Why is there men's and women's bikes?

I think the bar was first lower on women’s bikes so women could ride their bikes in a skirt or dress with less chance of giving the world a show.

the high bar gives the bike more structural integrity. this is needed because men tend to be more rough with their bikes. my explanation

Likeradar is mostly right. Though there were a lot of men wanted the show. It is also hard for someone in a dress to swing thier leg over the bar without risking getting tangled and really giving a show.

…i’m guessing that men “just don’t get it”...we figure “if it aint broke don’t fix it”...

…but to give us, men, the benefit of a doubt, i agree with likeradar and add that for engineering reasons, specifically to accommodate men’s heavier weights in comparison to women’s lighter weights is a basis for the bar’s location or absence…

@Likeradar is right, at least from what I was taught.

When I was a kid, I thought it should have been the other way around so a guy is less likely to hit his testicles on the high bar…

In the words of the cult classic Kindergarden Cop

“boys have a penis, girls have a vagina”

…here’s another guess: a member of the fairer sex, not the man who has the credit, is actually responsible for the bicycle’s invention…purely speculating, some of us, men, could be seeing the addition of spikes to the bar in the near future (a silent laugh to my late night quality joke)...

I have always wondered about this. I hate the look of girl’s bikes, and was the only girl I knew way back in the late 70s to ride a guy’s ten speed bike by choice. Now that I’m getting old and creaky, I might make a different choice were I to buy a bike today.

Mountain bikes are good, they are sort of inbetween!

The lower bar on a womens bike is so they can get on and off the bike easier with or without a skirt . Its un-lady like for a female to have to howke her leg over a high bar she should be able to slip on the bike, as if she were floating in the air .

What if a woman wants to ride one of these though? I don’t think they make a men and women’s version.

There is a few versions of the penny all go by different names .

So-called girls’ bikes were designed for modesty. Women and girls commonly wore skirts instead of pants until relatively recently.

This being said – bikes that are designed for men do not fit women very well. The ratio of top tube length to down tube length, in particular, is wrong for women because they generally have longer legs in proportion to their total height. Handlebars tend to be too wide, brake levers don’t fit their smaller hands, and so forth.

Engineer Georgena Terry grew disgusted with bicycle sexism and started her own company. She began designing bikes specifically for women. Most have a horizontal top tube, but the frame design is set up for a woman’s proportions. You can view here wares here:

http://www.terrybicycles.com

Petite women have the most to gain from Terry’s designs. A woman who is taller can get by with a bike made primarily for men by swapping out some parts and getting a good fit.

Also, seats are different, I guess, because our asses are different. Women’s seats are much wider, a fact I discovered when my seat died and I borrowed my wife’s bicycle seat. One day of that, and I was at the bike store! Ouch!

My wife and daughter don’t care. We only have one type of bike.

So we could have little baby trikes. Aren’t unicycles banned in the St Schwinn version of the Bible?