'd actually expect them to be better at opening difficult packaging. When I worked in fast food, the rich kids could never figure out packaging.
For everyone who's got grip issues, the OXO Jar Opener is my go-to tool. /u/chocobean's strap wrench is effective, but not easy to keep clean or store in a kitchen. Keeping it positive, I...
For everyone who's got grip issues, the OXO Jar Opener is my go-to tool. /u/chocobean's strap wrench is effective, but not easy to keep clean or store in a kitchen.
Keeping it positive, I understand that most people encounter ergonomic issues on a day-to-day basis. Designing for the middle of the (young) adult male normal distribution of size and strength leaves out at least half of the human population, especially since many of the reference tables are still based on military recruits from a few generations ago.
Based on recent global research, this table shows the current distribution of grip strength by gender. Opening a jar lid is an even trickier task to design for properly, because it's also dependent on things like handspan, finger strength, fat pad thickness, and skin friction (did you know that fingerprint ridges tend to disappear with age?).
I suspect there's a great deal of inertia in designing away ergonomic obstacles for consumers because capitalism and "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". There are products I don't buy anymore because they're too hard to use (i.e. modern minimalist carafes or insulated cups without handles). I'm now a shopper in the vast marketplace for shoddily-made, overpriced assistive devices, when I'd rather most things were made better and with more adjustability. That comes with costs for the initial design innovation and the sometimes small populations served - the $1,000 Aeron chair did eventually become the much cheaper office standard. Same with motorized desks and work tops.
Meanwhile, we can keep filing consumer complaints, boycotting the stuff that obviously doesn't work well, and hoping for regulations that elevate accessibility and usability.
OXO is generally great for accessibility since that's part of why the brand was created. Do you mean handleless mugs or something like a thermos? I'm having a hard time picturing what you mean.
OXO is generally great for accessibility since that's part of why the brand was created.
insulated cups without handles
Do you mean handleless mugs or something like a thermos? I'm having a hard time picturing what you mean.
There's a specific brand of salsa I get regularly that comes in a jar with a wide lid, and I (male) and my boyfriend both have regularly struggled to open it. I think the jar has a wider lid than...
There's a specific brand of salsa I get regularly that comes in a jar with a wide lid, and I (male) and my boyfriend both have regularly struggled to open it. I think the jar has a wider lid than most other jars. There have been many times where we both gave up on having salsa because we couldn't open it. When I found myself seriously considering breaking the jar with a hammer, I finally realized there must actually be good jar-opening tools and I ordered one. (It works great. If you've ever had a jar that you struggled with or made your wrist sore from, buy one! It should be a kitchen staple.)
It makes me wonder if we're really both far below average in jar-opening skill, or if the specific jar really can't even be opened by people of average jar-opening skill. Even before getting into gender, it feels like a surprisingly suboptimal situation around a normal grocery store product. I wonder how many people even buy this specific salsa and successfully open it. How many people have stopped attempting to purchase it because of the difficulty? It almost makes me want to wait in the store next to the jar and quiz the next person who grabs one how they manage to open it. Or it makes me want to count and mark the jars in the store so I can tell if anyone else is even buying them. Maybe I'm the only one that didn't get the memo the jar is impossible to open. Maybe I could ask random people off the street to attempt opening the jar to see how many people out of ten random people can even open it. I wonder if the jar being sold near jar-opening tools or having instructions on how to open it would bump the sales of the salsa.
Even as a guy, I sometimes struggle opening certain jars. I know for certain products, like Talenti ice cream jars, the temperature causes the lid to shrink onto the threads. But for others, it...
Even as a guy, I sometimes struggle opening certain jars. I know for certain products, like Talenti ice cream jars, the temperature causes the lid to shrink onto the threads. But for others, it has to just be poor design. When I lived with my parents, I'd sometimes use my mom's dull coconut blade to just stretch lids enough to break the seal and open certain jars (that we knew we wouldn't close again).
As the top comment mentions though, the seemingly small problem of poorly designed jars just highlights just how poorly designed the world as a whole still is, especially for women. As a car guy, it both boggles my mind and doesn't surprise me at all that crash tests didn't even have women dummies until fairly recently. There have even been cars that manufacturers claim were designed for women but those have basically only just focused on women stereotypes rather than actually engineering the car for the average woman.
When my sister and I lived together by ourselves, this was a serious nuisance, especially since we both have small hands. I keep rubber bands in the kitchen to wrap around stubborn container lids,...
When my sister and I lived together by ourselves, this was a serious nuisance, especially since we both have small hands.
I keep rubber bands in the kitchen to wrap around stubborn container lids, but beverage bottles out in public are still an issue.
I know shes talking about jars but she really means that everything is like this.
Shelves are too high. Stairs are too deep. Chairs and tables are too high. Spoons are too big. Women do not fit in cars and are forced to sit hazardously close to the steering wheel in order to operate a car.
Edit:
the poster below me has presented the bad faith argument that by accommodating others, things that the main group engages in comfortably now will become uncomfortable. Thats a basic bad faith argument that minorities and disabled folks everywhere have been hearing their whole lives, its not true, and presenting that argument is selfish and offensive, and I was nice at first by telling them this instead of being offended because hey sometimes people just really haven’t thought about it but then this poster doubled down on their dumb argument and offended the entire platform.
Tread here at your own risk.
Sorry everyone.
I mean....I'm 6'3. Just about everything is too short/small for me by default and it's caused me posture problems all my life, since the average US male is 5'9. I know women ranging from my height to 4'ish (average US woman is 5'3 for ref).
There's, literally, not a one size fits all for these things. You can try to make everything dynamic or bespoke, but that's very expensive, causes other problems (ADA compliance being the main one), and i'm still not sure what you're going to do about stairs.
Big and tall guy here too, so I feel your pain, but the issue isn’t that we can’t accommodate everybody everywhere, it’s that in WAY too many instances of design, testing, and implementation, women haven’t even been considered.
I highly recommend Caroline Criado Perez’s book Invisible Women for a data-driven look into the issue at large.
One thing that stuck out to me from it was that female crash test dummies weren’t used until the 2010s(!) in the US, and when they finally were implemented, safety scores for cars plummeted. It highlighted a significant safety issue for women that was previously unknown because nobody was testing for it.
The book is very illuminating and I highly recommend it. This issue is so much deeper than “not everybody fits the average.”
Responded to snake_case here but I think short version is "i know that's what's being said, I know it's true in some cases, i think people over attribute ignorance and malice on some of these things".
As for the book, i'm aware of it, i'll give it a read, but the crash test example is one I'm very skeptical of. I've no doubt women are more injured in car crashes (actuaries have known as such for basically the existence of car insurance), but I do question the correlation/causation of what's being claimed. I'll have to read it though.
Its not that I think they should cover 4ft tall tiny women, thats not the case the blogger is making either.
The problem is that “average person” is a man, and the average woman is too far away from their measurement of “average person”
I understand that, but my point is that there's still not a great solution.
So
No, the author is arguing about difficulty opening canned products. And while there is some discussion of that in here, I think it's one of the hardest to solve and has very little to do with "wasn't designed for women" so much as "physics is physics". No one said "oh that's loose enough for a man, stop it there" for many of those kinds of products.
The difference in the US average is 5". That is enough to already make things awkward. 2.5" "less" of everything doesn't translate easily to "okay now everyone is happy.
For example, you mention stairs. Stair's are around 7" (there's a min and a max which that is neither, and I think the only other safety rule is you can't adjust them).
They're 7"s mostly because of material efficiency. You could make them 5"'s, but then you're going to have more horizontal length on a staircase and need more steps to cover the height you're going.
So why am I rambling about height when you mentioned depth (well you said deep, so i'm assuming you mean the tread not the riser)? Well obviously if they don't want stairs to be horizontally longer (and not even going into landings) they're going to make them as short as possible.
The legal minimum is 10/11", and in this case, you MUST look at the high of the average, not the low. Yes it's going to be worse for women who are, on average, smaller, but it's a safety thing. Smaller means you will, on average, have more people falling down stairs because you need at least 10 inches for the average adult gait to not trip and fall.
Ideally you'd mandate the max. Don't want Shaq falling and hurting himself just because he's got bigger feet (4-6" longer than mine I believe). Realistically you draw the line somewhere, and for that you're going to pick the high end of the median, which, yes, is going to be the on average larger male.
So in short, even considering women, that's a perfect example of a case where it'd be absurd to adjust for it. You want to help as many people as you can stay safe. It may have just been luck that it worked out that way, I'm well aware rampant sexism exists, but the law is correct here in attempting to protect as many people as possible, and shorter treads are more dangerous.
Tables and chairs could be discussed as they're obviously not regulated (although I'd argue decent evidence designers have taken average female height into account), and I have to say I heavily question "spoons are too big". Are you really saying you or someone you know needs something smaller than a cutlery teaspoon (not measuring, it's a whole mess of standards)? You can buy those in bulk in just about any dinnerware set?
When you consider that stuff is made all over the world these days to different standards, yeah, the cheapest bidder amazon chair that really came from temu which came from indoneisa that the store bought is probably not made to ANY spec for you. Cheap sells.
To be clear, i'm not saying that this kind of oversight doesn't happen. Anyone studying business these days hears all about how many people made fortunes by just not being sexist and realizing you can build stuff for women too. .
Still people often underestimate just how focus grouped and overengineered some of this stuff is (obviously not the temu chair), and attribute sexism to what often boils down to in the modern age simple economics or safety. Things that make it through shitty shipping conditions and can last weeks outcompete things that don't. There's still a lot of growing to be done in the sciences when it comes to properly including female representation in the data, but a lot of this comes off as "well obviously everyone who's ever worked on these things is an idiot" and it's not that simple.
Edit-
I may have meant coffee spoon not teaspoon. I refuse to reinsert this knowledge into my brain though.
Just going through these claims one by one; apologies, sourcing these takes a while.
It's been solved for about fifteen years, at seemingly insignificant/unnoticeable price increase to consumers. Presumably, saving a couple pennies per jam jar is not perceived as a good ROI vs. a potential increase in sales. I wouldn't call that physics, though.
Many is a weasel word. Furthermore, considering that this sort of bias is absolutely everywhere (example for racial inequality), I'd go so far as to say that the production staff/engineers say "this is fine for everyone on the engineering team, stop it there" (editor's note: the entire engineering staff are 20-40 something dudes).
Here's a lighthearted anecdote: the universal pipe colour for recycled water (non-potable use only) is purple. Although the precise history is debated, one retelling indicates that this unusual colour was chosen because one of the people involved happened to be colourblind, and thus the product/engineering team realized that colourblind people exist and probably shouldn't accidentally plumb the urinals into the fountains.
I'd need more information about the original commenter to know what their concerns are w.r.t. stairs. Working backwards from your argument, though, it sounds like your claim is that tread and riser dimensions were selected empirically in order to improve ergonomics for a country's population. Furthermore, you note how there are population-level differences in height across countries. This would imply that building codes differ across the world, based on their heights.
Average height in USA: 168.3 cm (~5'6"
Average height in Philippines: 157.7 cm (~5'2")
American building code:
risers: 4"-7"
treads: 11"
Philippines building code:
risers: <7.5"
run: >10"
To my eye, that's practically identical given a ~4" average population height difference, after taking nosings into account (the Philippines NBC doesn't seem to). Ergo I disagree with your statement, unless you'd like to provide further evidence.
Generally, it's rude to question someone's observed reality. Regardless, data indicates that female mouths are ~22% smaller in volume than male mouths, and I expect absolute dimensions are also smaller too.
I'm not sure I understand. I think you're saying that it's possible to support a diverse array of appropriately sized products without the global economy collapsing, while also using that as an argument against providing appropriately sized things.
For the spoons, I think the question is whether small spoons are still too big. Most cutlery sets come with large and small spoons. The small spoons should be easy for children to use.
This is fully unrelatead to the discussion, but I actually hate every single spoon. Give me a small ladle instead (sob).
Spoons are so bad to eat with. Why are they 1/100th of a millimeter deep? Please just let me scoop up a reasonable amount of liquid without spilling half of it, because my hand isn't as steady as surgeons.
/noise
May I ask if you've tried a Japanese ramen spoon before? They're effectively more ergonomic, smaller ladles, and do a fantastic job of conveying tasty broth into one's soup hole. Plus they come in a lot of lovely patterns, and often have a matching plate to set them down upon.
I have! And that was the catalyst of my intense dislike for western spoons. I yearn for the ladle.
Now that you mention it though, I realised nothing stops me from simply buying ramen spoons and using them at home.^
One of my favorite things is realizing rules are arbitrary and you can do what you want :D
Adulthood has perks
Yes!!!
Just minutes ago, I put a frozen pizza in my air fryer and I am going to eat it soon. It's 12:21 am here. Nobody can stop me.
I am unstoppable.
I recently came across the concept of “if nobody is coming to save you/help you, probably nobody will be stopping you either” as a fantastic motivational idea :D
Brilliant!
Mine actually has a pizza setting, and it is delicious.
Ancedata, my preschooler prefers to eat with a salad spoon and fork. Not the table ones. The giant ones you use to toss the salad.
Kids are weird.
Aah, gotcha. I must admit to not having trouble with spoons, so I could've easily misunderstood the premise.
No one said "oh that's loose enough for a man, stop it there" for many of those kinds of products.
They did though. And smart phones are the same way. Made for big hands.
Jars. Phones. Power tools. The weight of a bag of mulch. All of these things are as large as they can get away with and we’ve been letting them get away with too large.
But they literally didn't?
Phones are large because customers want larger screens. Hell i believe data shows women care more about larger screens on average because they care more about photos on average.
Jars and mulch bags are large because of product to container ratios. It's why bulk products are cheaper, you're paying less for packaging (and arguably better for the environment. More packaging is more energy wasted on trash).
Power tools are large mostly because of physics behind making something that can drive a screw into wood with a battery that lasts long and doesn't break the first time you drop it. No one is making these things heavier than they need to be because it's more expensive too, almost all the tech has been focused on making them smaller and more efficient.
Handles are larger because you need grip on some of these tools and they want to make sure anyone grabbing it has plenty of space, so in that case bigger is safer and smaller is more dangerous.
If you want something with less power, plenty of those things exist, but if you're driving into metal studs, well there's just a limit to what physics allows.
I cant use power tools dude. If men were my size no one could use power tools. We would adjust.
How tall are you? I ask because I'm short enough to wear XXS and still fit in children's clothing, yet I've never struggled with power tools. I wear small gloves too. I exercise regularly to keep my body from aching, but I'm definitely not an elite athlete.
There are smaller power tools, but they're more expensive because it's hard to miniaturize a high-torque motor.
I really need one of those powered hedge trimmers but I tried all the ones at the store even the ones without batteries are too large, theres no reason to make the motor smaller cause smaller is worse, so they’re just all as large as they can get away with.
Handle, length, or weight of the tool?
The weight and the size, I could handle the weight if it were small enough and I could handle the size if it were light enough
Handles being hard to grip doesnt bother me, I’m left handed, all handles are wrong lol
Are you using the models with two handles? They should be held like a chainsaw with all the weight resting against your waist or stomach. If you're trying to hold them above your head and struggling then that's expected (unless you're strong).
So I can operate a chainsaw because of how its meant to be held, at the hip, but I cant start a chainsaw, the pull cord is too tough. Its super annoying.
I've always had a hate for pull-cord starts because it feels like my arm isn't quite long enough to get the necessary momentum at full extension. Chalk that up as another less-than-male-average-height complaint.
It’s everything about it, the weight, the cord length, the amount of times it takes. When I was a teenager I just hoped that id get bigger and be able to do it as an adult but it just never happened I stayed kid size in the eyes of the manufacturer.
I'm just as happy to dispense with hauling or pushing the weight of ICE tools - even heavy battery packs are easier for me to handle. Button starts are an amazing improvement. [Though spouse provided warnings about electric chainsaws - those motors produce enough torque to tear and melt Kevlar pants...]
But being at one end of the bell curve in either direction sucks for most products and designs.
Should he just keep his objection to himself because he's a man?
As tired as you may be, I'd wager a substantial portion of other people share his objections, and you may be better served by adressing why you think those objection don't track (which is the point if having a conversation on tildes) rather than trying to bully him into silence.
We know we have to explain in painstaking detail why we're not being considered and that power tools could indeed be made just as sturdily with handles that fit our hands. But there are tons of articles out there for someone to read, and instead I'm going to do all that labor for someone who probably won't read this or care because they are already arguing with an article that makes this same point.
Also I personally find being told how women should respond to the repetition of "obviously we're being ridiculous and we're not being excluded" with explaining to the person why they're wrong as patronizing. We know. We're tired. And it feels like we're trapped in an absurdist play.
But here are a bunch of things people can read. I've even summarized and pulled links out of it to click more easily than having to click into two articles. Certainly this will be read and change minds.
Shrink It and Pink It: Gender Bias in Product Design — Harvard ALI Social Impact Review
The argument often made is that it's stupid not to make money off women and thus obviously the market will work it's stuff out or that necessarily the things are the way they are because they have to be for other reasons. The former is disproven through both a long history of discrimination against groups of consumers for social reasons and both are demonstrative of implicit bias in product design.
It reflect the lack of women in these professional spaces and in spaces of authority to change things. Firefighting equipment doesn't have to be designed only for men with women forced to adapt. Surgical tools don't need to be sized for men's hands. PPE in health care is sized for men despite most healthcare professionals being women.
Invisible Women: it's time to design women in | UX Collective
When Product Design Endangers Women | TORKLAW
Drugs aren’t tested on women like they are on men, and it could have deadly consequences | Globalnews.ca
Exploring the ongoing diversity issues embedded in product design.pdf
And while these are recent, this is from 1985
A missing link: women and industrial design - ScienceDirect
Just because designers are not cackling manically while they think about how they can exclude women doesn't mean they're not operating off of assumptions, like "shrink it and pink it" or "firefighters are men" that ultimately damage not just women's experiences but women's health and safety.
And this is such a binary way of thinking about it, though it does not have to be. Universal design should make things more accessible for everyone, not for the "average man."
Look, I know this is all tired etc, and I don't want to add to the dog piling, but that PPE link is just an article with almost zero facts or information, and I do not buy it at all. I've worked in healthcare for decades, and yes, majority of nurses and healthcare staff are women. PPE absolutely positively includes and considers them. You can walk into any hospital and see that nurses stations and stools adjust down properly for short stature, gloves fit snuggly and for surgery, specific glove sizes are available for smaller (and larger) hands. Gowns and bunny suits are all pretty massive, which fits everyone but is annoying I'll admit.
When you say someone is arguing in bad faith but link what feels like extremely low quality evidence (in the PPE case) it weakens the thrust of the rest of your argument. Again I don't prefer nitpicking but healthcare definitely factors in female workers, it'd be suicide not to
The references linked in the article you mention
Specifically this report
https://womeningh.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/WGH-Fit-for-Women-report-2021.pdf
Which has many sources and a survey of female healthcare workers. And a link to this article which has broken but I searched it.
Female NHS staff at risk due to not being able to ‘access protective gear correctly sized for women’
In short the British Medical Association disagrees with you. And while this was during COVID so it also addressed the general shortage, it was a time when well fitting PPE was absolutely critical. (Finding modern sources that don't reference COVID or aren't impacted by it would be quite difficult. ) Maybe it's been fixed since then. I doubt it.
The lead for infection prevention at the RCN
The PPE link was a citation from the first article I linked, and it cited the report here and while I'm not an expert in PPE it did not take a long time to run down this information. So if the complaint is that I didn't do even more labor by sharing all the specifics well you're welcome to that opinion but I think the sources were viewable and speak for themselves. I get your disagreement and at no point do they say "nothing" is adjusted (though I know nurses who have a hard time getting gloves in their size in stock for example) but overall there is a disparity where women in healthcare could be safer and more comfortable if PPE was designed more intentionally.
And for the record if I think someone is arguing in bad faith, I'll say it. I didn't. I made no personal attacks either. I expressed exhaustion. The most I said is that I don't like putting effort into replying to someone who won't read or won't care. I wasn't speaking about anyone specific, including the person leading the chain of replies in this thread; it was rather more of a general statement. Even if it weren't I don't think it rises to accusing someone of arguing in bad faith.
Edited for typos, no change in content.
You're not doing this for the ones who don't care, you're doing it for those who do (or will, once they see it laid out one more time).
Shifting mainstream opinion is hard and slow. sometimes so slow that it feels like nothing changes at all. but just a few years back: car crash dummies now include female bodies, research now includes more and more female subject, "shrink it and pink it" is at least getting called out.
it's not enough or fast, but the direction is correct.
As unfair as it is, it is unrealistic to expect people to change their minds spontaneously. most humans don't work this way. contradictions have to stare us in the face before we'll consider updating our beliefs.
So, just repeat and explains, ad nauseam.
I wholeheartedly agree.
Thank you, I'll personally read all of them over next week, so at least one person will and it wasn't completely for nothing.
I understand all of this. That's why I did it despite being frustrated that unless I perform all of my labor, people will just argue that I'm not experiencing the thing being described. (And they still will!)
I really would prefer not to have this explained to me again and again. I find it patronizing.
I appreciate your willingness to learn.
I’m sorry that landed as patronizing.
That wasn’t my intent, but intent doesn’t change how it reads.
I do appreciate the links and the labor you put in.
I know it wasn't. But it is indicative of @fastpicket 's point.
So on the one hand I didn’t know I hadn’t unsubscribed from life women when I posted all this. I’m aware of the rough idea of the tags from such groups and I get it. I remove these spaces because I don’t think my method of communication helps that much and don’t want to cause trouble, and I assumed this was in somewhere else. That’s on me. I’ve fixed it.
On the other hand though, I find it wildly hypocritical that I can get personal attacks and snide passive aggressive comments here for simply agreeing things could be better but maybe we shouldn’t just ignore physics and safety standards.
I took time to explain why I felt the examples given were bad, now I’m just performance art or someone who won’t read the data and never will and never understood.
No actual response to anything I’ve said. I have read the data. I do care about it. I have met people who work on some of this stuff professionally but hey fuck me right? Must be a dog whistle or a sea lion or a misogynist or whatever because I’ve taken the time to try and understand some of these root causes and think if you want change you should actually address why you think it’s more than just those.
I'd like to politely point out that this is ~life.women. Regardless of whatever was said in the comments, it's generally considered poor form to show up to a space like this and say, "Hey, I'm a man, here's why you're wrong."
Is this really the purpose of tags? I always though they were just there to categorise the topic and filter (edit: also mods sometime change the tags after creation), not to create some kind of safe space free from any conflicting views, or reserved for some demographics...
It's not like a subreddit with dedicated mods and everything.
I don't see many people restraining from posting strong anti AI sentiment in ~tech.
I don't really want to engage with this conversation, and admittedly, didn't read most of it, just showed up on my feed and thought I'd respond to your question.
They are. This isn't reddit.
I can't find anything in the site documentation one way or the other. Has Deimos started the intent? Saying "this isn't reddit" seems to argue that discussion should be open to all.
In any case, discussions get filed away by certain empowered users according to category. I suppose you could make anti posts in ~tildes or ~talk once the original post was made. But if someone posted this article because they wanted to discuss how incorrect it was, it would still probably end up in ~life.women.
Plus, almost everyone is subscribed to almost every group. I highly doubt that the vast majority of users even check which group something is posted to. It's not like a post about how the transportation industry affects the environment could only talk about either ~enviro issues or ~transport issues.
It's a fundamental
flawdesign choice that comes with this style of website. Reddit comes with echo chambers enforced by subreddits; Tildes comes with the entire website's user base having an easy view and ability to respond to everything.To be honest, I don't know. There have been a lot of discussions about this over the years, and while I personally can't recall any specific established rule, I think the overall attitude and vibe leans in that direction when it comes to ~life.women.
We don't see a lot of activity in this subgroup, but we do in ~lgbt, and I would confidently say that ~lgbt isn't a place for cis/straight people to show up and debate whatever topic is posted there. Technically, this entire site is a safe space, but I would consider identity-based groups as...I don't know, extra safe. When it comes to those groups, I think of it less as a classification for organizing posts, and more of a way to frame the article and discussion in a way that centers people whose voices are typically underrepresented here.
This article could've been posted in ~design, and if it was, then the design aspect of it would come first. But it wasn't posted there, it was posted in the group about women.
Edit: I think this comment from a meta post about this group sums it up. However, there more opinions in that post that are just as valid and worth reading.
His original argument was that by accommodating women things that he, as a large man, uses comfortably now would become uncomfortable for him to use.
Thats like the basic bad argument for accommodating anyone with anything and minorities and disabled people everywhere have been hearing it their whole lives.
It’s an obvious bad faith argument that we can pick out cause we’ve heard it so many times. It wasn’t “just an objection” it’s an insult, and I was being nice by telling him that at first instead of being offended, but then he doubled down on it and now the whole platform is offended.
No. Smartphones was allegedly a "consumer choice."
The sizes of cellphones from between 1996 and 2015 were perfectly reasonable. It's the 'large flat glass slab' war that phones got overly gigantic. I have giant hands and it's still uncomfortable for me to use any cellphone larger than the Pixel 3.
If you halved the size of a bag of mulch/dirt, you'd more than double the plastic waste. I already practically fill a week's trash can doing the front garden....that's why I usually just order by the truckload.
And when it comes to power tools...it's much easier for a small person to grip a large tool than a large person to grip a tiny tool. If my cordless drill was 1/3 smaller, I'd have to stick my pinky out. Tolerable for a drill, less so for a saw.
Just thinking through the problem -- if a variety of hand sizes were the norm, wouldn't we wind up with grip adapters, or interchangeable grips? It would definitely impact the tool's design and weighting, but it doesn't seem like a hard impossibility, just a design challenge.
Even accepting that this could increase costs, it's the sort of thing that I'd hope that society would happily eat the price of, e.g. by mandating it at the federal level and providing incentives to encourage faster uptake (same as any other accessibility standard).
We end up with multi-size tools but then they're more expensive because each requires dedicated tooling to manufacturer. It's one possible reason "women's tools" are more expensive.
Raising my hand right here I dont mind if womens tools are more expensive thats fine I get im a minority user in a capitalist society I just want it to exist at all
Look for keywords like subcompact and '"low user fatigue."
TBH come a long way in 20 years.
Dewalt compact impact driver
I would also note that the DeWalt LiPo batteries are extremely light, that the Milwaukee M12 line tends to be smaller than most, and that Japanese import tools are a fair bit slimmer. I like Ridgid's subcompact drill/driver, too.
Also, sidebar, but this totally underlines why affordances are good for everyone: lighter tools lower fatigue. People who need to work over their head frequently apparently love the newer, lighter tech in power tools.
But you pay for the convenience, so they're not the default for occasional tools.
Mmhm. That's similar to what snake_case said three posts ago in this thread (this whole discussion is huge, so it's probably gotten lost in the fray).
My personal ideology is to buy once/cry once for equipment that can harm me severely, and having already suffered a few RSI-adjacent injuries, the investment seems wise. I pinch pennies on basically everything else in my life though.
I'm speaking to why big and bulky are the default for most home power tools. The default is "cheap" which usually means not optimizing for size and weight.
Perhaps! Sorry, I was going to do a bunch of searching for sources, but I kinda crashed this afternoon and needed to take a break.
I guess what I had in mind, moreso, would be modular tooling? Either on the user side -- as in, you can easily snap on a new, appropriately sized handle -- or on the manufacturing side, whereby the majority of the tool is identical except for a mating section which would bolt in to a differently sized handle.
Tools like the hedge trimmers we're discussing are more challenging, since weight distribution is more of a problem, but you can still get creative with flex drives (such as the articulated/flexible drill extensions) and/or battery extenders to move motors/batteries closer to the user's centre of mass. Although it still would weigh the same overall, carrying the weight on your hips is dramatically easier for the average person, regardless of physical build.
Food for thought I suppose.
It really does just come down to rethinking design. It's possible there will be some things that just cannot be designed "better" or are prohibitive in cost or materials at least for now. But new materials get created and new ideas occur to us.
The problem lies when no one (the predominant majority in the room) even thinks there is a problem and there aren't women (and disabled people and POC, etc.) in the spaces where the conversations are happening to say "hey, that grip is uncomfortable," "that product doesn't work well on my hair type," "a hinge here lets people in chairs use it better" etc. and then you need people not to dismiss those ideas because they're foreign to them. You need teams and bosses to listen to your ideas.
I mean, that's almost expected given you are (at least in the United States) top 2% of men's heights. That's the upper extreme - not really comparable to furniture not fitting an average height (5'3 or 5'4) woman.
For shortness, that's the equivalent of a woman being under 5 feet tall - and once you consider that children exist, being under 5 feet is probably even more common.
You don't even have to be that tall, I'm 5'11 and still find things that don't quite work. For example I find most bathroom shower heads and mirrors are placed overly low, and rolling luggage/toolboxes are almost universally made with handles too short to walk normally. Plenty of tables and chairs are set too low, and a lot of cars are made with a driving position that is meant for someone with shorter legs (or longer arms I guess) so I too have to compromise on comfort.
That's not even getting started on things which are made for right handed people and are various degrees of awkward to use as a left handed person...
Amen brother. I hit my head on everything and I have serious back problems. I get really annoyed by the people that are always like "must be nice to be so tall". It's okay.
There should never be a person coming into ~life.women and then telling women that their experiences aren't valid because men sometimes have a slightly hard time too about things.
Haha yeah like I’m sure its not on purpose at this point, its just that men still design most of our things and their view of whats reasonable comes from their own experience and thats just how humans work.
Woman are totally justified in complaining about this reality even if the men don’t do it on purpose.
I think that car safety tests may be starting to include women sized mannequins, so progress.
The thing that really bothers me is researchers purposely excluding women in medical studies cause it’s inconvenient to include that data. That shit is so unethical.
The rationale for excluding women from medical (or at least for drugs) studies was that they might get pregnant, and suddenly you'd be doing research on developmentally fragile pre-humans, too.
Which is just as infuriating an assumption in its own right, and scientifically indefensible because things that affect embryos and fetuses have been shown to damage adults as well.
And pregnant women need medicine too! Else when we are on lifesaving meds, including mental health meds, we will not get pregnant or terminate a pregnancy. Which upset some people unduly.
Yes/no....but like benadryl is deadly while breastfeeding. Huge liability exposure, especially in early trials.
I'd say excluding pregnant people from initial studies is reasonable.... but not women as a whole.
as a 6'2", broad shouldered and long-legged, male I don't fit in airplane seats, driving position in cars is a toss up, I can't get my legs under tables, hit my head on things that are the "right" high for other people.
I know where the author is coming from, but it really feels like a less of a "women" issue (don't get me wrong, there are a lot of those in the world) but an issue of everything being designed for the "average person".
There are lots of jobs around the house and in the garden where I trade off with my partner; she does the stuff that is low down, or demands small hands or getting in small spaces and I do the high-up stuff and high torque/strength things.
A frustrating amount of cars, Italian ones being some of the worst, seem to assume short legs and long arms (from my perspective). I assume there are some people that fit comfortably, getting an ideal driving position in many European cars just isn't going to happen if you are too tall or too short. I looked at buying a (used) first generation Porsche Boxster many years ago, my partner was all for it but I had to point out I my head touched the roof when closed and my shoulder was pressed hard against the door.
Right exactly and its unfortunate that in the eyes on the people who make stuff, a man is “the average person” instead of some combo of woman and man.
I kind of wonder if the average height would drop if it wasn't just "man" and then things would be even worse for us talls.
Not that perhaps we shouldn't, but as another tall man that frequently bangs his head on things, can't fit into airplane seats, etc, I'm curious what that would look like.
Average male height is 68.9 inches (~5' 8.9") and average female height is 63.5 inches (~5' 3.5") so in the middle, it'd be roughly 66.2 inches (~5' 6.2"). Source for male/female heights
But I wonder if the average white male's height is significantly higher than non-white males. Perhaps the default design caters to the average white male's height and not just all males?
I mean, the default in places where it's mostly white people.
As many (relatively tall) white people who have gone to Japan realize, other countries do not build things to fit the height standards of white people.
Best I can tell, most things are keyed at 5'6.
I'm 5'8, and I feel like the world is pretty much designed for me. Yeah, there are some high shelves I can't reach, and there are some tight places I can't squeeze into, but it's rare.
I've been in relationships with very short women who need my help reaching everything, and most of my friends are very tall men who hit their head on stuff constantly, can't fit into the back of cars, and just generally knock things over.
I think that's unfortunate, but it's a natural tendency to design around the average instead of the extremes.
I don’t think it would be an issue, the pressure to make tight spaces as small as they can get away with would stay the same, since the proportion of tall people is still the same.
It’s like how making things accessible for disabled people didn’t ruin any building architecture or any fun experience for anyone else, it just allowed more people to engage in spaces that were previously limited.
Being more inclusive doesn’t exclude the people who were already included.
Your height, in the United States, is at the 96th percentile. The chairs in my work building leave my feet dangling and I am around the 30th percentile for a woman. These things are not the same.
Seat belts don't sit correctly over breasts
At work, they replaced the old and comfortable cafeteria chairs with ones where my legs dangle...
The correct answer for seatbelts is 5-point harnesses like we use in baby seats. But short of mandatory legislation it'll never happen.
They don't want cafeteria chairs to be comfortable. They want you to take shorter lunch breaks.
Revolt!
Or demand more than one size of chair.
...does the seatbelt not rest between yours?
No, maybe it does for taller women, but unless I shift it, it goes directly over the top.
I'm a woman who is 5'10". Front seat seatbelts are ok for me in a car I fit into if I lower the adjuster all the way. Back seat seatbelts don't usually have that so they ride up and cut my neck. I can fix this temporarily by holding it loose with a clothespin, but I can't leave it that way or the seatbelt will end up hanging out the door.
I don't think it's a height thing, I think it's a body shape thing. I imagine it's worse while pregnant.
The height part for me is that the adjuster in the front doesn't ever get to a comfortable spot :(
Oh man they end up against my neck all the time. I used to have an adjuster for that but it was several cars ago. It's always uncomfortable.
I'm 156 cm and it's squarely centered on my chest. I haven't had any real issues in any car I've ridden in.
For me it's the "having large breasts" part that makes every seatbelt slide up and try to choke me. The height makes that worse , if I were taller the curve wouldn't hit the belt in the same spot.
Gosh that sucks I’m so sorry. Thats so freaking dangerous in a wreck. A hard enough impact could tear your jugular, destroy your wind pipe, I had to make an airway for a lady in that situation a lifetime ago and I’m sure shes permanently damaged but, alive at least. Such a shit situation.
Well that's only mildly terrifying. But yeah I spend a lot of time trying to adjust it back down. My primary vehicle is probably the best right now on the ones I've had, but I do need to get an adjuster thing... clip ...something.
I also had to get an extender for the wheelchair van seat belt because of how the modifications change how the seat well sits (both front passenger and driver captains seats are removable and the floor is lowered I think. I'm not sure how they do it.) But it works better to have an extender on the seat belt and be able to sit closer to the steering wheel.
At 5'4 I am the pinnacle of my maternal family's female evolution in height. My 4'10 Nonna had a hell of a time, especially in the cars available when she was driving/alive.
These seatbelt adjusters should be included in car accessories when you buy a bar.
These things should just be everywhere, gas stations, grocery stores, you name it, as ubiquitous as a tire pressure checker. They’re so easy and cheap to make its just a triangle piece of fabric. Totally ridiculous that such a simple piece of required safety equipment is so rare.
And when they do make them available they're often for kids (or were) and are like stuffed animal adjacent!
It's just one more thing to adjust. Like the extender and, and, and.
IIRC it's a serious issue with pianos as well. Before puberty, men and women perform about equally; afterwards, men have a significant advantage, because the standard piano keyboard size was designed for men.
Ironically, the family came to me from like age 10 til I moved out to open jars, because I played piano and I had hand muscles. My dad had meaty hands and we were about on par. He also taught me that metal lids opened easier when you run them under hot water (as his engineering, and later my experience understood).
Also I never had any issues playing piano, and could reach some of Chopin's 13ths on a good day. I've been 5'9 (175cm) since age 14 and actively played until 16.
What I'd like to discuss is acceptable office temperatures though...
I played piano for over 10 years, but being a skilled pianist doesn't magically make you better at opening jars, and no amount of practice is going to make my hands physically larger. I probably have to do all the same work and flexibility you use to reach a 13th in order to reach a 9th or 10th. Granted, I have particularly tiny hands even compared to most women, but still. I think it's faulty to attribute everything to practice or skill when the causation can often be in the opposite direction.
That's what I'm saying though, I just had the body feature for opening things easier coupled with the strength from playing piano. I don't feel that it's because I'm a woman though, which is where my issue with the topic lies.
I completely agree that many things should be reconsidered in their designs to make them more accessible, but not because I'm a woman.
Ultimately I think when it comes to women specifically, it's simply differences in where the bell curve on a particular feature falls compared to men and who a particular feature is designed for. There's plenty of variation in hand sizes independent of gender, with plenty of overlap in the bell curves, but presumably the peak of the curve for women is at a smaller size than the peak of the curve for men.
Yes, statistically speaking: stereotypes exist for a reason.
But I'd rather see things addressed at the statistics level instead of for the stereotypes.
Do small medical gloves fit you loosely with room to spare?
Not who you replied to but medical gloves actually fit me so weird, I have tiny hands but long fingers so every glove basically puts webbing between my fingers. I had to learn to just be used to it
I haven't had to wear such gloves recently but yeah, small ones have always been still a little big on me.
My wife is 5'3" and I am 6'3". One day she stood on a stepstool and we were eye level in the kitchen.
"Oh god this is terrifying! The counter is so far away, how can you possibility use a knife! No wonder you can never find anything!"
The reality is high shelves exist because otherwise it's a wasteful void. You accommodate the largest feet on stairs because a small person (like a child) having to cope with deep stairs is safer than a person with larger feet using tiptoes.
Spoons...that's a shop around problem. I have a really big mouth and I rarely ever use any spoon other than the teaspoon. The full-size spoon is approximately large enough to use as a weapon.
Relatedly, I rather like this instagram account of a woman in the trades who talks about this sort of stuff! So on top of everything else, this also discourages women out of pursuing entire career paths.
I was really sad one day in the hardware store browsing all of the powered hedging tools picking up one after another and there wasn’t a single one I could use comfortably.
I have to cut my bushes manually with old fashioned scissor style hedge trimmers dude. It takes weeks to get through it. But operating one of the powered ones would be unsafe.
Would small battery powered hedge trimmers work at all? They come in a lot of different sizes!
No actually the battery ones were worse, those batteries are so large and heavy.
I have a corded electric one, much lighter than either the gas or battery versions.
Downside is that I have accidentally snipped the cable a few times.
I’ll look harder, I really only went to my local hardware store and then their website and gave up. I just figured if they existed they’d be carried at fkn Lowes.
They will be, but they're expensive. Corded tools require heavy-duty electrical cables to use safely, and those suckers cost a pretty penny.
There's an old stereotype about lesbians and home improvement stores, so they definitely carry stuff that works for women!
Black and decker, $50. 3.9 lb. The lack of battery really drops the cost.
Being able to share the cable with other tools helps. 15 or lower gauge extension cord should do fine, can find those for less than $50.
@snake_case
This is great, thank you
Ach, that's atrocious. It's not like gardening work is the exclusive purview of men :/
Yeah I even went online willing to pay extra but couldnt fine one under 5lbs which is what it would take for me to safely handle something that size
You'll probably be stuck with manual trimmers if you need something that light. Chainsaws (which hedge trimmers kinda are) have a lot of heavy parts.
When I was 7 months pregnant I could not drive, because I had to have the seat so far back I could not reach the pedals. It wasn't just hazardously close to the steering wheel, it was physically impossible.
Jars and things that require strength I get and agree with, but I don't really know what you mean for the rest. As a guy who's 5'3", shelves, stairs, chairs, tables, etc. have not really been a problem in my experience. Sure every now and then there's an outlier, but not on average.
Another short guy! I'm 5'4". The place where I've noticed tables and chairs being a problem is restaurants. Not so much my legs dangling when sitting down, but like the table or bar-top being too high. It's not every restaurant. But it's just common enough that I (and my other short family members) notice it.
But everywhere else, like in the office or at home, yeah not a problem.
I think this can also vary a lot between homes. I can reach the lower two shelves of the three-shelf cabinets with ease here at my parents' home, and get stuff from the third shelf if I'm on my tiptoes. But in my apartment in Germany I was basically stuck only using the lowest shelf of my cabinets because they were hung so high. I similarly struggled with hand-holds on public transit when I lived in Germany, so this may be something that's just worse there because their average heights are taller? But it did genuinely hurt my quality of life a lot.
Ohh that's a good point about the handholds on trains and such. In some cities, they used like straps/loops that hang down. And those usually are just within reach for me. It's uncomfortable, but I can use them if I can't grab a handhold on the back of a seat or a pole. Which is rare, all things considered.
But here in DC, in some of the older train cars, the handholds retract upwards. So I'd have to jump up like a child, or stand on the seats to grab one. Which, no, not doing that. And even then, pretty sure I'd be swinging from it like I'm on a jungle gym, lol...
I'm going to Japan later this year. I wonder if their public transit is built more for shorter Asians, such as myself.
At home, in my apartment, I ended up getting a step ladder. My experience is like you at your parents house, so I really only use it for that highest shelf or two. But I could see that being really annoying if you had to constantly use a stepladder or step stool for even the lowest ones every time. Or just not using the space you're paying for at all.
Yeah, I think issues on public transit are particularly egregious examples of this because plenty of shorter people and children ride public transit and it can be extremely difficult to safely support oneself if handholds are too high. But given the relatively affluent, US-based population here and at the focus of the article, I understand why that hasn't been a centerpiece of the conversation.
I got a stepstool at my previous apartment, but when the cabinets are hung high enough that this is a regular issue, it's pretty exhausting to have to pull it out so frequently and thus I mostly just avoided storing anything I used frequently in those cabinets. This cost me money in buying separate shelves to add to my kitchen storage in addition to more abstract costs like "I never use my blender because I have to dig out a stepstool to even get it out" type things.
Ceiling-based handholds are limited because you ideally need them to be high enough that taller people won’t constantly hit their heads, and low enough that shorter people can use them. If they obstruct the space too much for taller people, then their primary advantage over more generally useful and inclusive handholds, like poles, is lost.
This is likely why more modern transport often seems to make less use of them. I expect the intention is that taller people will use the handholds, while everyone else will use rails and poles. That requires that there are sufficient numbers of poles, of course, but I expect that is the better option than lowering ceiling handholds.
For jars, there is a trick! If you put your hands together with fingers intertwined (kinda sorta like for praying or imploring), you can then place the jar lid between your palms with the edge of the lid at the base of your palms. More or less in the prolongation of your arm bone (don’t know the name of it).
Then you look at the lid, it has little indentations that grab onto the glass thread. Rotate the jar so that the area of the lid with one of these indentations is where your palms contact the lid (if you line it up on one palm it will also match one on the other palm)
And now, press the sides of the lid with your palms, getting leverage from your intertwined fingers.
This usually gets enough force to slightly bend the lid and break the airtight seal. you’ll hear a little phhht as outside air enters the jar. The contents are no longer under negative pressure and pulling the lid down, which makes the lid is much easier to open. Works every time. Gets a bit of practice to understand the orientation but once you get it it’s pretty reliable. Works best with larger jars.
Or you can get tools to help, like these triangles with a rubber side that also give leverage.
I have these little rubber grip things I use but Ive got carpal tunnel in my right wrist and I recently broke my left one so its been a struggle, been wondering how people with no arms operate.
The exemplary label is very (ab)usable, but thankfully it doesn't stick so giving it out like candy under a post like this isn't that damaging. It definitely loses its intended meaning for the entire post though.
Maybe there should be a way to remove an exemplary label if enough people find it "unexemplary"?
To be honest I just don't think there's any reason at all to have a public "Exemplary" label. This thread is an absolute highlight in how it is used the same way downvotes were used on reddit - to push visibility of agreed with opinions. I've also seen some users publicly state they will just use it because, well, they thought it is exemplary to state a particular type of opinion. And unsurprisingly it usually gets Exemplary status. I don't know how many users exactly operate that way, but this just seems counter to its intended purpose.
For that reason I think it would be better to have it just be a private notification for the poster and nothing else.
It's nice as a "thank you" for amazing responses in the less controversial areas of the site.
Maybe a "controversial" or "emotional topic" tag could be applied to certain threads that requires 2 exemplary tags for it to actually apply, or something.
Not a terrible idea on the surface, but I feel like that would take things from bad to worse. As you point out the exemplary label is already being used to mean something more like "I agree with you" instead of "good post", but that's not as bad as the community being able to dictate what's acceptable and what's not.
Lol yea I really feel like Ive ruffled the whole platform
imo it's absolutely not you that performed the ruffling. I swear, if there were a post titled "women should not be able to open things", it'd have less controversy.
This article highlights the difference in grip strength between men and women, and it points out that many containers require an inordinate amount of force to open. Considering half the population are women, maybe businesses should be more receptive to their needs and design easier to open containers. It would be an accessibility win and provide an overall better experience for everyone.
The comments on that post made me realize how absurd it is that you might need to pull off some special trick just to open a container. I've experienced containers that just feel clunky to open and it's always a slight point of frustration against that company.
Have you experienced any points of frustration when opening something?
When I transed my gender I was shocked by how quickly I lost the ability to open containers. I knew the medicine makes trans women lose a lot of muscle but I didn't expect it to really affect my daily life like that. Had to learn all the alternative methods for jars, and in general add exercise to my routine so that I wouldn't lose my ability to, like, carry a jug of milk for a few blocks.
Oh my god, me too, this just became an issue in my house. I can't open the pickles for my partner any more, we had to wait for a guest to come by and open up a jar before.
I've even started to struggle with Gatorades as the article refers to, they hurt my hands now, in part bc they're softer as well.
I found our rubber grippies for helping with jars, but I should get into our home gym.
As a woman that exercises occasionally, it fixes a lot of problems! Lots of exercise equipment has knurling that toughens your hands too (the knurling is to prevent slippage).
Pickles are easy, stick a butter knife in between the jar and lid where the seam is and put slight pressure on it by lifting the bottom of the knife up laterally.
This releases the seal and it’s very easy to open after. The lid will still function as intended.
Oh! 100% yes, and on top of a gender-thing it's also an accessibility-thing -- once you get older (or injure a thumb), it becomes infinitely harder to take care of yourself.
I learned about these adjustable jar openers the other day, though, which seem way better than the standard set of tricks (I tend to rotate through tapping with a spoon, hot water, and using a dish towel; eventually it comes off and I haven't had one explode in my hands yet 😅). Admittedly I'm the type to carry a mini-multitool with a pair of pliers for tearing into other types of packaging which require too much pinch/grip strength, so this might only be an outlier opinion.
(re. redesigning packaging so that it's easier to open -- I expect that there are probably a fair number of ways to do this that the commentors didn't discuss, such as forming extensions/flats on the lids in order to provide physical purchase on it for turning (example). Ultimately the tightness is (probably?) a food safety/package integrity issue, so giving better mechanical leverage somehow sounds like a safer idea)
On a new jar, you've got to maintain a vacuum seal or it's useless. Making it easy to break that seal makes it easier to accidentally break it.
We just need to go back to old mason jars. Once the seal is made, you can unscrew the metal ring entirely if you wish. then you pop it with leverage.
Totally reasonable take, and that was mine before I started to search for counterexamples in order to challenge my biases. I wound up finding Duerr's marmalade, which has been using easy open lids for fifteen years, and costs about the same as a typical marmalade. Presuming an efficient market, they should've pulled them off the shelf if the return rate from grocery stores was too high, so I'm going to make the inference that it's fine -- making the lid easier to open does not, in fact, cause a sufficiently large failure rate to be a problem.
Oh sick, yeah, although I'd go further and say that we should use something like weck jars (as another commenter noted): they are actually reusable for canning, and they can also stack!
I really wish they were both easier to get a hold of and that the recipes in the US that are considered safe to use would include metric for usage with those jars.
Given the overall jar opening situation, I do find it funny that overtightening the rings on Mason style jars before processing will ruin the seal. Overtightening uses a lot less torque than you'd think.
Oh absolutely. Relatedly: I veto'd the idea really quickly, since it's insanely cost prohibitive, but it would've been really cool to get a bunch of people together to fund a Weck-compatible jar line manufactured in North America. The original company got bought out, too, so it's only a matter of time before the (presumably) leveraged buyout forces them to start dropping quality :/
Yea we've got those too, but I do prefer the mason jar more often than not, though stacking neatly is very nice.
I live in a rare household where my husband asks me to open things - roughly 9/10 times I can do it, but sometimes I'm tired or the lid chews up my hand skin and I just don't have the will to get to the end. I have relatively good grip strength (I need to use a lot of different kinds of pliers at work), but I also have several injuries that limit my arm functions - at a recent function test I think I scored "average" for a 5'6 woman. I think to some degree it's a case of technique for jars, but as mentioned above there is a general issue where seat belts, kevlar vests, life vests, and other safety items that are supposed to be form fitting are not designed for women at all - they are designed for men, and it genuinely leads to increased hazards for women, because the designers never took boobs into account. It's scary to think about and frankly unconscionable. I'm glad to hear that finally they're using female "shaped" crash test dummies, but it really should not have taken this long to get there. I do worry that my car's airbags might kill me or seriously mess me up if I get into an accident.
On the other hand, when I broke my wrist a few years ago I no longer had the manual dexterity to open jars while I was wearing a cast, and it felt very foolish to call a friend to come over and open something for me. I figured out a technique where if I placed the jar between the arches of my feet, it would hold the jar firmly and I could twist easily with my good arm. The fact that this was the necessary way for me to open thing when alone brings up a whole new set of questions, especially for people with disabilities, but for anyone out there struggling and who doesn't have a gripper pancake, the foot-anchor method may work for you? (Also put less strain on my wrists and messed up my skin less.)
They're also finally using CPR dummies with breasts to reduce the "I don't want to make her uncomfortable so I won't put the AED pads in the right spot or remove her bra." Literally saw a trend of people posting "please save my life instead of my modesty .... It's bullshit we need to post this."
I mostly solve my issues with rubber bands but we may get an under the shelf/cabinet jar opener soon. Difficulty level is finding a spot my partner can easily reach without having to elevate his chair. Just solves the problem for future disabilities too.
Yes!! This came up recently at a CPR class I was taking and I was completely horrified. My family will not throw me in the trash if a boob pops out for all to see! Please save my life before my propriety!
Among my other extracurriculars, I'm a BLS instructor for the hospital system I work for. The AHA releases curriculum updates every five years, the 2025 AHA instructor update for BLS specifically named that instructors should call this out as behavior that needs to be corrected.
1960: invented CPR
c. 1978: first AED invented
2025: made sure we still have good CPR/AED for people with breasts
Yeah sigh that tracks.
In 2011 when I worked as a medic fully seasoned medics would misplace a 12 lead on women on the regular bc you gotta lift up a boob and place 3-4-5 leads UNDER the boob on most women.
The Pitt just called out that behavior on its latest season THIS YEAR so I guess we’re still letting women die of heart attacks because these mfs dont wanna lift a boob.
Yeah the Pitt brought it to my attention, and caused a bunch of social media posts saying "this is dumb and I shouldn't have to say it but please don't let me die because you're a prude." It was similar to "just for the record I don't consent to being kept alive to incubate a fetus" you know, just in case.
I just recently had to have an EKG and the nurse put the leads on correctly, using the back of his hand to lift and place the leads where they actually went. (I don't recall if it was 12 or how many, ER for hypertension).
Oh yeah Ive never seen a nurse do it. Maybe like on their first day or something.
The issue is, even back then, a seasoned medic has only been working there for like 6 mos.
Fair, it was mostly that I knew he was doing it right because of all the discussion about it!
I used to be super strict about this and call people out for not using the correct anatomical landmarks for lead placements… so much so that I actually had done repeat EKGs to see the difference it makes because I learned that it mattered..
What I found was they were exactly the same pretty much every time (and no I wasn’t just checking normal sinus rhythm, I did a good variety including nstemi, vtach, SVT, etc). Not even an increase in artifact… I still do correct placement every time for my own peace of mind but I gave up harassing my coworkers about it after that.
Part of me wonders if the technology is just better now than it used to be, I have no idea tbh.
I noticed it once or twice in women cause for some reason tombstones look really weird in women sometimes and if you don’t get leads t5/t6 right you’ll miss it
This was 15 years ago though so maybe you’re right
Replying from the AFAB/intersex/disabled sides here...
I used to have very good grip strength, helped by having large hands for my height (5' 4", men's medium glove size). It was enough to give right back on guys who enjoyed giving crushing handshakes. I had very little difficulty opening jars or using hand tools. I didn't really think about gendered grip differentials applying to me, even though I did engineering coursework in ergonomics.
Though I didn't know it at the time, sudden trouble opening containers was an early symptom of rheumatoid arthritis. Upper body strength was fine, but gripping anything hurt like heck. These days, I use all the assistive devices/opening tricks and pass anything really stubborn to my spouse. On a bad day, just turning a doorknob can be a problem (all due praise for ADA door handles!).
Both degenerative and inflammatory hand/wrist arthritis are more common in women by a factor of 2:1, with lifelong use of ergonomically bad designs as a contributor. Everything from jar lids to keyboard pitch to car steering wheel diameters contributes just that little extra bit of strain to daily life for a significant fraction of the population, and it adds up over time.
(Small gloves wearer!)
I've always gripped bars/cylinders overhand without my thumb on the opposite side due to limited joint mobility. Conveniently/coincidentally, that's also how I learned to grip high bars in gymnastics. For steering wheels, it's actually safer too because your thumbs won't be broken if the airbag goes off!
Definitely have struggled, and I wish more lids at LEAST had ridged grooves or something to have a better grip. I never struggle with peanut butter or water bottles. At worst I'd end up using a towel or my shirt to twist stubborn caps because the ridges begin digging into my palms a bit painfully (or my hand gets sweaty), but those ridges also let the fabric grip more easily. But any glass jar with a smooth metal lid is awful.
On that note, the difficulty varies by individual jar—not brand or product, but jars. My last major struggle was trying to open a jar of pasta sauce for probably five minutes, until I decided to try another unopened jar of the exact same sauce. It popped off almost instantly, no tricks needed. Just... GAH.
There is a way to avoid the impossibility of jars: use a knife. (This only works for metal lids on glass jars.)
Take a (dull pointed / butter) knife and slip it up under the rim of the lid, where the threading of the glass meets metal. Apply slight pressure up (like a lever) to break the vacuum seal of the lid. It will hiss on the seal is broken, then the lid will be easy.
I mean, canning requires a good seal for safety reasons. The solution could be having a special groove for a specific tool to latch on.
Yeah i'm not sure how much of this is "you're dealing with physics and food safety".
Pickle jars are the "trope" and that's mostly due to canning hot items pulling a vacuum. You could design the product to have some breakable seal, but not sure how you're going to do that without potentially causing other problems.
From the article itself:
I'm really not sure what Bonne Maman can do to ensure a tight and shippable seal that meets all safety compliance. They aren't "Making sure some people can open it" and designing it that way. It's basically just the physics of the vacuum you're pulling when you process Jam. Processing it then transferring it to an easier to open container is not only going to WAY up the price for obvious reasons, but also nuke shelf life and a bunch of other things.
Like look if i'm wrong and some of this can be easier, go for it. The "obvious" solution to me is probably a total redesign of lids to have a leveragable handle, but then you'll see price increases. Retooling machinery and larger shipping costs being the main issue. One's an up front but you'll be able to fit fewer jars per shipment and a larger % will spoil and that's not going away (and is technically a larger carbon footprint).
Honestly it'd probably be easier to just go back to cans that REQUIRE a can opener.
... I can't believe I've been nerd sniped by jam jar lids. Well. That's a way to spend Friday evening.
A cursory internet search turned up Orbit lids (requires 50% of the effort to remove vs. regular lids), which have been used by Duerr's marmalade jars for about fifteen years. From a brief look at marmalade options at a UK grocer, I've come to the conclusion that it's some sort of orange peel jam eaten by bears. Er, rather, that Duerr's is in the middle-to-low end of the cost spectrum, thus it doesn't seem like making your lid openable by more than just burly giga chads is cost prohibitive.
Anyways. I expect that this argument was intended to generalize out of jam jar lids and into all accessibility concerns, but I can only address the argument in front of me.
It's not always canning though - it's possible the breakaway perforation on a bottle of soda could be more generous, or a bag of chips could use weaker glue.
Maybe?
I think some of these are just tolerances and QA? Some % of the product doesn't meet spec, so you toss it. They could tighten up the spec and lower the acceptable tolerances, but you're still looking at retooling and probably more waste as a larger % fail QA?
Again i'm not against it if it's actually easy, but like...most times I can think of a woman not being able to open a soda bottle or bag of chips...none of us could without destroying the damn thing.
Given these are usually popular brands it pretty clear these are outliers, but it kinda just gets back to it maybe being easier if you just expect your users to carry small tools. I've got a minuscule knife/screwdriver thing (2ish" i think?) on my keyring and it'll make quick work of pretty much any packaging in anyone's hands.
Weck glass jars use something like this. The rubber seal sits between the jar and the glass lid. Metal clips handle the tension to keep the lid on. You can remove them all easily without breaking the vacuum seal. The gasket has a little poke out bit that you can pull pretty easily. I think the key is making it so that breaking the seal doesn’t require expanding the volume of the vacuum like with a twist off lid.
So those look like what I was roughly thinking of( lids like these )
I believe in both cases though you're looking at more parts, materials, shipping, failure. That's a guess? It could be as dumb as "customers don't like blah" or "focus group said blah" and i'd buy it, but in general i'm all for society finally getting behind reusable containers anyway.
Something like "Drop off your old one for sanitization and refilling and you pick up a new one" which solves many of these issues because you can have more complex containers.
Yeah, that’s pretty similar to my weck jars.
The most frustrating thing is that we used to have all the infrastructure in place to use reusable bottles. It was normal to return soda bottles to the store and they would be cleaned and reused. But cans became a thing and all of that was undone.
Yeah, I feel like this is just reality. I deliberately train grip strength, so I'm probably on the higher end of the grip strength curve, but I've also been defeated by some jars.
I always thought the classic way was just to pry the edges of the lid away from the jar slightly with a church key or similar tool. Eventually the vacuum breaks and the lid loosens. If the threads are still too tight, you just keep prying around until it's not so tight. There are many other "life hack" tricks to loosen the lid such as tapping the lid, rubber bands, tools with longer levers etc., but this way works every time, even with manufacturing defects. Jar lids are made of a relatively soft metal compared to other common kitchen tools, after all.
Seconding the prying method. If you are trying to use the jar as a test of strength, you are working harder than you need to.
I’ve seen a different jar design first in Switzerland and now sometimes on some products in Europe.
Basically the ring that goes on the thread is separate from the lid. So turning the ring isn’t as difficult because you’re not fighting the lid friction (and negative pressure in the jar). And once the right is unscrewed enough it applies leverage to the lid as you’re turning it, helping break the seal effortlessly. It’s brilliant. I guess it’s patented and that’s why not every product uses it but I don’t really know.
Edit: found it it’s from sonoco: https://metalpackagingemea.sonoco.com/orbit_metal_lid/
It seems like a modern, slightly more convenient (the ring and lid remain attached) implementation of the same principle behind the standard Mason jar lid in the US that has likely been around and quite common for over a century (I don't know the exact date, but the inventor died in 1948)?
The specific tool is just a bottle opener. Lift the edge of the lid until the air comes in and it is easy to open afterwards. This won't work for plastic caps of course, but I don't think those are particularly a problem, at worst you gotta grab a towel.
For plastic caps, you should be able to also run it under hot water to get it to expand and open
There is a tool for opening jars, it lifts the side slightly letting air in.
For containers that are too tight: strap wrench . Extremely cheap, and since I got one I had not had to ask again.
But the general point of the world being made for the average man excluding the rest of us, stands.
The Pink Pony (automechanic) Club
As an aside, the development of the can opener followed the development of canned foods by decades. Kind of nuts when you think about it.
For vacuum-sealed jar lids, nothing (IMO) beats a simple can punch style can opener. That shape has the most success in gripping the sides of varieties of jar lids. I like OXO for being easier to grip with limited hand functionality, but any of this type should work fine.
The way you use it is to juuuust lift the side until you hear the vacuum release, so you're not actually poking through the lid. Once that happens, it'll become as easy to open as any other pre-opened jar. One of my PTs taught me this trick when I was in a cast for several months, and it was a real life-saver.
I already commented as a reply elsewhere talking about this type of tool, but I guess it's a pet peeve of mine so I'm commenting again. It drives me crazy that there are so many life hacks and weird specialized tools when something so simple and so old and so effective like this exists. Works 100% of the time, although you might have to pry in a circle around the lid a few times for very tight lids.
Fully agreed. I had already gone through several other assistive opening tools that all more or less sucked until this one particular lady shared this tip. I made sure to thank her personally once I realized she had the actual answer!
Okay, so I commented earlier about being able to open things just fine (that is, related to jars or whatnot), but this whole thread kinda went another way... I still can open a lot more things but now I have the arthritis, and also, I just feel the need to say...
WOMEN CAN OPEN THINGS.
The point is the need for more universal design..I can manage to open most things but it's definitely harder for me with smaller hands and less leverage. I have to adapt to it. I have to adapt to a lot of things.
It would just be nice to be considered in design (and not just by making things pink ಠ_ಠ)
Repeat for accessibility in general.
You mean you don't immediately feel that making something pink or purple means it's for you?! What else are they supposed to do??? (I feel similarly, and if a product "for women" only comes in those colours usually I look to see if there's another brand available...)
The Bic pens "for women" reviews were peak comedy for a while on Amazon. Might still be!
But look I even like purple. I'll pick up a purple screwdriver over a yellow one if they're the same. I'll even pick up a purple pen. But if you sell a screwdriver "for women" fuck off, ya know? Now if it's like "screwdrivers for smaller hands and larger hands" and I can pick my color and comfort, sure.
It's the "don't patronize me" thing really. AND it would help guys with smaller (than whatever the standard is) hands too. Assuming people don't get weird about it.
Slightly off topic, reminds me about sex toy reviewers complaining that everything comes in purple or pink because that's what sells lol.
I 100% agree with this, but not because of my gender.
I get this. It's a situation where it's not that anyone is incapable because of their gender it's that there's a disparate impact on women caused by systemic issues in representation in design and leadership.
I don't expect anyone to agree because of their gender. My gender, squishy as it is, informs my experience.
Those plastic clam shell packages are not all that common now that most stuff is sold online. For food it’s mostly safety. Jars have to be vacuum sealed to keep bacteria out.
Can you give some examples of packaging you feel are class warfare? On the whole, poorer people are more likely to have blue collar jobs, so I'd actually expect them to be better at opening difficult packaging. When I worked in fast food, the rich kids could never figure out packaging.
For everyone who's got grip issues, the OXO Jar Opener is my go-to tool. /u/chocobean's strap wrench is effective, but not easy to keep clean or store in a kitchen.
Keeping it positive, I understand that most people encounter ergonomic issues on a day-to-day basis. Designing for the middle of the (young) adult male normal distribution of size and strength leaves out at least half of the human population, especially since many of the reference tables are still based on military recruits from a few generations ago.
Based on recent global research, this table shows the current distribution of grip strength by gender. Opening a jar lid is an even trickier task to design for properly, because it's also dependent on things like handspan, finger strength, fat pad thickness, and skin friction (did you know that fingerprint ridges tend to disappear with age?).
I suspect there's a great deal of inertia in designing away ergonomic obstacles for consumers because capitalism and "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". There are products I don't buy anymore because they're too hard to use (i.e. modern minimalist carafes or insulated cups without handles). I'm now a shopper in the vast marketplace for shoddily-made, overpriced assistive devices, when I'd rather most things were made better and with more adjustability. That comes with costs for the initial design innovation and the sometimes small populations served - the $1,000 Aeron chair did eventually become the much cheaper office standard. Same with motorized desks and work tops.
Meanwhile, we can keep filing consumer complaints, boycotting the stuff that obviously doesn't work well, and hoping for regulations that elevate accessibility and usability.
OXO is generally great for accessibility since that's part of why the brand was created.
Do you mean handleless mugs or something like a thermos? I'm having a hard time picturing what you mean.
Both, depending on the diameter.
There's a specific brand of salsa I get regularly that comes in a jar with a wide lid, and I (male) and my boyfriend both have regularly struggled to open it. I think the jar has a wider lid than most other jars. There have been many times where we both gave up on having salsa because we couldn't open it. When I found myself seriously considering breaking the jar with a hammer, I finally realized there must actually be good jar-opening tools and I ordered one. (It works great. If you've ever had a jar that you struggled with or made your wrist sore from, buy one! It should be a kitchen staple.)
It makes me wonder if we're really both far below average in jar-opening skill, or if the specific jar really can't even be opened by people of average jar-opening skill. Even before getting into gender, it feels like a surprisingly suboptimal situation around a normal grocery store product. I wonder how many people even buy this specific salsa and successfully open it. How many people have stopped attempting to purchase it because of the difficulty? It almost makes me want to wait in the store next to the jar and quiz the next person who grabs one how they manage to open it. Or it makes me want to count and mark the jars in the store so I can tell if anyone else is even buying them. Maybe I'm the only one that didn't get the memo the jar is impossible to open. Maybe I could ask random people off the street to attempt opening the jar to see how many people out of ten random people can even open it. I wonder if the jar being sold near jar-opening tools or having instructions on how to open it would bump the sales of the salsa.
Did prying the lip of the lid out a bit with a spoon not work to break the seal and let it be opened easily?
Even as a guy, I sometimes struggle opening certain jars. I know for certain products, like Talenti ice cream jars, the temperature causes the lid to shrink onto the threads. But for others, it has to just be poor design. When I lived with my parents, I'd sometimes use my mom's dull coconut blade to just stretch lids enough to break the seal and open certain jars (that we knew we wouldn't close again).
As the top comment mentions though, the seemingly small problem of poorly designed jars just highlights just how poorly designed the world as a whole still is, especially for women. As a car guy, it both boggles my mind and doesn't surprise me at all that crash tests didn't even have women dummies until fairly recently. There have even been cars that manufacturers claim were designed for women but those have basically only just focused on women stereotypes rather than actually engineering the car for the average woman.
When my sister and I lived together by ourselves, this was a serious nuisance, especially since we both have small hands.
I keep rubber bands in the kitchen to wrap around stubborn container lids, but beverage bottles out in public are still an issue.