What other potentially life changing inventions are currently being stalled because those judging them are looking at them with gendered or other biased lenses?
Opinion: I just devoured the fine print of a travel insurance policy like it was the final Bridgerton episode.
After what seems like a lifetime, this Kiwi is about to fly. To London to work and then onto France to play.
I feel like I’m back at school being released from the last class before the summer holidays. It’s the anticipation of the delights of in-flight movies and the oversized bottles of gin waiting for me at duty-free.
All rose-tinted mind you. There is no jet lag or cabin fever in my daydreams.
I have already dragged out my suitcase and brushed off the dust. It’s a solid beast that will hopefully protect the bottles of pinot and jars of marmite my UK-based family have asked for.
Given I will be packed to within a gram of my weight limit, I am thankful my suitcase has robust wheels.
But reading Katrine Marҫal’s Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored In An Economy Built For Men, I realise I shouldn’t take those wheels for granted.
She writes about an American fellow named Bernard Sadow who, in 1970, sweaty and cursing from lugging his family’s suitcases, spotted an airport worker driving a machine pulling a wheeled pallet.
Cue lightbulb.
At home he unscrewed four castors from his wardrobe and stuck them on his suitcase. He pitched his idea hard, but all American department stores rejected his suitcase on wheels.
You see, suitcases are for carrying, not pulling around on wheels, he was told. The buyers were most probably men and men carried suitcases, preferably leather ones with sturdy handles.
Luckily for me, the idea re-surfaced in the 1980s as more women started to travel alone (without men to carry their luggage). As women traveling solo became normal, so did the need for suitcases that women could manage alone.
Then in the late 1980s air crew started wheeling their suitcases across the terminal floors. Wheels on suitcases became associated with the glamour and freedom of air travel and every luggage label started to produce their own version.
Marҫal concludes that ‘the suitcase started to roll when we changed our perspective on gender: that men must carry, and women’s mobility must be limited’.
Today I doubt many men would think twice about using a suitcase on wheels. I doubt any would consider that their masculinity is at stake by pulling a case behind them. I also doubt that many women are waiting for a bloke to carry their suitcase either.
But it does make me wonder.
What other potentially life changing inventions are currently being stalled because those judging them are looking at them with gendered or other biased lenses?
And if attitudes towards suitcases can change so markedly and rapidly, what other gendered attitudes could change quickly as well?
So next time you pack PJs ready to fly, just think about how there nearly was a world without rolling luggage.
