Well Well Well is Seattle Met’s regular health and wellness column, covering the sometimes surprising ways we can support our physical, emotional, social, and environmental well-being.

I have perhaps never been happier than I was last August, when I stepped onto the dance floor at a wedding and realized my gown had pockets. Deep pockets! Deep enough to securely fit my phone, a chapstick, and even a snack. I could put my purse away and really focus on Cupid Shuffling without encumbrance. And yet my phone was close enough that I could snap a photo at any moment. It was a delight.

Women like functional pockets. They don’t often get them. The reasons why are more complex than you might imagine and date back centuries.

Starting in the 1600s, men got pockets sewn into their clothing, while women wore a detachable pouch under their layers and layers of fabric. But as dresses got sleeker, these pouches were no longer practical. Instead of leading to built-in pockets like the boys, women instead got handbags.

When suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton asked her dressmaker for a simple pocket in her skirt, she was rebuffed and told that pockets would “bulge you out just awful!” But Elizabeth didn’t care if her hips looked flawless; she just wanted a place to keep her speech notes.

Slender silhouettes, the purse industry, cost cutting, time savings, and the good ol’ status quo are all factors at play in the dearth of built-in compartments. But whatever the reason, Aditi Sinha is here to put a stop to pocket inequality.

After spending 15 years in big tech, Sinha struck out on her own earlier this year with cofounder Sakina Adeeb to start Seattle-based Point of View (POV), a women’s workwear label that focuses on solving some of the peskiest issues in professional clothing, starting with the lack of pockets.

“It’s the twenty-first century—the only thing you actually need to step out of the house is your phone,” she says. “If there isn’t a place for you to keep your phone on your person, I think it’s a handicap.”

Indeed, the cell phone seems to have been the catalyst to get manufacturers to rethink their designs for women. In the 2010s, pockets started popping up on the red carpet, starting the slow trickle down to mainstream wear. But even celebs hyping up their pocketed dresses and regular women clamoring for them as phone sizes increase hasn’t completely changed the landscape.

Sinha’s tipping point was after Bring Your Kids to Work Day at Amazon. One senior leader was going from meeting to meeting with her 2-year-old son, all while keeping her phone in his cargo pants. You see, he had six pockets; she had none. “That’s when I realized this was not cool and I really wanted to do something,” Sinha remembers.

She started a pledge on Change.org to demand functional pockets in women’s apparel, and she started a company to do something about it herself. Through personally speaking to more than 200 women and secondary research of another 1,000-plus, she learned that a little bit of pocket bulk isn’t a major concern. “Society has reinforced that our aesthetics need to always be a priority over our function, but women actually did not care as much about the silhouette as we thought they would,” Sinha says.

Still, POV has come up with a solution that puts the pocket on most of their garments on the front side instead of the curve of the body, so as to make it as nonintrusive as possible. And those pockets are appreciated—the company does a series on social media called “What’s in your pocket?” that shows they come in handy for everything from dog treats to lipstick to pepper spray.

From her time at Amazon, Sinha took away two things: customer obsession (always considering what customers want and what will make their lives better), and building for scale. Other features already here or in the works include no-gape button-down shirts, tops with bra strap holders, and adjustable-length pants.

There’s no doubt that adding these enhancements drives up cost and complexity, but just as a man would be unlikely to buy a pair of pants that didn’t have pockets deep enough to actually hold anything, women can demand clothes with utility, too. And if POV has anything to say about it, functional workwear for women will simply be a given in the very near future.