Chinese Shopping Mall Caters to Female Drivers By Giving Them Bigger Parking Spaces

August 29, 2016

One shopping mall in China has dedicated special parking spaces for female drivers with slots wider than the usual. While it may look as a nice gesture to assist in easier parking for the ladies, it does kind of reinforce the stereotype that Asian women are terrible at driving.

People’s Daily reported that the shopping center in Xi’an has recently unveiled its female-only parking areas that are colored in pink and feature parking spaces that are 12.3 feet wide, 4.1 feet wider than the standard width of 8.2 feet. Not to be missed, a sign in both Chinese and English reads “Female Parking.”

“There are over 2,000 spaces at the mall. The most convenient spaces are the 12 super-wide parking spaces for women,” the mall’s guard told Sohu News.

The management of the shopping center explained that the installation of larger parking spaces for women should be seen as an act of kindness rather than discrimination as making the spaces wider was essentially intended to “protect female drivers.”

According to Global Times, many female drivers are loving it:

“I’ve been to that shopping mall and I can park my car easily in just one try,” said a woman who just started driving.

“I can easily open my door and there’s room for a shopping cart,” one customer wrote on the mall’s WeChat account.

“The pink makes me feel like a teenage girl again,” a netizen posted.

A similar “act of kindness” was met with outrage earlier this year after eight ridiculously wide, parking spaces, painted in pink, were set up for women at the Tonglu highway service area in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. According to Xinhua, critics have called the female parking spaces sexist and misogynistic.

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