I’m pretty annoyed today, for nominal reasons ranging between ‘petty’ and ‘doesn’t even make sense’. I’m not entirely sure how or if to take oneself seriously when one has such absurd grievances. But that’s a question for another time—I’m here now to tell you about my one potentially valid peeve.
I understand that gender is complicated and difficult, for the whole species (and honestly probably more so for some other species). And it can be hard to tell exactly if anyone is behaving badly regarding it, at least in my modern bubble. Maybe women just aren’t that into designing programming languages? Maybe the thing I’m saying is just boring and a man is saying a more interesting thing?
But a thing that is undeniable is that women want to open jars, dammit! What’s your nuanced explanation there, Bonne Maman? Does the proper amount of friction for maintaining spread safety fall just between the male and female human grip strength distributions?
This study suggests that would be about 400N Fmax (though this would not avert most elite female athletes acquiring jam, see second figure, and the pictured participants are young adults):
The distributions are really surprisingly not-overlapping!
90% of females produced less force than 95% of males. Though female athletes were significantly stronger (444 N) than their untrained female counterparts, this value corresponded to only the 25th percentile of the male subjects.
We know that men and women have different grip strengths! We know that about half of people are women! Why do so many containers require women asking a man for help in order to open them? (Or carrying around an opening tool or living in a kitchen?)
Yes, strength required to open packaging ranges across a wide distribution, but I note that very few are impossible for anyone to open, so it seems like some effort somewhere goes into keeping them in the feasible range, and that effort does not seem to care about it being reliably feasible for people like me. I don’t imagine Bonne Maman wants to stop women getting to their jam—I imagine that nobody cares.
I thought about this most when I lived in a group house with a shared bulk stash of Gatorade, and any time my woman housemate or I wanted to drink a red one we’d have to ask a guy to open it for us. But these days I also often hurt my hands opening (or failing to open) things, and while I’m sure I’m low in the female grip strength distribution—and may also be high on the ‘unreasonable anger about anything nearby when my hands are hurt’ distribution—I don’t think it’s just a me issue, and in the moment it always feels like a ‘fuck you, raspberry jam isn’t meant for you’.
I don’t think the lids are hard to open because they’re screwed on tightly, but because there’s a vacuum in the jar? (cf. those Age of Enlightenment experiments where large teams of horses couldn’t open vacuum-sealed containers.. history doesn’t record whether the horses ever stopped pulling in teams and tried just unscrewing them...)
Possibly you could make them easier to open despite the vacuum by making the thead pitch finer—but I suspect that since the threads are cut into glass rather than steel there’s a limit to how fine-pitch they can be made and still be robust.
But anyways—why is there a vacuum in the jar? To preserve the jam? Isn’t jam a preserve? Like, I thought the whole raison d’etre of jam was as a way to make fruit keep, unrefrigerated, through the winter? Why must we preserve the preserve? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
I’m pretty sure that when old ladies from the Women’s Institute make jam to sell at the village fête [at a manufacturing cost of £2 per jar.. which they then sell at a cost of 50p a jar.. to raise money for.. old ladies..] they don’t vacuum-seal the jars, and their jam seems to keep just fine.
Lastly (probably well-worn common knowledge—apologies if so—but I haven’t seen anybody else mention this so I thought I would just in case): To make it easier to unscrew a jar you can increase the coefficient of friction, increase the torque, or (if I’m right about the vacuum thing!) increase the pressure inside the jar to bring it closer to atmospheric pressure:
If your hands are moist or oily, wrapping something like a tea towel or (dry) dishcloth around the lid can increase the coefficient of friction; this also increases the effective diameter of the lid (thus increasing the torque).
A thin rubber sheet or rubber apron would do this even better (but presumably less useful if one opens one’s jam in a kitchen and not a sex dungeon). You can get a special tool (that looks a bit like an automotive oil filter strap-wrench) to increase the torque, from kitchenware shops, but having yet another single-purpose kitchen gadget lying around is pretty annoying.
Running the jar under a hot tap would increase the internal pressure (but seems a bit wasteful of energy/water). Piercing the lid with an awl would increase the internal pressure (and an awl seems like a less annoying and more useful thing to have around the house than a jam-jar-strap-wrench-thingy) but is it a problem for shelf-life if the lid has a small hole in it? If jam genuinely is a preserve, possibly not!
Jars are filled while the contents and the jar are boiling hot, which kills anything that might spoil it. As it cools, that creates the vacuum, which also pulls the lid tight to create a good seal. Properly jarred food, per my understanding, will be safe to eat pretty much indefinitely, but once you open the lid it will be exposed to pathogens and start spoiling. So the jam sold by old ladies should be vacuum sealed, if they did it properly.
Preserves also happen to have extra preservative properties, due to the high sugar content and acidity, which makes it last well even after opening the jar—but it will still spoil once open, especially if it’s unrefrigerated.
You can release the vacuum on metal lids with a cap lifter
Or just use a butter knife. Which will also teach you that it is indeed the vacuum that makes jars hard to open.
As commented elsewhere, do not use a butter knife, use a teaspoon. Not sharp, stronger, dosnt slip, better shape for levering.
But butter knifes aren’t sharp. And easier to get under the lid. Best by test.
They are sharp as hell on the serrated edge. That can slash you to the bone with some force behind it. I’ve seen a plastic knife do it.
Ok, it seems the American butter knife is a deadly weapon. The butter knife I mean has a rounded tip usually not even a serrated edge and it’s basically impossible to cut anything with it. Except butter.
I always get mad when my wife mutilates a bread roll trying to cut it with a butter knife. That’s what a bread knife is for.
You are correct, butter knives are not steak knives.
Let me put it this way, butter knives are sharper than a teaspoon, they are also long implements so your hand is further from the tip. Both things mean a slip (which inevitably happens when interacting with a lid on glass), can result in a cut or stab.
Why risk this? Especially as general advice, maybe you happen to have the perfect butter knife for the job, but other butter knives may be lethal.
Every teaspoon will get the job done safely.
The reason why I prefer butter knifes is that they are much easier to get under the lid. They are only sharp enough to cut butter so you can also grab it close to the tip if you need to.
Yes, don’t use anything that can stab or cut you even if for some weird reason you call that a butter knife.
In my region of the world “butter knife” means a wooden utensil with round edges so it never even struck me that it could be sharp!
Oh weird, ours are metal, not very sharp, but sharp enough.
substantially more difficult and possible to injure yourself relative to cap lifter IME.
You need to stem yourself against the tide of specialised kitchen utensils otherwise you will be buried by it.
Bury my french fry press next to me.
Yeah, the technique advocated by a lot of people here seems annoying. I have a simpler one: tap the rim of the lid with the spoon/knife until it crumples a little. Like so.
Rather hampers re-use
In many cases you can also just hold the jar upside down and hit it with the heel of the palm of your other hand.
There are also band wrenches made specifically for opening jar which provide a nice level to increase the torque force when someone wants to open something with a twist off lid (not recommending this but you could probably use an oil filter band type wrench).
The easy to open jar lid tech exists. I have encoumtered this in the wild. The way it works is that the rim is separate from the lid. The rim holds the lid down but can be lifted separately, so you don’t have to fight vacum while rotating. (I don’t think this is a good explanation. It’s hard to put in words. My main point is that it is possible and has been done.)
Also, the vacum is from the jam cooling, so also happens for home made jam. You want to close the lid while the jam is hot. You boil the fruit to kill off any bacteria, then close it in a jam so new bacteria can’t get in.
I only ever see those types of lids for home canning, and they tend to be single use. I’d wager they also are non-trivial to align during automated production and that’s one reason they don’t get used commercially (probably also just more expensive to have a 2-part lid). Also while they can be easier to remove the first time a jar is opened, I think it’s a significantly worse UX every time after.
I’ve encountered this type of lid on a store bought pickle jar. It was no problem using many times.
It’s probably more expencive to produce. But they keep beeing good UX. The two parts can move relative to eachother, but they stay together.
Friction is an interesting one. Some people have smoother skin than others. Men are more likely to have calloused hands, and to use less lotion. I find that if I’ve either used lotion in the past few hours, or if my skin is dry, I struggle with jars more often and need grippy gloves.
None of that invalidates anything in the post, though.
Having done canning at home, you do indeed create a vacuum seal. There is a rubber (plastic?) gasket in the flat metal lid, and the cooling jam creates the vacuum seal which pulls the glass against this rubber.
My pet theory is that jars being too tight is a plot by a shadowly cabal of reactionary foodstuff manufacturers hellbent on recreating traditional gender roles. The freemasons, Don Draper, cadet branches of the house of Valois, and the Michelin man all implicated.
Traditional roles like… not letting women make food?
Reinventing tradition always ends up with something that is unlike whatever actually happened in the past.
You see, it’s done so that dem women “know their place”. Can’t have them think they are the boss even in the kitchen you see. Those man only jars shows them they can’t even without man
Freemasons… MASON jars… wake up…
Wow i never realise knew there was that much of difference in grip strengths
AIUI, grip strength is one of the physical attributes where there is the least overlap between men and women (even compared to other measures of upper body strength like bench press)
A trained woman should be able to bench more than an untrained man at bench press (whether she would be stronger is hard to say because of leverages and skill-specific neuromuscular adaptation that doesn’t broadly apply to all physical conditions using the pecs/front delts/triceps). As a 125 lb 17-year-old I started off at 105, so let’s say an untrained grown man would be around 135. That’s an easily achievable goal for most women if they use the right training methods and eat enough protein. It’s around a 195-205 male bench, I’d say.
In grip strength, you could take a woman who could deadlift 400 lbs and a random man off the street is probably still stronger in terms of crushing force. It’s probably the most sexually dimorphic physical trait.
It is ridiculous. Even when I had a fractured wrist in a cast I was able to produce more torque on jars than my wife, and none of us are extreme iin any direction.
My goat is gotten by things like seatbelts, headrests, and gym equipment that are actively hostile to people under 5′9″.
The world is also hostile to the tall. The tyranny of the mean...
The number of times I’ve banged my head on an extractor fan......
And while it seems to be getting better (soft take here as I am not left-handed) but used to be the case that the world really punished left-handed people. If necessity is the mother of invention I somewhat wonder if that doesn’t explain part of the the (old) perception that left-handed people are smarter than others.
It’s hard to prove, but it sounds right. If people are put under the right amount of pressure, they grow as people. More capable, less stressed etc. Through misery, competence.
Through misery, competence.
Through competence, burnout.
Through burnout, misery.
The way of the left-handed warrior.
IME there’s at least as much skill as raw strength in opening containers. Occasionally my wife will hand me a jar to open; almost always I can’t open it on a low-effort first pass either, and so I do a bunch of superstitious rituals on it that I’ve acquired over the years without theorizing about it, and then it will open effortlessly.
Because of the relevant cultural assumptions, she can pass it off to me, while I look incompetent if I can’t open it in response, so I’ve had more reason to accrete all the rituals that seem to work in aggregate.
Like running it under the hot tap. Heat makes the metal expand, makes the air expand, and softens any sticky bits of jam gumming up the threads.
Oh and a rubber washing up glove, for better grip.
For many caps a good portion of what makes the cap difficult to open is the vacuum used to seal the cap. I’m not sure whether that’s the case for Gatorade but for Raspberry Jam that’s probably what’s going on. You can take a spoon to pop out the vacuum.
Even through I’m a man I find it much more comfortable to just use a spoon to pop the vacuum seal than to use force with grip strength to open jars.
When searching for the video for the spoon illustration there were also plenty of other tricks to getting out the vacuum. If you do a bit of experimentation with opening technique, you should be able to find something that works for you.
You can also frequently do this by just rapping the lid of the container against a hard surface a few times.
I think the main problem is getting enough grip, not rotation per se. It’d be a lot easier if jar lids had little wings like on a wingnut. No idea why something like that hasn’t caught on.
I would guess some combination of increased likelihood of breakage during shipping, or less tight packing of containers during storage and shipping, or costing a fraction of a penny more to manufacture.
The lid is usually smaller than the diameter of the jar, so I don’t know that packing would necessarily be affected.
Often, but not always, yeah.
Let me formulate a new question:
What is the reason for jars requiring such force?
a. Conscious engineering decision to maximize the probability of preservation with a deliberate cutoff around ~50% of the population. (E.g. when testing the engineers coming up with the design were male and created something they could still open)
b. The most economical way of producing such preserved food by chance happens to require this amount of force. We ended up doing this as about 50% of the population can still open it. In an alternative universe with weaker male hands we would not have such storage as it would be unusable.
If the answer is “a.”, this should be much easier to change than in case of “b.”.
It wouldn’t be unusable, vice grips would just become a default kitchen tool.
Probably a, and id rather not have rotten food or botulism. Good trade off for a hard to open jar.
Frankly as a large burly male, I don’t even bother struggling and straining to open a jar, some of those bastards are well beyond me. I use techniques mentioned elsewhere. Spoons and such.
But why would it require that exact amount of force? It seems more likely that it involves a lot of force, and they take measures to keep it from being too much (like shallower threads and narrower caps that would have less force on them) and stop when it’s just enough that about half of people can get it open.
Naw it’s
C. the man (tryna keep a sister down)
D. The m.f. patriarchy
E. Men evolved to conspire to elevate their sex and women evolved to be blind to most sexism so they don’t spend as much time gettin hit..
F. Women and men both evolved to jse
Logically, the next iteration will be a jar that can only be opened using a penis.
Part of this is will be redundant with other comments.
If we are strictly speaking about jam jars with screw on tops (like this https://vendingsuperstore.co.uk/cdn/shop/products/111357_1.jpg) then I think the answer is “women are able to open them if they have the necessary knowledge”.
There are 3 mains technics I know to help open a jar, some of them I also sometimes need to use as a man.
Use a dry piece of cloth to turn the lid, such as a towel
Run the jar under hot water first
Use either the tip of a knife or the back of a spoon to let some air pass under the lid, which helps reduce the pressure difference. As other comments have noted if you use a spoon then you must use is as a lever to push the lid upward and if you use a knife you must push at an angle to turn the lid a bit as you let the air in. I think the knife method is more effective but it is a bit dangerous (you might cut yourself if careless) and it can damage the knife.
I am french and in my entire adult life I don’t think I ever saw anyone fail to use one of these technics when necessary or need to give up on opening a jar. I just asked my girlfriend and she confirmed that she never has issues opening a jar on her own. The vibe I get from this post and some of these comments is “the knowledge of jar opening is not being properly transmitted in some places”. Perhaps there should be a disclaimer on the jar?
I will add a fourth technique, which is the one my wife uses:
4. Whack the upper corner of the lid with a knife or spoon until it is dented in several places around the circle. This breaks the seal and makes it easier to open the lid.
I am a woman. I know/ use all the techniques people are listing.
I still have troubles opening lids.
(Also it’s annoying a bunch of guys being like “don’t you know to run hot water?” etc, as if we didn’t)
Thank you for the datapoint and sorry my reaction was annoying.
Do you have troubles in the sense that you sometimes struggle but end up victorious (happens to me) or in the sense that you literally give up on accessing the jam in the jar?
(You specifically were not annoying, sorry. It was just a conglomeration of lots of people saying the same type of thing)
I literally give up, and do not get to eat the food I wanted until there is a man around. There is even a CHILDREN’S food pouch brand that is insanely difficult to open (relative to all other brands/ types of children’s food-in-a-pouch) such that I have almost given up on it.
This is one of many reasons I don’t want to live by myself.
I see. The fact you are experiencing this despite knowing / using all the technics listed shows I was wrong in my assumptions.
Am I right in assuming that you do not own a special tool for opening jars + have a low grip strength for a woman?
I however think the main point of the post on non-jar containers stands. But looking at the graph of difference of grip strength between men and women maybe a lot of things couldn’t be changed to sit safely in the “easy to open for women” range without also being too likely to open on their own or leak? The difference is definitely stronger than I expected.
My guess is that there are things targeted at men that are pointlessly too tight for women because no one cared. But I expect “how easy is this to open for the typical consumer” to be somewhat important when designing containers, which would mean women are taken into account when they are an important part of the target audience.
I do not have a good explanation for the gatorade example.
Vacuum seals don’t exist to prevent jars to open on their own or to prevent leakage.
I am not sure what you are implying / implying I am implying? I will try to answer in a direction that feels useful.
I expect that something would be lost by making screw on containers easier to open (without altering the design). The containers leaking or opening on their own seem the most obvious candidates to me. Also I want to clarify that the pressure difference that makes it hard to open jam jars is not necessarily done on purpose and is also present with homemade jam. I found a source that says it is caused by the jam cooling down in the jar: https://www.scienceofgadgets.com/post/why-is-the-jam-jar-lid-hard-to-open .
Lastly if by “vacuum seals” you were thinking of the kind we often see on industrial bottles (like this https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRAuOjEA3Plec4QY5s-hlLlUb-IL4Gw2PP8oQ&s) then I don’t think they typically make it hard to open the bottles.
To prevent food spoilage, companies that manufacture products not only want to prevent containers leaking or opening but want to prevent bacteria going into the products.
No, I’m speaking about the way a jar of marmalade works. If you fully fill a closed container with heated marmalade and then the marmalade cools down and takes up less pace, the remaining space is vacuum (maybe not completely vacuum but strong under pressure). This vacuum makes the jar harder to open but it helps with increasing the time till the food in the jar spoils.
If you don’t want this effect you could put down cooled down marmalade into your jars instead of filling it with heated marmalade.
In practice, you can easily pop the vacuum with a spoon or various other tricks and easily open the jar, or you put in more effort to force it open which needs grip strength.
It’s actually a pretty old home production technique too, and I agree it has little to do with keeping the jar from accidentally opening or content spilling out. I suspect the vacuum itself is more by-product than intentional design.
Which seem to get to the core of the issue here. Is the situation really gender related or targeted? I don’t know if some of the comment about it being about pushing some pro-masculine conspiracy are really jokes or serious comment. Hopefully the former. I suspect the resulting challenges for many women, like the vacuum itself, is something of a by-product and may well be unavoidable if one wants to have the content stay good while stored.
I think the question here might come down to using the right tools, rather than suggesting the manufacture solve the problem.
From the perspective of an individual, the solution is to learn proper technique for opening jars.
That still leaves the question open of why nobody at Nestlé thinks that given some engineers research dollars to finding a closure mechanism and then marketing a new marmalade brand with easy to open jars for women is something that happens in practice.
For contrast, it’s interesting what happened with bottle cap in the EU recently. The EU said that bottle caps for bottles like water bottles need to have a mechanism where they stay connected to the bottle. At first the naive implementation of the requirement was quite annoying if you want to drink from a bottle and not get the bottle cap in the way. Then companies innovated and thought of clever techniques to architect the bottle cap so that it stays on and doesn’t get in the way. While the first bottle caps after the regulation had worse UX than the old bottle caps the new bottle caps that are now sold have better UX than the old bottle caps.
It might very well be possible that a smart engineer finds a way to create marmalade jars that do the job of food preservation while needing less force to open and currently nobody invest into creating that technology.
Also since this is a problem of grip strength rather than “turning strength” a solution might be to improve the grip on the lid by making it slightly less round. Soda bottles often do this with little indentations around the cap.
If the problem is purely grip strength then the observed results should be that when women try opening the jar their hand slip before the cap starts turning. Is that the case? Not sure myself.
For example, I suspect many more women moisturize their hands than men. That is going to change the adhesion of skin to cap producing the “grip” to turn the cap. (Here the analogy might be comparing tire compounds for long lasting tires and performance tires and cornering speeds of the same car on a test track.) What might happen when that is controlled for—assuming the view is correct?
Another thing no one has mentioned is hand size. I definitely notice a difference when opening jars of different sizes. Would be interesting to see if ratio of diameter of cap to span of hand is well correlated to ability to open a jar independent of some standardized measure of grip strength.
Why do they exist then? To pointlessly torture us? I am confusion.
I know this is not the main point of the post, but have you played around with one of these?
I got one about a year ago and found it fun for a few weeks and worth the price. I think most people can significantly increase their practical grip strength in a few weeks of playing around with it
I’d recommend not using this tool and doing wrist curls with a small (1-2 lb) dumbbell instead, searching for the torsion/angle of the hand that minimizes wrist tension.
Why? 2lb seems way too low, and hand grippers are extremely easy to use (and for some people fun). You can just gradually increase the resistance to get a sense of progress
I say this based on trying both of them out systematically, I don’t have an a priori argument. My not particularly justified intuition was that hand grippers would be a better exercise, but that turned out to be wrong for me. I also found a jacked guy on youtube saying to do wrist curls, which is what prompted me initially to try them out instead of the hand gripper. I was also surprised that 2 lb was sufficient.
If a jar of food loses its seal before sale, it’s garbage. Jars have requirements about maintaining a vacuum and not getting opened accidentally, and a design that’s easy for women to open seems to be more expensive overall than women getting a jar opener, which you can find on Amazon for like $7.
The Danish marmelade brand Den Gamle Fabrik has this thing they call the “swup-låg”, which is super easy to open! I do expect that they’re more expensive though (they consist of two parts)..
Here is a cute promotional video^^ https://youtube.com/watch?v=NbPMjWsPOsw
In the Netherlands, Hak sells vegetables in easy to open pots (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CN975teFuMQ). They consist of two parts as well; one is a ring that breaks the vacuum when you turn it, and they really are easy to open (I buy them sometimes). But I’ve just read an article (https://www.deondernemer.nl/actueel/de-stille-dood-van-de-hakdeksel~737591d) saying that other brands don’t imitate them because they are too expensive. :(
Bingo!
It is actually possible to design lids that are easier to open. See for example here: https://metalpackagingemea.sonoco.com/our-orbit-closure/
I already tried a jar that had one of those lids linked above. It was indeed a lot easier to open.
The way that it works is that the lid consists of two parts. The flat upper part presses against the sealant surface and doesn’t turn. The ring shaped part on the side that grips into the threads of the jar does turn. The fact that you only have to overcome the friction in the threads and at the point where the two parts of the lid meet but not the friction at the sealant surface means that it is a lot easier to turn.
So yes, when someone notices and cares, it is possible to design stuff that is usable by almost everyone and not just by half the population.
The amount of force required to open containers feels like it varies based on type of food contained within while seeming relatively consistent within food categories (jam jar lids are, generally, harder to open than peanut butter jar lids; peanut butter jar lids seem harder to open than that of animal cracker jars).
Are there any sanitary benefits toward a tighter seal that constrain certain food categories and not others in this way? Or is it just something along the lines of genre convention: ‘Well, jam jars have historically felt this way, and we don’t want to rock the boat’? Is it a cost-savings thing (‘If we add a notch or a tab on a lid for the user to latch onto for leverage, it’ll cost more because [new injection mold, materials cost, shipping cost]’)?
Is there a UX design book for food containers? It feels like such a foundational part of society, but I’ve never really thought much about it at all.
Peanut butter goes bad more easily than animal crackers, so it has to be vacuum sealed which makes it harder to open. Jam is produced hot so it can’t be poured straight from the machine into plastic containers, and the heat-resistant combo of glass jars with metal lids is harder to open.
Is that true? Peanut butter (natural, not even the highly processed stuff) stays good for many months after opening without refrigeration, in a jar or even in clamshell-type packaging when you buy it freshly ground in store.
I suspect things also have to be tightly closed to prevent theft in shops… the kind where the thief would take a bit and then close the jar again.
When the jam cools it makes it’s own vacuum seal.
This seems like a totally reasonable complaint to me. I wouldn’t even call it petty. Everyday things should work for everyday people.
My personal experience of life is that 70% of jam jars opened by myself and the women around me pass unremarkably without comment, and then another 10% even the guys can’t open without tools. Would be curious to get some empirical measurements on the actual variation in resistance between jars, even of the same brand. Could be extremely spiky!
But also I’d gladly pay an extra buck for jam to avoid needing to strategize how to open the damn thing 30% of the time!
The design is part of the vast conspiracy to keep women smarter and more coordinated than men. Putting lots of little challenges in their way gives them lots of reasons to think critically and problem-solve, swap solutions, and emotionally bond.
I keep raising this issue at Patriarchy Club meetings but the guys are just too dumb to listen and insist on keeping the jars this way just for their amusement. They don’t see that they’re being had by the Matriarchy Club. They just call me a conspiracy theorist.
Friction materials make jars vastly easier to open. Silicon ones are also decorative.
It’s best to have two, one for the jar and one for the lid. But one often helps a lot.
Despite the enthusiasm for this topic, I hadn’t seen this mentioned.
In addition to the raw force thing, estrogen alters the structure of skin and makes it less friction-y compared to testosterone based skin.
I agree with the other commenters that tightly sealed jars are good. Just use a stray butter knife. Mind over matter.
This doesn’t seem to be true? I looked it up and the research I found indicated there’s no significant difference.
Huh, it seems like I was wrong. I remembered it from reading trans subreddits years ago but as best as I can tell you’re right, there’s nothing supporting estrogen affecting the skin’s structure this way.
i distinctly remember your sister explaining the friction thing to us during a dinner party at some point last year.
Oh huh. I thought I had run across it before that but maybe not...
This covers fingers. Does it cover palms? I strongly suspect palm skin deformation is a significant part of the effect.
Interesting perspective. If I were asked about the difference between the grip strength in men and women, a priori I would have guessed the overlap between the strongest non-athlete women and the weakest non-athlete men was bigger, so this is a bit of a surprise. Though to be fair, I’ve been lifting for several years and live in a very gym/sports-forward social bubble, so I’m generally biased towards overestimating the average cis woman’s strength.
Another sorta related thought: While it seems that women ask for help opening jars more often than men, my intuition is that it’s not always that women physically can’t open them. Many people are conditioned to think that “feats of strength” are uniquely “manly”. Women might not know how strong they are as they don’t have much experience consciously using their strength. In the case of jars, I think it might present as a woman somewhat trying to open it, failing, and delegating it to a guy even though she probably would have opened it on her own if she tried harder, but the internalized belief that women doing feats of strength bad/scary/unheard of/etc. prevents her from putting all of the strength she can into it.
Admittedly, I’m depending a lot on personal experience here. I definitely fell victim to that way of thinking in the past. I’d struggle to open a jar, ask my husband to help, and he’d say something like “If you give it another honest try and fail, I’ll open it for you, but I genuinely think you’re strong enough to do it on your own”, and what do you know, 9 out of 10 times he’d be right. The remaining 10% of cases would usually turn out to be a particularly stubborn jar that he’d also end up struggling with. And please note that this was before I started working out—back then I was definitely on the lower end of the spectrum when it comes to cis woman’s strength. (By the way I feel like this can be generalized to many other beliefs I did or do still have, but that’s a whole other can of worms, so let’s just stick to the case of jars for now lol).
That being said, hell yeah, accessible packaging rocks & I wish more brands put thought into this.
Jars aside, my experience is that training your grip strength is just a cool thing to do! It’s relatively low effort (for example, get a hand grip ring and use it while reading or doing work that doesn’t engage both hands at the same time), but can yield some nice benefits, like making it easier to hang on to slippery things, or decrease the pain you feel when fighting with particularly stubborn jars. I found the hand grip tools to work pretty well as fidget toys, too. Iirc there’s also been some Lancet studies exploring correlation between grip strength and overall longevity and health? My intuition is that it’s probably more of ‘a grip strength improvement correlates with overall strength and fitness improvement correlates with better cardiovascular health’ situation, but I’d have to find and read the study to be sure. I’ll probably look it up when I have some time later.
Trans women on feminizing HRT often report losing the ability to open jars irrespective of diminution of strength. One common report is that this is correlated with changes in skin texture.
Edit: I see that datawitch has already brought this up. Pardon the redundancy.
I wonder why we continue to purchase the specific products which don’t meet our preferences for opening them. Probably something complicated and sociological about tolerating inconvenience, or something?
But if the goal is to easily open the maximum possible amount of jars, including out-of-distribution jars that even people with male grip strength struggle with, there’s a tool called a strap wrench. They’re available for cheap in the plumbing section of your local Harbor Freight or any other hardware store. I keep 2 in the kitchen and have never met a screw-top container whose top they couldn’t easily unscrew.
Then again, I take a certain amount of enjoyment in having the default strength levels that necessitate better tool use. Everybody’s barehanded strength hits an upper limit, but becoming a reflexive and habitual tool user gives me access to exerting more force than any barehanded human, and I frequently end up opening jars for men because I’ve had more practice doing it the tool-user way. Not applying moral valence to others’ preferences on tool use here, just describing n=1.
A sturdy wooden stick about a centimetre across can be hard to break for most women and easy to break for most men, without any of this being the doing of a patriarchal society. With traditional jars, the kind you can also make at home, the resistance to opening comes from the basic sterilisation process, which creates a partial vacuum inside. Larger jars, like those of cassoulet (to stay in southwestern France, as with Bonne Maman), are often impossible to open even for a man and generally require the help of a piece of cutlery. If they aren’t hard to open, that’s a bad sign, especially in the absence of a “pop” on opening. Small jars usually pose no problem for anyone, and intermediate ones like jam jars sit in a grey zone, where a spoon helps more or less depending on the case. It also depends on how full the jar is and on the temperature (warming it up should make it open easily).
So I think we’re dealing with something fairly exogenous to societal discussions about gender, and there’s hardly any harm in just reaching for a spoon. In my view, if there is an issue here, it lies less in industrial design than in the attitude of the users. Who hasn’t seen a man make a point of opening a jar unaided, going red in the face and risking an aneurysm, persevering until his hand cramps up, as if his life depended on it,especially in the company of other men, only too happy to watch him fail so they can have a go themselves ? Conversely, it must also be granted that many women don’t try very hard and often hand the jar straight to the nearest man. If there is an effect of patriarchal society here, that’s where I’d locate it, at the behavioural level (or is it a biologically ingrained tendency ?).
He loosened it for them.
I’m a man with genetically (probably!) slim wrists and forearms. I say genetically, because my younger brother is one cut away from six packs and focuses on his forearms in particular, and he still has forearms that are only respectable and not impressive for his reference class. There have been somewhere between 10-20 times in my life that I’ve been unable to open a jar or container, and had to ask another, beefier man to do the honors (while swallowing the dishonor).
Like you, I have been slightly aggrieved about it. Oh well, all I can really say is that actual exercise keeps me out of the bottom half of the male distribution, and being very slightly embarrassed once a year or so is not the end of the world for me.
(I think jars should be easier to open. Women in my life have showed me a good trick: immerse them in hot water or just under a running tap. I’ve never needed to do that myself, but it seems like a band-aid patch that, like actual band-aids, does something.)
I hear you when you say you want to be able to open jars without tools. And you’re right, it is likely because women weren’t considered during the design process. The force due to pressure is a manufacturing requirement. But the friction under pressure is not. If a lubricant was added to the jar rim or lid before the lid was put on, both genders would enjoy opening jars without using tools. The increased manufacturing cost would be marginal. The temporary unique selling point of “Easy open” would pay back the early adopters quickly. By the time it was standard and those USP profits dwindled, it would not make financial sense to be the only jar you can’t open easily.
Most of the proposed fixes in this comment thread accrue a privatized cost, available only to those who can pay it in money, infrastructure, or skill. A $10 gripper, running hot water requires electricity and water paid by the user, retained knowledge and space to store a gripper. It’s infuriating when you get a drink from a gas station on the go and you can’t open it.
This post shows a known concept of an implicit gendered tax. It can also be shown with office hvac systems being designed for male metabolic rates…making women supply an extra sweater or space heater. If interested, this topic is covered in Caroline Criado Perez’s “Invisible Women”. Would highly recommend if you want to look at other examples of how this is shown.
Installing an under-counter jar opener was a win for our household.
It’s so grippy that it gouges the lid sometimes, so I use it for disposable lids like tomato sauce but less for things like “a mason jar I intend to use again, which my husband has screwed on way tighter than I can unscrew.”
I’m a man with amateur-athletic grip strength, like I dead lift and rock climb, and I can’t open many jars unassisted. Note the trope of a man opening a pickle jar for a woman often involves the man handing it to a second man, who opens it, then the first man says “I loosened it for you.”
Jelly jars, and those small jars of ginger paste require breaking the air seal by banging it with an implement. Probably there’s a better way, I learned banging.
I can think of some containers designed to require an implement—wine bottles, paint cans, beer bottles.
It seems important to point this out.
Probably stuff like Gatorade bottles fall in the annoying space of hard for women, easy for men, often opened away from home, and seems slightly unnecessary to be hard to open. But this space is definitely not as big as “jars”.
It seems an unfortunate consequence of the forces involved in making vaccum sealed preserves. If the force necessary to open the jars were higher than the average male grip strength, then I predict we would have jar-opener devices as standard in kitchens, like we have can-openers or bottle openers. In fact, the old style cork screw for opening cork bottles is probably requiring the higher side of male strength, which explains why we have the newstyle bottle openers with the cog wheels and arms as a force multiplier.
In short, blame the patriarchy for normalising a lack of jar-openers in kitchens, but don’t blame it for the force required to open a jar.
Just curious, as many comment seem to be focused on vacuum being the source the force required to open, is this about first time you open a jar or that or times where someone else has closed the jar and you then want it open?
Quick additional question, but data might be scarce, have you considered looking at the grip profiles for left and right handed people for open the standard jar? Hand position is different and I’m honestly unsure if the structure of the wrist is such that twist strength is symmetric.
It’s a ploy to increase birth rates
I have this gadget and it works great. I think there are other screw-top-openers with different characteristics, but I can’t attest to those.
It’s sort of amusing seeing all the comments from men saying “actually all the difficulty is in the vacuum, and you just have to release the vacuum and then it’s easy”—no! you don’t understand! It’s easy for you once the vacuum is released, but there exist lots of people for whom even un-vacuumed jars are often difficult to open! It’s not just an issue of there being some inherent difficulty in opening vacuum-sealed containers; I usually find screw-top plastic bottles difficult or impossible to open without the tool. There’s no law of nature that says that the little moulded plastic sprues on bottles with plastic caps have to submit to precisely the amount of force that the typical man can easily supply but not that which the typical woman can. The amount of force required is similar across all cap types, so it can’t just be that the twisting force dictated by physical reality just happens to oh-so-fortunately fall in the gap between the typical man and the typical woman.
If you are stuck without your gadget, for one of the plastic molded lids with the little ring attached underneath the main lid, you can use a knife to cut the little plastic sprues (new word for me). This makes the lid easy to remove.
I had not even imagined the depths of weakness required to not be able to open a depresserised jam jar lid, sometimes they are so loose they rattle? I suppose I’m not denying the possibility, just shocked I suppose.
Oddly my mother was always better at opening jars than me with hands alone (i am a large burly male). I got good with the teaspoon and the dish towel for grip and the cutting of the sprues.
I am a male arthritis patient with the handgrip of a 10-year old girl (literally). But I have learned to cope with it using physics. Basically, if you break the seal on any can until you hear the “pop” any person can open anything. On top of that if it is not possible I have some lever-tools that I can use. But the most useful way to break the seal is actually not to punch a hole to it with a knife, which I used to do previously. Then I found that you can use a tool like a can opener hook to lift the lid slightly on the side. This way there is no permanent hole in the lid and you can still close it completely. Just a small dent on the side where you let the air in.
As a man, I find it difficult to be consciously sympathetic of the strength difference. The force that I use to turn the faucet knob to a comfortable, definitely closed position actually requires an uncomfortable amount of force to open for my grandma. Would be interesting if someone made bottles and knobs that are 2x harder to open than usual...
Sometimes even I can’t open a jar. I use a C-Clamp to deform the cap by screwing into the cap diameter, and pop the air runs in and pressure lets go.
I mean for jar-opening, how easily you can open a jar would also depend on the sizes of the hands, not just the grip strength.
i heard from someone a while back that it wasn’t actually about grip strength it was that women’s skin is softer and less able to handle the friction.wait i’m wrongWow, that chart was enlightening. I would definitely have assumed that this was at least in part driven by males refusing to admit they can’t open something and therefore being more willing to go to extreme lengths risking personal injury, or resorting to different tricks. Which in hindsight translates to “women don’t try as hard” which I’m not proud of!
OK, so can we fix this? In my experience the jars I (a male) have been asked to open are typically wide mouth glass jars with metal twist on lids. As others have noted a lot of the struggle with the initial opening comes from the vacuum (or at least pressure differential) within the jar sucking it down and making it harder to overcome the friction of the seal in the lid sliding against the top of the jar.
Decreasing the pressure differential seems like it would be detrimental to preservation so doesn’t seem viable, but it seems likely that moving to a narrower mouth jar might help. I’m too lazy to do the math right now, so I’ll just wave my hands around and maybe someone will come do it for me: the smaller diameter lid would have a smaller circumference which means less area of seal touching the jar, so less friction. Less surface area for the lid would also mean the pressure differential would generate less force pushing the lid against the jar. You also have less leverage now of course, but I think since area decreases faster than circumference we end up with less pressure for each given unit area of friction generating surface so maybe this doesn’t matter?
Bring back Mason jars. They’re a bit more expensive, but the lever acts as a force multiplier.
Huh, I hadn’t thought of Mason jars as being a lever, could you explain the mechanics of that here?
They are probably referring to these:
Ah, yeah that was not what I was imagining
There are also threaded ones that separate the twisting action from the vacuum seal, but even those can be difficult to open and usually require a tool for the vacuum lid.
It seems there’s two styles: one with a rim around a central cover, and one with a metal frame over the top and nothing screws. I meant the frame kind.
Something like this:
https://www.ralphs.com/p/flying-cauldron-non-alcoholic-butterscotch-beer-soda-bottle/0009034100200
Or this:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1846825029/vintage-ball-mason-jar-set-in-wire
They’re excellent for getting a good seal, and the wire handle is much easier to open than a screw top. I didn’t realize people make mason jars on a different style, sorry I wasn’t more specific and thanks for the question, I learned something too!
Worth noting, perhaps, is that the main reason people fail to open jars is not due to a lack of grip strength, but due to a lack of friction. If you have a stubborn jar that you cannot open, put on a pair of rubber dish gloves and try again, and I think you’ll be surprised at how easily a previously-unopenable jar magically pops open. This method has literally never failed me.
Methodology: Methodological holism is required here. The inability of women to open jars is not explained by any individual woman’s grip strength or any individual jar manufacturer’s torque specification. It is a structural property of the capitalist packaging system, in which engineers optimized for shelf-life and shipping integrity, generating a civilization-wide distributed imposition (T1-4 Against Rent-Seeking and Capture, T3A-6 Against Systematic Engineering of Exploitable Vulnerability) on everyone whose hands are smaller than the industrial design assumption. No single lid is the villain. The lid is innocent. The system sealed your salsa.
Counter-argument for methodological individualism: actually, you could just hit the lid with a butter knife.
Level of analysis: individual. Problem resolved.
Falsification criterion: if hitting the lid doesn’t work, holism was right all along.
Maybe this is insensitive but have you considered getting stronger? I have no idea how much you work out or how much your housemates worked out, but ranting about the tyranny of grip strength seems like it won’t work as well as increasing your grip strength. Since you said that you’re sure you’re low in female grip strength distribution, getting stronger would actually be pretty easy
Huh, when I was a child and did not have male adult levels of strength yet, I always jammed a kitchen knife in the cap and wiggled it until I did something that let air in. That usually solved it.
Easiest trick I’ve learned is just to run it under some warm water for 30 seconds (sometimes more but often enough) and then it just slips right open without a struggle. Had problems with a weirdly tight ketchup bottle the other day (the brand has never caused me issues before or since) and it went from literally impossible to easier than lifting the bottle itself.
Nobody is allowed to care. The notion that the average female is in any way inferior to the average male is one of the strongest taboos of “polite society”.
Hmm, when we were redesigning milk bottle lids, we were explicit that you had to design for the extremes of strength. Women aren’t the weakest class, generally that’s the elderly, you are still allowed to recognize difference by age. I think the harder to open design was chosen by upper management anyway because it was cheaper....
I wouldn’t expect getting into trouble for saying something along the lines of “women on average is physically weaker than men”
The strongest taboos are not the sort of thing that people fear saying, but the sort that never even enter their heads (or go in one ear, then out the other). “Women are inferior in such and such way, therefore...” isn’t a way that conversations go.
Amusingly, here’s the first google result on entering this for me: How Gendered Myths of Strength Keep Women Weaker
Did you read the article, or are you assuming its contents from the headline?
The article does not dispute that women are physically weaker on average, and is instead criticizing social norms discouraging women from exercise.
I likely disagree with the author on the degree to which traditional gender norms are responsible for these differences, but it seems uncontroversial to say that gender norms play at least some role in discouraging women from exercise, and that exercising more would be good for women (as it would be for a somewhat smaller percentage of men).
Just use a teaspoon to leaver it open, no issue. They are a much better lid opener than a knife, stronger and not sharp.
The discussion is about lids that unscrew (like on a jam jar) not lids that need to be levered-off (like on a paint tin).
I have seen jars of comestibles with paint tin style lever-off lids, but they’re pretty rare where I live. Possibly they’re more common where you are—which would explain the confusion?
(And personally I’d prefer to use a flat-blade screwdriver -I have quite fancy delicate teaspoons!- but if the choice is exclusively between a teaspoon and a knifeblade, I’d pick the teaspoon too!)
Yes, a jam jar lid is very easy to remove after you have used a teaspoon as a lever to allow air into the jar, equalising the pressure.
I speculated on this elsewhere—just didn’t realise that’s what you were describing here! Ingenious technique; I shall absolutely try it!
Breaking the vacuum seal by inserting a flat object between the lid and the jar makes unscrewing the lid much easier, since it’s mostly the vacuum seal that makes unscrewing the jar difficult in the first place, not the lid/jar geometry.
The atmospheric pressure outside the jar is stronger than the pressure inside the jar, and this difference creates a downward force that clamps the lid against the jar, which increases the friction.
Equalizing the pressure inside and outside the jar by breaking the vacuum seal decreases the torque needed to overcome this friction.
I speculated on this mechanism in another comment (thanks for the confirmation!) - I just didn’t realise that jam jar lids were malleable enough to be levered-open from the side (I was imagining puncturing them). Thanks!
This was how I used to open jars pre-puberty.
A tip: levering works better with more rigid objects such as a teaspoon—if you use a knife instead rotating it after you insert (as opposed to levering) is the optimal method.
It sounds like you understood physics pre-puberty that I’m only-just starting to speculate upon in middle-age (damn you!)