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An April 2024 survey by the Women’s Engineering Society revealed that more than 35% of women found personal protective equipment (PPE) and apparel uncomfortable or ill-fitting.
The textile industry, however, has seen strides in addressing these concerns, with changes to standards and market forces finally moving products away from a one-size-fits-all or unisex approach in protective gear that has focused on the male body only. Better fit in women’s gear means better worker productivity, job satisfaction and safety.
‘Shrink it and pink it’
“I don’t think it’s a new problem that we’re tackling,” says Xochil Herrera Scheer, president and apparel engineer at The Chicago Pattern Maker in Shorewood, Ill., which provides professional product development, pattern making and fashion design services to brand clients and businesses throughout the country. “I think [women] are just getting louder about it and allowing it to be addressed because of more diversity in the workplace.”
There’s a term in the industry, she shares, based on the idea of simply creating clothing for women based on men’s gear and making it smaller. “It’s known as ‘shrink it and pink it,’” she says.
“I love pink,” she adds, “but I think if I was working in industries where women are working hard to dispel gender stereotypes, they don’t want to necessarily stand out from their male peers by wearing pink.”
Fit affects job performance
Herrera Scheer points out safety issues with disproportionately sized women’s garments. “If it’s baggy and you have to pick up your pants because the rise is too low before you can walk or run appropriately, say in a firefighter situation, or you’ve got to be quick when rolling up sleeves or adjusting your collar on your jacket, those could be seconds that are critical to your job performance,” she says.
Dria Brown is a firefighter paramedic with the Nimishillen Township Fire Department in Stark County, Ohio, and has experienced these issues firsthand.
“I’ve climbed through windows and up ladders and carried dummies and done rescue stuff with gear that doesn’t fit well,” she says, “and it can be scary. I’m restricted in how I can act, and because we do a lot of high-risk things, being able to move appropriately in gear is very important.”
She adds, “If your gear is too large, you can have issues with steam burns. I’ve gotten steam burns quite a few times.”
Melissa Dixon, director of product management at National Safety Apparel (NSA) based in Cleveland, Ohio, concurs with the safety concern. She focuses on PPE that addresses these issues, such as Enespro®, primarily in the metals and electrical safety space.
“Having a man’s garment not only is not going to help you do your job effectively, but it can truly be hazardous, especially if you’re talking about oversized things,” Dixon says. “You can get snagged on pieces of machinery, and you can have trips, slips and falls when garments are too long and baggy and impair mobility.”
Heather Meitl is an account manager at Beverly Knits, a circular knit fabric manufacturer in Gastonia, N.C. She works mainly in military fabrics and shares that in the past couple of years, “there’s been a shift in services to modify uniforms to be more fitting to women.”
Shifts are also being made in law enforcement, says Steven LaGanke, global market leader for the defense segment at DuPont in Richmond, Va., which produces, among other things, Kevlar® EXO™ body armor vests. He notes that in the 1970s, U.S. law enforcement was about 3% female. “Today,” he says, “it’s about 13% and is expected to be around 30% by 2030.”
LaGanke regularly interacts with many law enforcement personnel, including taking part in the annual National Law Enforcement Police Officers Week. “Most women won’t accept a one-size-fits-all. They want something that fits their body and allows them to perform their job.”
Herrera Scheer concurs that a better fit aids job success. “I’ve learned about these issues working with different brands. Well-fitting clothes make you better able to concentrate on your true job. Whether it’s fire, construction or anything else, everyone must work with their colleagues, male and female, so feeling prepared, feeling comfortable and feeling like they don’t have distractions of tugging a garment or adjusting on the fly is important,” she says.
LaGanke notes, “Whether you’re chasing somebody down or getting in and out of a patrol car, if the [armor] is not moving with your body, it becomes uncomfortable and a burden.”
Stretch and weight factors in protective gear
Dixon says she has seen companies responding to needed changes, especially over the last five years.
“Stretch has been a huge game changer in the PPE space—just for building in that mobility, because you want to reduce the amount of physical strain that your garments are putting on you,” she says, adding that in primary PPE situations, “you could have on three layers that get up to 30 ounces per square yard of material on your body that’s going to cause some physical strain on top of what you’re already doing. So the more you can reduce that physical strain and reduce how much you are working against your garment is key, like building in ventilation, articulation and gussets—things that allow the garment to move with your body without negatively impacting your movement.”
At Beverly Knits, CEO Ron Sytz says the company has seen “a significant increase in using knits in combination with wovens in women’s workwear. Having the torso of the shirts be flame-resistant knits or even use knit side panels allows the shirts to stretch and give as the body moves. It also forms better to different body shapes, versus wovens in which a larger size is needed for different body shapes.”
Brown says she is grateful for the advances that Fire-Dex, a fire protection equipment supplier in Medina, Ohio, has made. “[Fire-Dex] was the first gear [I received] that someone took the time to measure, to ask questions about how I wanted things designed specifically for me. It’s the gear that I feel confident in being able to do things without any restrictions.”
Not only does Brown find it easier to perform her job, but her gear also helps her compete in Firefighter Challenge Competition events, where speed is a factor. “One of the most important parts of doing that and being more successful in it has been how light [Fire-Dex’s] gear is,” she says.
LaGanke says manufacturers are working to adapt to both the male and female body, “and I think a lot of it goes back to the materials that they can use,” he states, noting, like Brown, that lighter-weight fabrics play a big role in making that happen. The new EXO aramid fiber used in body armor vests that DuPont has been working on for more than a decade is designed to do that.
The Kevlar EXO fiber is 40% stronger than legacy Kevlar aramid fiber, says LaGanke, “which means you can make the body armor 40% lighter weight.”
DuPont is partnering with Point Blank Enterprises to launch a new female body armor, which was certified by NIJ at the end of 2024.
Protection and dexterity must coexist
Protective gear goes beyond clothing—covering everything from gloves to hard hats, boots, goggles and more.
“Gloves are an area that people don’t really think about,” says Dixon. “If you’re working with your hands, you have to have a glove that not only protects but offers dexterity.”
LaGanke was formerly in charge of DuPont’s glove/mechanical protection segment. “Most of the glove manufacturers we work with use engineered yarns, which is a hybrid of our materials with other materials that provide elevated levels of protection beyond our Kevlar fiber,” he says. “We work with partners that can make very fine denier fibers, which then allows you to make gloves that have greater dexterity, including smaller gloves. The cut resistance that you can get in a glove that has good comfort dexterity is amazing versus what it was 10 years ago.”
The future is female?
Even small brands are helping to disrupt the industry in rethinking workwear for women, says Herrera Scheer. “The larger brands have the money behind them to implement these things more quickly,” she says, “but I think they’re starting to listen to the marketplace of seeing smaller brands coming up.”
Dixon also sees potential for female designers like Herrera Scheer to find a niche in the women’s protective gear space. “I think having more options available helps, but access and education to help women understand these options exist is important. It’s still not widely known,” she says.
“I think women being more involved on every side of the conversation these days is shifting the focus,” concludes Herrera Scheer. “Women are finally speaking up and taking leadership in how we need things to be changed.”
Kelly Hartog is a freelance journalist in Los Angeles, Calif.
SIDEBAR: Making room for protective maternity wear
Creating better protective wear for women also needs to encompass maternity wear.
Melissa Dixon at National Safety Apparel (NSA) notes that NSA was one of the first companies to come out with a maternity garment that was also protective.
“Now,” she says, “we are seeing more options available on the market because women want and need to be able to work while pregnant, especially because this country doesn’t have any robust paid maternity program that can support women as they’re going through pregnancy and after the fact.”
The Chicago Pattern Maker’s Xochil Herrera Scheer says that while her company hasn’t yet started working in the protective gear maternity sphere, “I’m excited that more people are talking about this, so I’m sure we’ll have that opportunity soon. I have worked with nursing and maternity apparel outside of workwear, and there are lots of considerations to make.”
She cites accessibility, ease of taking gear on and off “and making something women actually want to wear, including materials that are easy to care for—materials that don’t stain as easily or can be cleaned easily at home with normal laundry.”
Those products, she shares, can include materials such as bamboo and lyocell for those reasons.
Beverly Knits recently worked with the U.S. Air Force on a flame-resistant maternity stretch belly panel for a combat uniform, shares accounts manager Heather Meitl. The company had been working with the Air Force on some physical training (PT) fabrics “because they had just rolled out a new PT uniform, and in our conversations, the maternity panel came up,” Meitl says. “Beverly Knits got involved, and we developed the fabric. It passed testing and has been approved.”
Now, she says, “The company is getting an order so that the garment manufacturer can move forward with the uniforms.”