Ladies, we all know the struggle of having jeans or pants with either the smallest, shallowest pocket or without one altogether.

If you’ve never stuck something in your front pants pocket and had it fall right out losing it forever, then you’re lucky. For the girls that have, I’m with you. It’s one of the worst feelings in the world having something fall out of the small pants pocket and feeling stupid for having lost it. We seem to get blamed for the missing thing even though if we could design the pants ourselves, we’d make the pockets deep enough to fit everything we needed.

Now there’s always the back pockets that seem deeper than the front pockets, if the pants even have the luxury of not sewing the back pocket shut. The thing about that is when you put stuff in your back pocket it just looks awkward. It looks as though your butt grew a lump, which is not cute.

So why do companies manufacture pants with shallow pockets? What’s the point? I decided to take matters into my own hands and do some research to figure out just why women’s pockets are the way they are.

While doing some digging, I found a clothing company called Kirrin Finch whose goal is to meet the demands of gender-defying fashion and creates clothing designed to fit females and non-binary bodies that are actually inspired by menswear. They supplied a lovely explanation to why women’s pockets are the way they are.

Pockets should equal gender equity — but they don’t

I’m not trying to bash on the advancement of gender equality throughout history because we all know that amazing strides have been accomplished, but this point kind of makes sense.

According to the article on the Kirrin Finch website, everyone before the 17th century carried everything in a bag, even men for that matter! Then when pockets were invented only men got them and women were forced to wear tied-on pockets under their garments, which was pointless since they were inaccessible.

Women didn’t receive pockets until World War 2 and of course that was only because they were doing jobs done by men. Once the war was over so were pockets for women.

Pockets “ruin” womens figures

According to the article found on Kirrin Finch’s website, another reason pockets in women’s clothing are so rare is because of the history of men dominating the fashion world and the sentiment that pockets ruin a woman’s body.

This shocked me but didn’t exactly surprise me. The fashion industry obviously cares more about how something looks rather than its function. On the runway I totally understand how it would be concerning how a woman looks but what if I need to hide pepper spray or a taser in case of being attacked? Wouldn’t it be smart to have a pocket deep enough to hide it? Also, it’s a lot easier to have a handbag stolen then to have something stolen out of a pocket.

Bigger pockets will bring down handbags sales

The third reason listed by the article is the fact that the purse industry, valued at $8 billion, would lose their value if pockets were put into place.

Yes, this is a good point, but I don’t think that this would do an incredible amount of damage to the industry considering a lot of people buy handbags by their looks rather than just for what they put into them. If that were the case, then people wouldn’t buy handbags for the crazy amount they sell for. Also, there are people who just collect handbags and don’t necessarily use them for holding things but for decoration.

Hopefully someday soon they’ll be more jeans and pants with deeper pockets for women.