You can have a female founders conference, whose purpose is to uplift women, and allow men to be there as well. True story: I once attended a "women in tech" style conference as a hiring manager looking for potential recruits, and I won a random drawing for a prize. It was a purse with a company logo on it. Yes, it felt pretty sexist that no one expected a man would be there.
I'm sorry you didn't like the prize, but is it such a stretch that prizes at a women-in-tech conference would be targeted at women in tech?
You might not realize it, but women face a similar issue all the time at conferences/events where "unisex" (really men's) cut t-shirts are given out. These t-shirts are generally quite flattering on men and not-so-flattering on women, so I'd argue they're the woman's equivalent of your purse.
I went to the Grace Hopper conference this year and it was very refreshing to see that every company that gave out t-shirts used female cuts, since those are t-shirts I'll actually wear!
>You might not realize it, but women face a similar issue all the time at conferences/events where "unisex" (really men's) cut t-shirts are given out. These t-shirts are generally quite flattering on men and not-so-flattering on women, so I'd argue they're the woman's equivalent of your purse.
Erm. This kind of makes a lot of assumptions about what 'flattering on women' means. Which of course begs the question about a lot of possible latent sexism at play in your response.
The sorts of t-shirts given out at conferences don't fit anyone. They're generic pieces of cloth that wear like drapes. Hanes Beefy-Ts. That you think they're appropriate for men but not women kinda speaks volumes. Drapes over pecs are fine, but not breasts? Why? What would make a women's t-shirt fit in a more 'flattering' manner? Tighter? More forming to curves on the waist and breasts? Looser, more baggy? Why would that particular fit be flattering?
Also why is the goal to have a 'flattering' t-shirt -- which implies impressing other people, being an object for everyone else's gaze -- rather than a t-shirt that you like? It's sexism against women if we don't provide t-shirts that are 'flattering' to the people looking at her?
They're designed it seems for a man who's 5'10 and 170lbs or something and then just scaled linearly in both X and Y. That's not how human beings scale, though.
As a guy who's 6'3 and a bit more torso than legs I feel like I would need to be at least 250-275lbs for an XL shirt (which I need to wear so it's long enough) to not look like a sail.
This isn't a problem unique to women, it's unique to anyone who's not a 5'10 170lbs man; the mannequin they designed the shirt for.
I don't think it's equivalent. Handing out T-shirts that are clearly labeled "unisex" suggests you are trying to accomodate both men and women. Maybe you could accuse someone of ignorance about how unisex T-shirts fit women (I never knew unisex didn't fit women), but I wouldn't accuse them of sexism, quite the opposite because they clearly intended to accomodate.
