The simple answer is that women's fashion is driven by appearance, not by function. That's not universally true—plenty of modern designs incorporate pockets—but many do not. Designers might assume that women carry purses or that they'd prefer form-flattering clothes over functional options.

"We [women] know clearly we need pockets to carry technology and I think it's expected we are going to carry a purse," Camilla Olson, creative director of a fashion firm that shares her name, told The Atlantic. "When we're working we don’t carry purses around. A pocket is a reasonable thing."

Olson went on to say that the fashion industry is keeping women "in a certain place" and preventing them from moving forward professionally by avoiding pockets.

That might sound like an overreaction, but it seems more reasonable in the context of the complicated history of the pocket. Prior to the 17th century, most people carried essential belongings with them, and pockets started as small bags that hung from the belt. Some time in the 1600s, the bags were sewn onto the inside of men's pants, and women started to wear their tied-on bags under their dresses, accessing them through slits in their clothing. That changed in the late 1700s and early 1800s when dress styles became too slim to accommodate the bags.

"The design of the times was 'Greek Goddesses.' Women ... would study the ancient texts and couldn't find pockets, so they didn't use them in the dress," Elizabeth Morano, a professor at Parsons School of Design, said of this era of fashion in an interview with Marketplace. "Some of those stories are just stories, but the line was a lot more sleek. Think of the neoclassical dress. It's straight up and down. The line of the clothing changes completely."

By the 19th century, some women had started pushing for equality in fashion. In an Aug. 28, 1899 piece in The New York Times, a tailor noted that some women asked for pockets in their bicycle "costumes" to hold revolvers.

"Not all of them want to carry a revolver," the tailor said, "but a large percentage do and make no 'bones' about saying so."

That New York Times piece also quoted an anonymous "Philosopher of Small Things" with this bit of tongue-in-cheek wisdom:

"Assuming that Adam and Eve both began life without any pockets, it seems to me that the difference in the progress of the sexes toward pockets illustrates and proves the superiority of the male. Man's pockets have developed, improved, and increased with the advances of civilization. Woman is actually retrograding—losing ground and pockets."

Over a century later, feminine fashion has certainly changed significantly in positive ways, but women's pockets don’t hold a candle (or anything else) to men's pockets. In 2018, research from The Pudding found that, on average, the pockets in women's jeans are 48 percent shorter and 6.5 percent narrower than men's pockets.

Of course, women are typically smaller than men, but the researchers measured jeans with the same 32-inch waistband. The jeans should have been made to fit the same size person, but pocket size still varied between the sexes.

Some designers believe that adding pockets to women's clothes (along with other functional improvements) could actually promote gender equality. For that to happen, women would have to purchase the new designs—and that could happen fairly soon, as pocketed dresses and pants are becoming more popular. A number of startups offer pocketed pants for female consumers, and proponents of change have started hashtags like #pocketequality to promote the movement.

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