Sexism or just bad marketing?

[UnderwaterSpaceCadet]

I don’t usually post here so apologies if it’s not the right place.

I was just on the H&M website and I noticed that under the “women’s” section they had a category of “Dog Clothes & Accessories”. This isn’t listed under any other section. I actually found it pretty offensive as clearly women aren’t dogs.

It’s probably a small thing to get annoyed by, but WTF?

My guess is that someone on the web team cocked up.

Yes I agree if that's the case and suggests that only women are still enough to want to dress their dogs up, when it fact, lots of men do too.

Probably - but it’s a bit of a cock up!

Men do dress their dogs up but I'd say demographically it's more likely to be women so I don't see any issue with it being put under 'Women' as somewhere to list it just like handbags and jewellery - which men also like to wear. Be a bit weird to create a whole menu item in the navigation of the website just for dogs.

It's probably more likely women will buy dog accessories from somewhere like H&M.

Or that they didn't want to set up an entire pet section of the website and had to site it somewhere.

Which is sexism.

Lots of gay men dress up their little dogs.

It's both

They're a big company - they can afford decent IT support who can create a whole new tab for "pets"

Not that it would occur to me to buy something for a dog to wear from H&M!

They have a “sports” section and a “home” section - dog stuff could have been in either of those.

And as stated, there are men who like to wear dresses but we don't purposely move those into the mens section. Is that sexism too?

Honestly, there are many things I could get worked up about but dog's coats being listed in the women's section is not it.

But the dresses are (presumably) designed for women - if men want to wear them, then whatever, but they’re the ones not using them as designed. There’s nothing inherent in dog clothing to make them more appropriate for female body types.

I don’t like a) the assumption that only women want to dress their dogs up and b) making the implicit association between women and dogs in the women’s clothing section, given the gendered insults that are typically thrown at us.

Was it matching dog and wpmens clothes?

No, just dog clothes & accessories as far as I could see

Jesus wept! It's not rocket science to understand that the main purchasers of dog apparel are female.

'Women are more likely than men to dress their pets in clothes (70% vs 50%)'

www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2022/12/09/2571042/0/en/Pet-Clothing-Market-to-Touch-Valuation-of-7-3-Billion-by-2028-Over-60-Revenue-to-Comes-from-Dog-Owners-SkyQuest-Technology.html

Still nothing to do with women’s clothes though.

Women don’t wear or use dog accessories. There are other sections it could be under.

Or maybe cockered up.
😉😁😁

The main purchases of home accessories tends to be women too, but that gets its own category

It's not really than hard to create a new category for pets

It's possibly just poor logic or accidental.

I was in Dunkin donuts the other day trying to use the self service machine to order a latte, tapped the 'coffee' category and no options for latte, tried the 'hot drinks' option, no latte. Went to the counter and apparently I should have been looking under the 'handcrafted drinks' option.

Sometimes the people categorising or designing the systems don't use logic.

They're probably just introducing it so don't want to put it in the top level menu and will be doing marketing that pushes people directly into those pages. Plus there's the cross sell opportunity for the soft launch.

Laughing at the comment it's some guy in IT suport who sorts out what's on their website

50% of male pet owners is still a lot of potential customers who may remain unaware of their products. 5:7 isn't a massively disparate ratio.

"women and dogs" isn't a great look for a website category, is it really!

I saw (on Facebook I think) an ad pop up for a “men’s” dog coat - I did wonder why it was in the men’s section. Not sure this is sexist, just lazy website management.

There are far bigger and more important things to get into a lather about. Life is exhausting if you continually look for something to be aghast about. This is a non-issue.

They are a big enough company to create a 'pet' section. Sexist, IMO. Plenty of men dress up their dogs.