“Great shirt/jacket/climbing shoes, but it comes only in pink!” That’s what a complaint of an outdoors woman in an outdoor shop may sound like. Let’s face it: gender stereotypes hold our society firmly in their grasp. Even the toughest women, with climbs so hard that they put to shame many a man, can’t easily avoid pink outdoor clothes, even if they would like to. Supply is simply limited. Or maybe not?

How is it really? How much women’s outdoor equipment is actually pink? And what about the men’s wear? Who could know?

…sudden silence…

Me, of course! I used a mighty computer kung-fu and downloaded all images of clothes and shoes from internet shops sport-outdoor.sk and hudy.sk [1] Approximately 5000 images overall. Offer of both shops covers most of the major brands., cut out the background from them and made a statistics of colors used for both men’s and women’s items. [2]In short: python, scrapy, numpy, mpld3 and this code of floodfil algorithm with treshold. Here is my source code

Here are the results in the form of two most colorful plots I have ever created.

It’s immediately obvious that women’s items really tend towards violet, turquoise, red and yes, pink too. Men’s wear, on the other hand, tends (surprisingly) towards, yellow, green, orange and (unsurprisingly) towards dark colors. The color blue is interesting, because contrary to the stereotype perpetuated by color coded children clothes, blue doesn’t dominate for men. Differences between men’s and women’s clothes are however smaller than 10% percent of all items.

Moral of the story? Maybe this: that pink creature at the beginning of the article is not just some random girl, but Sasha DiGuilian, one of the best female climbers in the world and a huge fan of everything pink (if you don’t trust me, take a single look at her personal page or read some of her interviews). So the moral is, wear whatever you like, even pink if you want to. Maybe you too will onsight some 8b+ then, and even if not, at least you will be happier :)