The Debate pt 1: Women Aren't Represented in Design

Contemporary Design Culture: Week 8

The following is the written version of the spoken debate conducted as apart of The Great PDT Debate. Please feel free to comment your thoughts/opinions Do you Agree or Disagree?

I will be commenting on the debate and detailing my findings from the experience in next blog post.

For the motion:

“DESIGN IS FOR MEN BY MEN, WOMEN ARE UNDERREPRESENTED IN DESIGN”

Let us start off by asking, who here has ever used a Mac before, or any other Apple product? How do you know what to click in order to save something? You’ll never see a tab simply just saying “save” there’s always an icon denoting the feature. Iconography has become a dominant force in our world, as text fades to the background and visual stimulus moves to the forefront. We are in a world full of GIFs and emojis, which can often say more than words ever could. Susan Kare, began working on Apple’s Macintosh computer in the 1980s where she started developing digital font and graphics for the first mac computers. The creator of the “trash can” icon and the “Floppy disc” save icon. Kare is responsible for giving computers a personality. What would the digital world look like if our computer systems weren’t user-friendly and accessible? It’s unthinkable and yet if you Google the key designers of the Macintosh system you won’t see Kare’s name only a long list of men.

The RIBA Gold Medal, first awarded in 1848, has only gone to four women, and only one solo female recipient. To put this in perspective for medal recipients to reach gender equality, it would have to be awarded to a woman every year from now on until the year 21-86.

We’d like to point out to you how many women are on our class list. There are forty-six students in this class, thirty-five of them are men, eleven are women. Across our modules, we have had twenty-one lecturers and tutors, five of those were female. Even our course director is a man, and when he went on sabbatical, a man took his place. Sensing a pattern? The percentage of women working in design has risen just four per cent since 2004 and women are under-represented in all design disciplines, including architecture, software design, fashion and product design. According to the latest Design Census conducted by AIGA and Google, 53.5% of designers are women. It’s 2020, and yet women hold just 11% of leadership positions in design. If so, where do all the women go? As said by Lynda Decker, of the AIGA Women Lead Initiative, “Once in the workplace, particularly after five to ten years, women start acutely feeling the lack of mentorship, celebration of women’s work, support for mothers, and equal pay”

“75:25”

Believe it or not that is the ratio of male designers to female designers in Ireland today. More of a gender gap than you thought, right? This is something people like Jane Gleeson are trying to address through events such as 'Women in Design: Breaking the Glass Ceiling' which invited females from the industry to run talks and workshops to promote gender equality in the industry. Gleeson said “it’s not about fighting to (break through the glass ceiling), it’s about continuing to do so.” Gleeson mentioned some of the many different projects and organisations forging the way in gender equality in the Irish design industry. One such vision is the ‘Gray Legacy Project’, spearheaded by our very own Muireann McMahon. The project aims to tear down the barriers to Product and Industrial Design so a person can succeed based on their own accomplishments NOT their gender. It’s initiatives such as these that are needed to dismantle the societal concept of ‘gender’ and build, in its place, a safe space for creativity and design free from gender persecution.

The lives of men have been taken to represent humans overall. When it comes to the other half of humanity there is often nothing but silence. These silences, these gaps, have consequences. They impact on women’s lives every day. The impact can be relatively minor – struggling to reach a top shelf set at a male height norm, for example. Irritating, certainly, but not life threatening. Not like crashing a car whose safety tests don’t account for women’s measurement’s. Not like dying from a stab wound because your police body armor was built in a world centered around male data which can be deadly. From crash test dummies based entirely on the measurements of the average man, to speech recognition software that is 70% more likely to understand the male voice – without enough women weighing in on how a product is designed, made and tested, we’re designing a man’s world. When Apple launched their AI, Siri, users in the US found that SHE (ironically) could find prostitutes and Viagra suppliers, but not abortion providers. Siri could help you if you’d had a heart attack, but if you told her you’d been raped she replied, “I don’t know what you mean by “I was raped”

Its about time we level the playing field.

References

Criado-Perez, C., 2020. The Deadly Truth About A World Built For Men – From Stab Vests To Car Crashes. [online] the Guardian. Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/feb/23/truth-world-built-for-men-car-crashes> [Accessed 12 March 2020].

Erdman, N., 2020. How The Design Of Iphones, Toilets, And Crash Test Dummies Has Ignored Women — And Sometimes Put Their Lives At Risk. [online] Business Insider. Available at: <https://www.businessinsider.com/design-details-show-the-world-been-built-for-men-2019-10?r=US&IR=T> [Accessed 12 March 2020].

Fairs, M., 2020. UK Design Has "Shocking Gender Imbalance" According To Design Museum Research. [online] Dezeen. Available at: <https://www.dezeen.com/2018/12/05/design-museum-research-women-design-uk/> [Accessed 12 March 2020].

Image, 2020. 75:25 // Women In Irish Design | IMAGE.Ie. [online] IMAGE.ie. Available at: <https://www.image.ie/interiors/7525-women-in-irish-design-81231> [Accessed 10 March 2020].

McLaughlin, A., 2020. The Most Influential Female Designers Of The Last Century. [online] Design Week. Available at: <https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/5-11-february-2018/the-most-influential-female-designers-of-the-last-century/> [Accessed 10 March 2020].

Pownall, A., 2020. Five Female Trailblazers Who Changed The Field Of Design. [online] Dezeen. Available at: <https://www.dezeen.com/2019/11/18/five-women-in-designers-book-roundup/> [Accessed 10 March 2020].

Prasad, R., 2020. Eight Ways The World Is Not Designed For Women. [online] BBC News. Available at: <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47725946> [Accessed 12 March 2020].

Stevens, E., 2020. What Are The Biggest Hurdles Faced By Women In The Design Industry? | Inside Design Blog. [online] Invisionapp.com. Available at: <https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/hurdles-women-design-industry/> [Accessed 12 March 2020].