By Maxine Morland
The gender problem runs through the industrial design world, from poor recruitment and retention of women designers to designed products that are unsuitable for women.
The design industry has a surprisingly large ratio of men to women – in the UK, the design industry is 78% male (Design Council, 2018). In product and industrial design, men make up 95% of the workforce. This is not because women are choosing to avoid these subjects at university – according to Design Council research, 63% of all students who study creative arts and design courses at university are women.
This is my experience as a journalist covering the automotive design sector. In both design studios and networking events I was often the only woman present who wasn’t part of the serving staff. This pattern was replicated in China, America, Europe, Korea and Japan. I rarely interviewed any women in management or senior positions and, when I did, they worked in the highly gendered ‘colour, materials and fabrics’ (CMF) department. Women in automotive design have been differentiated (Reskin, 1987) into a particular department, one which is not held in high regard. Not only are the tasks different in this department but it always sits in a discrete part of the design studio. Barbara Reskin (1987) tells us that such physical and task-based forms of separation, occupational segregation, is common when dominant groups work to maintain their dominance.
Gender biased design can produce many problematic outcomes, one of which is creating products that are unsuitable or exclude certain users. Gender narratives and the inherently male design world produces products which then shape the social world again. Although you may have no interest in cars, many women buy cars, in equivalent numbers to men, and yet the headrest still doesn’t accommodate a ponytail, there’s nowhere to put your bag when you are driving and the safety engineering for the car is designed around an ergonomic model of a man.
Caroline Criad Perez’s book Invisible Women tells us that when a woman is involved in a car crash she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured than a man, and 17% more likely to die. Why? Women sit further forward when driving because our legs tend to be shorter and we need to reach the pedals. This also means we must sit more upright and closer to the dashboard. We are ‘out of position’ drivers, and because of this we are at greater risk of internal injury in frontal collisions. This blinkered approach to design and engineering is not restricted to the vehicles, it is currently creating an electric vehicle (EV) charging network in the UK that is putting women (and men) at risk.
We all know that there aren’t enough EV charging points but there’s another problem: online retailer heycar recently conducted a driver survey and found that 80.3% feel vulnerable when charging their EVs.
Imagine it is late at night, you are running out of charge in your car, you locate a charging point in a small town. It is in a deserted car park. There is some lighting, but not near the charge point. You must sit there for 20 minutes to get enough charge to continue your journey, one hour if you don’t want to have to repeat this exercise. There is no CCTV covering the charge point, no manned service station and no way of disconnecting from the charge without getting out of the car and doing it manually. How safe do you feel? This charge point has been designed and located for ‘everyone’. However, in design, when the end user is unspecified, the designers will almost always default their design to the dominant group – able-bodied white men with access to technology and who speak English. A design plan that prioritised vulnerable individuals would have created a charge point with better lighting, in a better location with oversight by CCTV and clear instructions on how to deal with threats to personal safety and they might have designed an electric vehicle that can be charged without exiting the safe space of the car.
Recently, in the interests of design justice, academics and designers have begun exploring approaches to design that require designers to think through how different factors of identity, such as gender, race, class and disability, interact and combine for users (Costanza-Chock, 2018). An intersectional (Crenshaw, 2018) approach to design theory and practice. This may allow us to see the forces at work behind our designed objects and systems and begin designing a better, more just world.