Chinese parking lot creates 'women-only' spaces for bad female drivers

One of the most beloved and universal stereotypes of all time is that women can't drive. If only they had a phallus -- the genital responsible for driving -- the world would be a safer place. 

At the Tonglu Service Area located next to the Hangxinjing highway in southeast China, parking lot officials decided to take this wildly inaccurate theory seriously. They designed extra wide "women-only" spaces specifically for female drivers, and painted them the universal color of women: pink. Because clearly, women only feel safe parking their cars in softer, maternal palettes.

The eight spaces are an estimated 50 percent larger than the other spaces. There are approximately 370 spaces total in the lot. 

Pan Zhuren, director of Tonglu, told China’s Qianjiang Evening News that he created the spaces after noticing that women were struggling with parking. Some didn't know how to reverse, and others parked recklessly, causing disorder.

"Yes, these are parking spaces ‘customized’ for women," Zhuren told Qianjiang Evening News. "It’s part of measures we’ve introduced to humanize the service area."

Parking lots: they just need that human touch.

Now, women in the rest area will get the once-in-a-lifetime chance to feel slightly offended every time they park their car. 

Though the parking spaces were added in March, they first caught the attention and fury of social media over the weekend.

"True respect for women entails letting women enjoy the same rights as men," one user on Sina Weibo, China's Twitter, wore. 

Women-only parking spaces aren't new: there are spaces like them in Australia, Switzerland, and Germany. In countries like Germany, however, spots were created to protect women from sexual assault, not prevent "reckless parking."

Interestingly, traffic mortality rates are an estimated three times as high for men as for women in China. Yet highways, for now, remain gender-neutral. 

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