Larger Parking Spaces For Women: Long Live Inequality?

Be it compliment or insult, the facts remain that a shopping center in China is offering women drivers bigger-than-normal parking spaces to accommodate what its backers see as their “special needs.”

Aimed to “address women’s strong sense of color and different sense of distance,” the policy of the shopping center in Hebei province’s Shijiazhuang city is controversial to say the least.

The spaces are “one meter (about three feet) wider than normal parking spaces and the mall installed signs and security monitoring equipment that corresponded more to women’s needs,” says Wang Zheng, an official at the Wanxiang Tiancheng shopping center.

Regardless of the chauvinism which certainly appears to be there, one fact remains clear; driving in China is notoriously perilous and more than 73,000 people died in car accidents in the last year, which according to police statistics, boils down to over 200 fatalities per day!

Is this an attempt at fair play or gender-based scorn? One could easily argue either point of view. It is as difficult to believe that all women are born with the same inabilities for parking a car, as it is to believe they enter this world with the same degrees of intelligence and aptitudes for particular subjects.

What about Chinese men who don’t park well? Does this mean they should don women’s clothes and drive around incognito for the sake of maintaining this silly new parking space regulation?

It does seem rather absurd even though one can suspect that the motives behind this novel situation were well intentioned.

But then again, isn’t that what they also say about what paves the road to hell?

Think about it.

How do YOU feel about this?

(Link)

By MDeeDubroff on 10-01-2010