A Chinese shopping mall has opened a special parking lot for female drivers, demonstrating China buys into the stereotype that Asian women are bad drivers.
A shopping center in Xi’an, Shaanxi recently created a parking area for females, complete with parking spaces that are 4.1 feet wider than a standard parking space, the People’s Daily reported on Saturday.
The new parking area is pink, features a bilingual sign which read’s “Female Parking,” and contains parking spaces 12.3 feet wide. A normal space is only 8.2 feet wide.
“There are over 2,000 spaces at the mall. The most convenient spaces are the 12 super-wide parking spaces for women,” a mall security guard told Sohu News.
For inexperienced drivers, backing into a space, the norm in China, is a real challenge — but, wider spaces make it easier to back in.
Mall management reportedly told Sohu that this is not discrimination: rather, the installation of larger parking spaces for women is an act of kindness.
The shopping center explained that the wider spaces are there to “protect female drivers,” indicating that the wider spaces are there to protect female drivers from themselves.
This is not the first time China has set up discriminatory female parking spaces. In May, China’s Xinhua News Agency reported on eight super-wide, pink parking spaces designed for women at the Tonglu highway service area in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. A number of outraged Chinese citizens called the special female parking spaces sexist and misogynistic.
Pan Tieyong, the director of the Tonglu Highway service area in Hangzhou, told Xinhua that the wider spaces were specifically-designed to help “female drivers with sub-par driving skills.”
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