One Size Fits No One: The Illusion of Equal Access and Why “Universal” Systems Often Fail

A swimming pool offers a monthly subscription: pay once, swim as much as you want.

At first, it sounds fair. Everyone pays the same price. Everyone receives the same access. Everyone is promised the same benefit.

But that promise only works if every body can use the pool in the same way. For someone who menstruates and cannot comfortably swim for several days each month, the “unlimited” subscription is not actually unlimited. The system does not openly exclude them, but it quietly assumes a user whose body can participate every day.

That is where the problem begins.

A one-size-fits-all system often looks fair because it treats everyone the same. But sameness is not always fairness. When a system ignores difference, it does not erase difference. It simply makes people deal with it privately.

Many systems are built around an imagined average person. The average commuter. The average worker. The average student. The average body. The average user.

But real people rarely fit cleanly into that model.

The issue is not always intentional discrimination. Often, it is assumption. Designers, schools, workplaces, businesses, and governments create systems that seem neutral because they are not openly targeted at anyone. But neutrality can still hide a default. If the “average” user is quietly based on one kind of body, lifestyle, ability, or schedule, then everyone outside that image has to adjust.

This is one of the arguments behind the idea of the gender data gap. Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women explores how many parts of society have historically been designed around male bodies and male patterns of life, from office temperatures based on male metabolic rates to crash-test standards that made cars more dangerous for women. The problem is not only that women were ignored, but that male experience was treated as universal experience.

That is why one-size-fits-all design can be so misleading. It does not always mean “designed for everyone.” Sometimes, it means “designed for one group, then applied to everyone else.”

A rigid system can be equal on paper and unequal in reality.

A public transit system may be designed around a worker who travels directly from home to work and back. But a caregiver may need to stop at school, buy groceries, visit an elderly parent, and then go to work. The same transit map exists for both people, but it serves one life far better than the other.

An office temperature may seem like a small thing, but when standards are based on male bodies, women are expected to simply adapt to discomfort. A phone may be marketed as universal, but if its size fits the average male hand better than the average female hand, then its “neutral” design still favors one body. A medical system may claim to treat all patients, but if research and symptoms are based mainly on male bodies, women’s experiences are more likely to be misunderstood or dismissed.

The same logic appears everywhere.

A school policy may assume every student has quiet space at home. A workplace may assume every employee can stay late without caregiving responsibilities. A gym membership may assume every person’s body, schedule, and health remain consistent across the month. A digital platform may assume every user can see, hear, read quickly, or process information in the same way.

None of these systems necessarily announce themselves as unfair. That is what makes them so effective at hiding exclusion.

They say: everyone has access.

But the better question is: access for whom, under what conditions?

One-size-fits-all systems often fail because they confuse equality with uniformity.

Uniformity means everyone receives the same thing. Fairness means people receive what allows them to participate meaningfully.

Those are not the same.

A student with a visual impairment does not need the same worksheet as everyone else if the worksheet cannot be read. A wheelchair user does not need the same staircase as everyone else. A person watching a video in a noisy environment does not need the same audio-only information as someone in a quiet room. Giving everyone the same design may look equal, but it can still leave some people outside the experience.

This is why inclusive design begins from a different starting point. Instead of asking, “How do we make one solution work for as many people as possible?” it asks, “Who is being left out, and why?”

Kat Holmes, a major voice in inclusive design, describes the difference clearly: universal design often aims for “one-size-fits-all,” while inclusive design is closer to “one-size-fits-one.” In other words, inclusion is not about pretending one solution can perfectly serve everyone. It is about recognizing human diversity and creating more flexible ways to participate.

That shift matters because it stops treating difference as an inconvenience. Instead, difference becomes the starting point for better design.

The strongest argument against one-size-fits-all thinking is the curb-cut effect.

Curb cuts were originally designed to help wheelchair users move safely between sidewalks and streets. But once they existed, far more people benefited from them: parents pushing strollers, travelers rolling suitcases, delivery workers moving carts, elderly people, injured people, and anyone carrying something heavy. A design created for a specific access need became useful to society more broadly.

That pattern appears again and again.

Closed captions support Deaf and hard-of-hearing people, but they also help people watching videos in loud spaces, quiet rooms, or second-language contexts. Text-to-speech supports blind and visually impaired users, but it also helps commuters, tired students, multitaskers, and people who process information better by listening. Digital accessibility experts describe this as a broader pattern where accessibility features improve user experience beyond the group they were first created for.

This is the irony.

Designs made for “everyone” often exclude people because they are based on a narrow default. But designs made for specific needs often help far more people than expected.

The pool subscription that ignores menstruation calls itself universal but fails a real group of users. A flexible access model, in contrast, might begin by recognizing different bodies and different patterns of use. That change would not only help people who menstruate. It could also help people who travel, get sick, work irregular schedules, or have health conditions.

Inclusive design does not shrink the audience. It often expands it.

This issue is bigger than ramps, captions, office temperatures, or pool memberships.

It is about how society imagines people.

When institutions design for an average person, they often reward those who already fit the system and blame everyone else for struggling. If a person cannot access something, the problem is treated as personal: their body, their schedule, their disability, their caregiving role, their language, their health, their difference.

But maybe the problem is not the person.

Maybe the system was never as universal as it claimed to be.

This matters in schools, workplaces, healthcare, urban planning, technology, pricing, and public policy. Every time a system claims to serve everyone, it should be asked who “everyone” actually includes. Every time a rule treats people the same, it should be asked whether people experience that sameness equally.

Because sometimes the most unfair systems are not the ones that openly exclude people. Sometimes they are the ones that insist they are fair while quietly forcing certain people to absorb the cost of difference.

A better system does not need to predict every possible human experience perfectly. That is impossible.

But it can stop pretending that one default person represents everyone.

Fairness should not mean forcing people into the same structure and calling it equal. Fairness should mean building systems flexible enough to recognize that people move through the world differently. Different bodies. Different responsibilities. Different abilities. Different needs. Different lives.

The goal is not to create endless special treatment. The goal is to stop treating the default as neutral.

Perhaps the real failure of one-size-fits-all thinking is not that it helps no one. It often helps someone. The problem is that it mistakes that someone for everyone.

And maybe the question is not how to design one system that fits all people.

Maybe the question is why we keep pretending people were ever the same size to begin with.