Women's Parking

Last year in Germany, I took a lift with a friend. She drove up and down the car park, desperately hunting for a parking space.

"Hmm, are there any Frauenparkplätze (women's parking spaces) here?", she wondered aloud.

"Excuse me? Frauenparkplätze? What, because they think women can't park very well and need a special space to enable them to do so?", I enquired, baffled that such lazy sexism could exist so institutionally in such a progressive modern nation. 

My friend chuckled.

"Nein nein", she replied. "They're the closest spaces to the building; it's safer for women."

Oh, that's okay! I thought, for a split second. Nobody's needlessly reinforcing stupid gender stereotypes, it's just a safety thing!

Then the bleak fact that it had been deemed necessary to install especially-for-women car parking spaces closer to whatever the carpark was there to facilitate (in this instance, a train station) to help prevent them from falling victim to a mugging, an assault, or rape, dawned on me.

How naïve I was for that split second. 

Photo credit: Wikimedia