The genius behind the stick figure toilet signs, BBC Future (2014): "One of the best early examples of intuitive global signs for public lavatories was that created for British Rail in the mid-1960s. The stick-figure pictograms were popularized with their introduction by British Rail in the 1960s. ^ a b Sex-segregated public bathrooms existed since at least the 1880s, originally labelled in writing.^ Niki Simpson, Botanical symbols: a new symbol set for new images, Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, Volume 162, Issue 2, February 2010, Pages 117–129."The Origin of the Male and Female Symbols of Biology". In mainland China, silhouettes of heads in profile may be used as gender pictograms, generally alongside the written words ( 男 for male and 女 for female). In many locations, a realistic or cartoonish image or figurine of a man and woman or boy and girl are used, often themed to the establishment. In the United States, accessibility laws require both pictograms and geometric symbols be used, either together or separately, with the genealogical symbols of a circle ○ for female, triangle △ for male, and triangle inscribed in a circle ? ( ) for unisex, while in Poland a circle ○ and inverted triangle ▽ are used without a pictogram.
The modern symbols originate from use in the British Rail system, but are abstracted to varying degrees in different countries – for example, the circle-and-triangle variants (female) and (male) commonly found on portable toilets, to the extreme of a triangle △ (representing a dress) for female and an inverted triangle ▽ (representing broad shoulders) for male used in Lithuania. In public schools, the pictograms may be of children rather than of adults, with the girl distinguished by her hair.
Since the 1960s, male and female pictograms that were developed for the British rail system – often color-coded blue and red – have become the norm for marking public toilets in much of the world, with the female symbol distinguished by a triangular skirt or dress, and in early years the male symbol stylized like a tuxedo. Schoolhouse outhouses in the 19th-century United States had ventilation holes in their doors that were shaped like a starburst Sun ✴ or like a crescent Moon ☾, respectively, to indicate whether it was the boys' or the girls' toilet. Main articles: Public toilet § Society and culture, and Unisex public toilet This convention was quite influential for a time, and his convention of prioritizing male kin by placing them to the left and females to the right continues to this day (though there have been exceptions, such as Margaret Mead, who placed females to the left). R River distinguished gender in the words of the language being recorded by writing male kinship terms in all capitals and female kinship terms with normal capitalization. īefore a shape distinction was adopted, all individuals had been represented by a circle in Morgan's 1871 System of Consanguinity and Affinity of Human Family, where gender is encoded in the abbreviations for the kin relation (e.g. Pedigree charts published in scientific papers use an earlier anthropological convention of a square □ for male and a circle ○ for female. Kinship charts use a triangle △ for male and circle ○ for female. Minimal kinship chart: a male and female producing male and female offspring They are sometimes abstracted to ▽ for male and △ for female. The modern international pictograms used to indicate male and female public toilets, ? and ?, became widely used in the 1960s and 1970s. These are also used on public toilets in some countries. In genealogy, including kinship in anthropology and pedigrees in animal husbandry, the geometric shapes △ or □ are used for male and ○ for female. In his Mantissa Plantarum (1767) and Mantissa Plantarum altera (1771), Carl Linnaeus regularly used the planetary symbols of Mars, Venus and Mercury – ♂, ♀, ☿ – for male, female and hermaphroditic (perfect) flowers, respectively. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols.Ī gender symbol is a pictogram or glyph used to represent sex and gender, for example in biology and medicine, in genealogy, or in the sociological fields of gender politics, LGBT subculture and identity politics. This article contains special characters.