The basic icons of “man” and “woman” are common to any building’s signage program to demarcate the location of restrooms. Each country has a different twist on the man and woman. In the United States, the iconified people are normally standing erect and with legs together; in most southern European countries, they stand with legs apart in a relaxed stance. Trendy restaurants around the world like to throw certain twists to make it confusing for their guests, like the restrooms in a Shanghai restaurant that use the man and woman symbols (♂ / ♀); because I can’t remember which is which, I had to peek in the bathrooms to see which one had urinals in it. Luckily, both of the restrooms were empty …
I took the photo of the above sign in Japan. Note that one side has diaper-changing facilities and the other doesn’t. A lot is said in such a simple sign.

Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy. We need to decide what that looks like.
New large language models will transform many jobs. Whether they will lead to widespread prosperity or not is up to us.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
GPT-4 is bigger and better than ChatGPT—but OpenAI won’t say why
We got a first look at the much-anticipated big new language model from OpenAI. But this time how it works is even more deeply under wraps.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.