Rainboots and Gender

[A not entirely serious reflection on the issues presented.]

What got me thinking about this is a male colleague who likes to say, whenever it rains, "I hate wet" - it occurred to me during yesterday's rainstorm that he might not mind it as much if he were wearing rainboots rather than dress shoes, and keeping his feet dry.  Then I started looking around and noticed this local phenomenon:

Only women wear rain boots or galoshes in the rain. Men wear sneakers, loafers, dress shoes, or (rarely) work boots; no wellies. Is this a truth universally acknowledged? Or just American (east coast) urban business areas?

It's clearly a matter of convention, but a curious one.  As if rainboots are OK for women and children, but not for men.  And of those three groups, only women voluntarily choose to wear them (at least in my experience, children wear them under protest).

The funny thing about it is that rainboots are not inherently feminine -- to the contrary, they are emphatically utilitarian and unisex in form.  They are not flattering to the female leg, even though one can get them with cute decorative colors and designs.

Some of my correspondents have pointed out that there is a practical reason for male office workers to eschew rainboots - they would have to carry spare shoes for the office (or else clunk around in boots all day), and their shoes are bigger than ours (more annoying to carry) and they don't typically carry bags or purses that could contain such shoes, etc. etc.

But I think it goes beyond the merely practical, to a sense that manly men can "tough it out" or something; that it is somehow a weakness to adapt one's footwear to the elements in a torrential downpour.  Men could easily wear the rubber slipcovers that they used to decades ago (my dad among them), but I haven't seen this in modern-day NYC.