Think back to the last time you went in search of a bathroom at the airport. Of the two available entrances, you picked one, without consciously thinking about how the respective pictograms depict the sexes—men with narrow hips and women in A-line dresses. The images are as expected and predictable as gravity, pulling you toward your gendered option.

But that doesn't mean that they're especially good designs. Since the 1930s, when Otto Neurath, an Austrian sociologist, developed the Isotype pictogram language we rely on so heavily, more and more women have started to wear pants much of the time. Some designers have taken a stab at correcting the female image, such as the recent “It Was Never a Dress” campaign, which uses a clever bit of color blocking to turn the dress into a superhero cape. Restaurants, too, love to use cutesy gender binaries like “guys” and “dolls.” That’s all fun, but the fact remains: When it comes to heavily trafficked public places, it’s very hard to deviate from the dress. Even in slick, newly designed offices, a triangle (an abstracted dress) typically connotes the woman’s room.

SomeOne

Enter SomeOne, a London branding studio, that has figured out a way to design around the skirt. Its pair of pictograms depicts stances, instead of outdated wardrobes. The man has a widened stance; the woman stands with her feet together. It’s an elegant solution that relies on the exact same graphic elements for both the man and the woman, but hints at male and female body types just enough so there’s no doubt about which is which. SomeOne’s initial design was for Eurostar’s train cabins, but the designers have since created similar versions for other clients like global payments company WorldPay.

From Medieval to Modern

“It’s really interesting how the gender stereotypes have stuck, and it hasn’t moved on,” SomeOne co-founder and creative director Simon Manchipp says about standard bathroom signage. It’s even kind of archaic, he says: “If you look at British pubs, they’re designed for a medieval mindset. When people say they’ll meet you at the King’s Head, there’s literally an image of a king’s head, because you couldn’t read. But these days, we have a much higher level of sophistication in our visual literacy.” So in 2011, when Eurostar commissioned SomeOne to do a massive overhaul of the brand (Eurostar invested £700 million in the entire redesign), Manchipp took on the old cliché of a woman in a dress. Eurostar owns those bespoke images, so when WorldPay needed a new look in 2014, SomeOne iterated on the design yet again—thus, the new pictograms.

SomeOne

Manchipp attributes the decades-long staying power of the skirt design to a desire to avoid confusion. "If we create a character set for male and female symbols that’s so far removed from what those understandings should be, people won’t recognize it.” Put differently: We're just used to reading certain symbols. Bathroom signage in particular became standardized in 1974, when industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss brokered a collaboration between the U.S. Department of Transportation and the American Institute of Graphic Arts that led to the adoption of some 50 pictograms. Also, Manchipp says, “I think there’s an enormous drought of imagination. For a lot of organizations their greatest fear is confusing the public.”

To get to a new set of symbols, SomeOne created a spectrum of gendered iconography, ranging from the usual rope—the girl with the skirt—on one end, and an androgynous set of characters on the other end. “We worked all the way down until any references were removed and it became asexual, and then started to eek back, so you’ll find that the hair has a little bob,” Manchipp says. Funny thing is, the hair (which buys into another gender stereotype) isn't that necessary. It's a secondary clue after the stances, and it’s absent altogether in the WorldPay bathroom signage.

Socially, the symbols constitute a much-needed update. But they're also just one part of comprehensive branding efforts that jibe with an overall aesthetic feel. By matching the pictograms to the respective company's overall visual identity, Manchipp proves that giving the matter a little extra thought can yield many creative solutions. In one U.K. restaurant chain, for example, his bathrooms have two nearly identical stick figures. The only difference is that one stands, and the other squats. Sure, it's less dignified than the Eurostar and WorldPay symbols, but as Manchipp puts it, the bottom line is the same: “We don’t need a skirt to tell us the sex of the room." We're all adults here.