Category structure for SEO and/or customer?

[seo.gops]

I'm setting up categories for my e-commerce site (clothing) and have researched what queries on Google Search Console generates exposes for my site. I then categorized those searches and found that type of product and type of material totally dominates search queries. In my understanding, categorizing your content is a way to explain to Google how you organize your content to your customers. So I then find it a bit odd that almost all sites selling clothes promotes the category gender by first making the customer choose between female, male and child. Why is that?

[Electrum]

Here are three strategies to improve your category page performance.

1. Structure Your Category Pages for User Flow
2. Research Your Competitors and Use Historical Data
3. Optimize Content for Your Visitors
Create Pages With Intention
Avoid Publishing Similar Content and Pages
Improve Upon Existing Content
3 Additional SEO Tips for Category Pages
- Add ample content to your category pages with images, videos, and internal links to other relevant pages.
- Build internal links from relevant blog posts to your category pages.
- Update your category pages at least once per year to include new product-related content, images and video.

Use Google Analytics to Measure Category Page Performance