I found myself staring at two identical caps in a shop in Sheffield four years ago (one from the mens rail, one from the womens) trying to decide which one to buy for my niece before the line behind me started tutting loudly. Same colour, same logo, same brand. I think I had about thirty seconds before the bloke at the till was going to lose his shit at me turning them inside out looking for some kind of clue. This is the point where that question flips from something you read about to something you find yourself actually having to answer in a shop whilst someone gets impatient behind you. And the conclusion I eventually came to, the one I’ve stuck with ever since, was that yes women’s hats (caps) do generally run smaller than men’s, but not in the way you think they do and also not in any way that you’ll be able to tell by comparing the two side-by-side on a shelf.
I’ll level with you, my first reaction when I found myself having to answer that question there and then was that it was some kind of marketing bullshit, like the “pink tax” things women pay more for basic sanitary stuff but applied to hat sizes where someone somewhere has decided women should get a proportionally smaller product for the same price and called it a design feature. That’s not really what’s happening, not directly anyway.
There are two places the difference actually lies and once you know what they are, it stops being a mysterious monetised power move and starts becoming something you can actually verify with your own hands in about ten seconds.
The Adjustment Strap Is Bullshitting You
Moreso than any other feature, caps, men’s or womens deceive with the phrase “one size”.
What “one size” actually means is “one size range”, dictated by how much the adjuster strap at the back can stretch. Be it the old school plastic snap holes or the newer style fabric strap with velcro. On a men’s cap, that size range is generally built around a wider spread, maybe a 56 all the way up to a 62 centimetre head, because they just expect from the off that it’s a larger skull that’s going to be fitting it. On a women’s cap, the exact same strap setup is frequently resized at the manufacturing stage to cover a narrower range, sometimes by filing off a few holes at the end of the snapback adjuster, sometimes by reducing the length of velcro patch by a few centimetres itself so the total head size covered by the adjuster shifts down by around two or three centimetres before you’ve even put it on.
I discovered this bit properly by buying the cap for my niece and then having it absolutely refuse to sit near comfortably on my head five minutes later on a whim, and trust me I’ve got what I consider to be a relatively standard head size at this point. Small, not giant but not pea shaped either. When I flipped the women’s cap around and compared it to one of the men’s they were both mostly the same size adjuster strap but the women’s simply ran out of holes midway across my head where the men’s still had three or four left on my largest setting. It’s not so much the label lying to you there as it is the strap doing the measuring and the label just describing which strap section you happen to be on. Always check the size range of the strap first before you worry about anything else, that’s the part actually doing the fitting, not the word on the tag.
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The other trick, and this took me ages to clock because hats are devious like that, is that a lot of womens caps will actually also have a narrower base curve to the brim itself too which subtly alters how the whole thing sits even before the strap width is factored in. Again, it’s only off by a couple of millimetres at most in the brim curve but it changes how high or low the cap itself rests on your head and it’s part of why sliding a womens cap onto a head that’s outside their target size range doesn’t just feel tight, it feels like it’s going to tip over whenever you move because it’s not balancing like it’s meant to.
Crown Depth, The Thing Nobody Tells You About
This is the bit that matters way more in practice than the strap though, and that’s the crown depth. Meaning how tall, from sweatband to top button, the cap is cut inside.
Men’s hats, as standard are cut with a deeper crown because the expectations are they’ll have more hair and more volume to fit, or a ponytail/bun needing room at the top, or in my case these days fuck all hair and nowhere near enough of a problem to account for at all.
Women’s hats will frequently be cut up to, and call me crazy here but I’m just going with it, a good centimetre or so less deep in that crown area. Doesn’t sound like much until you put one on over say your normal hair and realise that suddenly the whole cap is perching up and away from your head like it’s trying to escape seconds after putting it on, rather than resting snugly like a well fitting cap should.
I asked my brother, who has far more hair than sense, to try on one of the women’s caps I picked up as a test for writing this piece and he handed it back to me grey-faced and spent without so much as a word. He’s never once handed back a cap without buying it at this point so that right there is a bigger recommendation than I could ever provide. That reduced crown is fantastic if you’ve got less hair to fit over, it keeps the whole thing close and neat and won’t do that off-balancing thing caps suddenly do when they’re too small. But apply that same women’s cap to a head with an actual army of hair hiding under it and suddenly the whole thing just looks and feels wrong, and no amount of fiddling with the strap is going to fix that because the strap can only adjust how wide the cap is, not how much room there is for hair inside it.
To actually answer the question then, as opposed to just agreeing with it; women’s hats do run smaller circumference-wise because the sizing strap has been deliberately shortened at the design stage to offer a narrower range of head sizes and they run shallow on the crown because they’re literally cut with less room inside for hair. They’re two completely different issues both being referred to by the ambiguous term ‘smaller’ and neither of which care how the label lying next to them describes itself. Honestly by the time I finished looking into this I stopped caring about the men’s and womens labels entirely and just went with what my own head told me, and I really think you should do the same. Look at the adjustment range first and then try it on with whatever hair you actually got, because those two things combined will tell you far more than anything written on the shelf-dwelling packet ever will.
