An interesting phenomenon recently popped up in my Media & Culture Studies course. We have been studying gender and how it plays a role in society. For example, the color pink usually correlates with girls, and blue usually correlates with boys. My professor assigned us a project where each person in the class needed to go to a place (a retail shop) and observe gender and see if there are any gender differences between men and women.
I picked H&M, a predominately women's clothing store. I went into the store and took notes on my phone different things I observed. I ended up going to H&M three times in order to get a complete idea with primary research.
As I said, H&M is a predominantly women's clothing store, but they do sell men's clothes, but they were very generic clothing. By that, I mean that all the clothing that was available to men were basic, there were whites shirts, graphic T-shirts, jeans, shorts, and the list goes on. These are all generic clothing in my eyes because no guys that I know own a pair of jeans, or a graphic T-shirt and so on!
The women's clothing had all sorts of styles, patterns, colors, and sizes. The women's section had graphic T-shirts, casual wear, business wear and more. The women's section had everything that the men's section had times two.
Look at these two images of men's clothing at H&M and women's clothing at H&M. The men's clothes consist of button-downs, T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers, whereas the women's clothing looks silky and has a beautiful floral pattern on it. You can easily tell that the material is silky. The picture of the men is very simple, it just looks like a couple of friends posing for a picture, it does not look like models modeling for clothing. The picture of the women modeling clearly looks like models posing. The clothes aren't casual like the men's photo, but they definitely stand out so much more.
I ended up concluding that H&M is a very female-oriented store, which is okay, some stores target to females, others target to males. But the ones that do market to both men and women only seem to sell generic clothing for men. There are rarely any "daring clothing," colors, patterns and so on. This idea suggests that women are better suited for shopping and that they should be the ones doing the shopping, while men should not be spending too much time on their appearance unless they want to be gay or vain.
So yes, there are still gender barriers in society and retail. It was all very interesting to observe and even more interesting to learn about. I am not a feminist, nor an anti-feminist. I respect people's beliefs, and the only thing I think is that there should be some more gender neutral clothes and people need to stop thinking that pink is girly and blue is boy-like. People can like what they like and that is it!
