We Analyzed 750 Pairs Of Jeans And Found Definitive Skinny Bias By U.S. Retailers

It sounds like hyperbole, but it isn’t: Half of American women struggle to find jeans that fit at the mall. More specifically, only 13% of women’s jeans in brick and mortar stores are available for women of average size or larger. The number comes from a Quartz analysis of women’s denim offerings in the Mall of America that bluntly illustrates the reality faced by millions of women in the fitting room. We looked at every store selling women’s apparel in one of America’s largest malls and compared the jean waist sizes on offer to the typical American woman’s waist size. We excluded department stores. The median waist size for American women aged 20 years and older is 37.3 inches (94.8 cm), while the average is 38 inches. Most popular retailers don’t produce jeans at either size. It’s 8 inches larger than the median waist size of jeans available at the Mall of America—30 inches. It is only one inch smaller than the median of the largest sizes carried by these brands. Read more at Quartz.