Myth of Women's Specific Bikes

Women's specific bikes have been around for many years and on the surface it's feels like a useful thing. After all we have women's specific things in other areas, like clothes or shoes; why wouldn't women need their own bikes?https://youtu.be/460geLUCTm4The problem is that the bike manufacturers that build these machines would have you believe that the entire bike was re-engineered in all areas to suit the riding needs of women. When in fact, the reality most of the time is that the most of the components of the bike, including the frame, are the same as a "men's" bike with "female" aesthetic touches, link pink/purple/baby blue accents and bar tape. Perhaps they use a slightly narrower handlebar, and a wider/softer saddle, and voila, we have a women's specific bike.The most telling issue here is that the frames are either identical to the men's bike or barely different so as not to be useful if in fact there should be a difference between men's and women's bikes. Much of the time, a manufacturer will take he men's size "small" and call it a women's "medium", the men's medium becomes the women's large, etc. Occasionally they will add a size on the small end of the spectrum, calling it either a small or x-small, but the irony here is that this size bike will be the best fit for many shorter men as well.Which brings me to the critical point of this article -- men and women will the vast majority of the time fit the same size bikes. Some women should ride bigger bikes, just as some men should ride smaller ones. Are women generally smaller and therefore gravitate to smaller sizes? Sure, but there's nothing to suggest that they would benefit from a geometry any different than their size-matched male counterparts.But don't women have longer inseams and shorter arms? This will affect bike fit, correct? It would if it were pervasively true but this is a generalization that isn't true frequent enough to offset the truth that there's also a large group of males who fall into this category.Recently I had a viewer ask me about whether it was normal for men to be riding on women's saddles. In factI've had many instances where men have found their best match in what is deemed and marketed as a women's saddle.If we assume that there's a need for race bikes as well as varying degrees of relaxed geometries, with shorter effective top tubes and longer head tubes, then I would put the issue this way -- men and women in equal measure will need geometry that is more relaxed or race focused.I take no issue with a manufacturer trying to appeal to female riders with different aesthetic touches, but don't try to sell us the myth that the geometry of the bike has been carefully tuned to a woman's needs and body dimensionsTo reinforce this point further, let me illustrate this with perhaps the most pervasive notion - that women's hips/pelvis' are wider and therefore they need wider saddles. Let's use sit bone width as merely a starting point for required saddle width -- although there are a lot of reasons that this fails as a useful metric in choosing saddles, but that's another article/video.