Children’s bicycles are distinguished by gender in three ways: frame shape, paint (color and pattern), and name. “Girls’” bikes tend to have the bar connecting the handlebars with the seat post set lower than “boys’” bikes. The lower bar is meant to allow girls to get onto the bike without heaving a leg over the seat and thus showing their underpants. Very small bicycles--those with 12- and 16-inch wheels--tend to have more overtly gendered paint jobs and names than larger bikes for older children and adults. (More expensive bikes tend to be less gender specific also.)

The 16-inch options available at local discount stores and specialty bike shops included “Top Gun,” “Major Damage,” and “Chaos” for boys, and “Miss Daisy,” “Little Foxx,” and “Miss Rocker” for girls. That is, the boy’s bikes have names reminiscent of armies, space warfare, or reckless driving, and girl’s bikes are the vehicular equivalent of Barbies.

The two matching Huffy bikes on display are “Looney Tunes,” which come in both a girl’s and boy’s version, distinguished by color scheme and frame shape. The gender-coding of these bikes is mild compared to what else is available, and at least the bikes have the same name. The owner added the pink and purple baskets so that the kids who ride the bikes could carry snacks and a water bottle.

What is it that the gendered bikes are supposed to respond to anyway? Manufacturers might argue that girls, for example, want bikes called “Happy Daisies,” that such products are an expression of their identity as girls, and shouldn’t be denied them. But when we buy things for children and those things always come in two “kinds”—one for girls and one for boys—we are sorting the world and its experiences for them, laying out a sign-system of gendered experiences before they even get a chance to figure out if gender has a place in that experience or not. Taken together all the pink things mean that girls are never supposed to forget while riding a bike, or playing with other toys, that they are girls and that being a girl makes a big difference all the time. The same goes for boys, although boys’ bikes tend to be the “unmarked” category of bicycles, just as masculine gender is understood as the “norm” and thus less marked as a gender than femininity.

Suggested Reading:
Bem, Sandra Lipsitz. The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
-----. An Unconventional Family. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Burke, Phyllis. Gender Shock. New York: Doubleday, 1996.

Devor, Holly. Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Lorber, Judith. Paradoxes of Gender. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.