Women in Industrial Design

Just thought I’d share an interesting contrast of article & an review on amazon.com

on FastCompany:
“Good products balance the needs of men and women for the benefit of both. They’re not male products masquerading as unisex or — worse — hiding under a coat of pink paint. They don’t alienate anyone with overt claims of being women-focused or women- friendly. They just are.”
[source: Forget “Shrink It and Pink It”: the Femme Den Unleashed]


on Amazon.com

A coworker of mine brought cupcakes to work in this carrier which she found in brown and it was just too cute to pass up, especially when I found it in PINK! ”
GardenofEdens | 1 reviewer made a similar statement

During my studies we were 15 male, 15 Female. Level of work def not leaning one way or the other. Some very fresh insights were shared to both sides of the genders. All in all a great environment.

As i now work work with athletic clothing, i am a minority by 1/5, in the design dept. Albeit, im the only one from an ID background. Several colleagues have spoken up, wanting more males in the product dept. I’d like that as well, but for selfish reasons.

There’s a 50/50 split among the industrial designers at my company (but there’s only four of us and they just hired us two women this year, so we may not be a good sample).

I think it’s mostly personality, and ID people have more of a tough “manly” personality than other design fields. From what I’ve experienced in school and in the real world, successful female industrial designers seem to be more of the “tomboy” type who aren’t afraid to get dirty in a machine shop making prototypes who have a tough outer shell holding their ground defending their design decisions and remaining composed and open to criticism when their designs get torn to shreds in critiques. This type is a minority of women in general, and then you take a fraction of that minority that decides to go into ID and that’s why there are fewer women in ID, in my opinion.

I was going to go further in my original reply to comment on this. The grey area of this discussion is that Industrial Design becoming a remix. I am seeing ID firms taking on more strategy design processes as well as UX firms taking on more ID processes. The “traditional” ID firm is kinda going the way of the Dodo. Someone with an ID degree can become a model maker, CAD jockey, render monkey, brand strategist, UX Designer, entrepreneur, … the list is pretty endless. It speaks a bit to the Boomer comment also, in that good work is what will be the discussion in the future, not gender or race or [insert bias here].

Cool. I am glad it spoke to you in some manner.

I just want to be perfectly clear as my post was likely poorly written. Of all the candidates, only 1 in 10 were women (purely based on their names). Same with the people I interviewed, 1 in 10 were women.

To be fair, of all the resumes we received, only 1 in 10 men were considered for the positions too. I can’t interview everyone who sends me a resume. I think that is pretty typical in that only about 10% of the people responding to an ad actually fit the description in the ad.

Good luck with your career.

No problem. A few other women in industrial design whose work I really admire.

Kimberly Wu: wish I was this good!
http://www.notcot.com/archives/2008/09/kimberly-wus-jo.php
http://www.kwudesign.com
kimjoy.jpg
Nancy Wu, Kimberly’s sister:

Amy Arandia:
http://www.coroflot.com/amyarandia

Thank you! I’m actually in undergrad, but I talk to our grad students daily. As for diversity of students, my university (Auburn) is a state school with a rather decent engineering college, so many non-engineering majors have former engineering students in them.
Myself, however, I am a 20-something married adult who went back to school after working in the “real world” for several years. I’ve had several people confuse me with being a graduate student :wink:

I enjoy feminist studies and writing, and when I saw this topic, I knew it would be fascinating to hear other people’s thoughts on the subject. Honestly, thank you for posting it!

Yo – Thank you so much for linking to Kimberly Wu’s work! Honestly, I am not interested in cars really at all (which is crazy for this field), but those are just lovely. Nancy Wu and Amy Arandia’s as well, thank you, I am adding these to my bookmarks of designers :slight_smile:

While it would be nice to speak only to good work in all fields, unintentional/institutionalized discrimination is kind of norm.
Years of telling children that it’s good to be “colorblind” has had more ill effects than good. I would gander that the same applies to gender, as well. Some degree of discussion about gender and race and class are necessary, if we want to be inclusive and sensitive to the wider world around us.

This could very quickly turn this into a different conversation than originally intended…I’ll try to keep it in context…

We disagree here…well, maybe. The issue for me is typically behavioral (cultural) vs. racial (skin color/gender, etc.). There are plenty of white dudes that are all “gangsta” as much as any other skin color. It is the behavior of the gangsta mentality that I believe is what should be discussed, not whether they have a certain skin color.

Similar to this conversation, I see a man and woman walking through the door should be judged on their behavior/skills not the orientation of their dangly bits.

Now, there is the whole issue of gender roles in society. From the 60’s on, women have been asking for “equality” in the work place. Equal pay, equal opportunity to rise to the top of the food chain, etc. But they also want months (year long) maternity, and flex time to be able to take care of kids, etc. The wants and realities don’t jive. I fall under the opinion that having children is a personal choice and not one that is the responsibility of an employer to bear. If you disappear for a year and someone comes in that is better and faster than you…is that the employer’s fault? I know…controversial, but something that needs to be discussed far more.

In the context of this discussion, a part of it that isn’t discussed is that there’s a LOT of research out there that shows that women are far more competitive when it comes to other women than anyone wants to admit. Studies have shown that women will be inclined to stake claim to their corporate territory and are more likely to discourage other female hires into potentially competitive roles.

Also, consider it from the other angle. The boss (male) needs to hire for a role of someone that has to be working side to side with him for 40 hours+ a week. The top candidate is a VERY talented female…she also happens to be VERY attractive. I can promise you, more times than not, the man will second guess this hire because he knows the kind of grief he’s going to get at home from his wife.

This discussion is a sociological onion.

Although I haven’t seen as many females as males in the workplaces I’ve been, I think managers may see females as an opportunity to provide additional perspectives to their design group. One example is the consultancy Smart Design. They have formed the group Femme Den, which focuses on the female consumer. To no one’s surprise, there are a lot of female consumers.

When I would help the freshman 3D labs I would listen to the teacher ask what major they wanted to go into. Overall, many people didn’t know what industrial design was (not surprising) and out of those, most girls were saying they might go into graphic design. I wonder if there are a large group of females, who go into Art & Design school already with a mind set on other arts & design. With portfolios and majors being competitive, they put a ton of effort into these fields and may miss on the opportunity of learning more about industrial design. These are just some thoughts I have wondered based off of my own school experience.

My class graduated in 2011 with 50/50 gender ratio. Since then 8 females and 6 males have found jobs as industrial designers in either a corporation or consultancy. 3 females are freelancing in various types of design work. Other classmates have found jobs in other design fields, the arts or other fields of interest.

We have been discussing females in corporations and consultancies but what about females who are freelancing. How many females are working as freelancers in industrial design?

Adding to the yo’s list of superb female designers: Eva Zeisel,

Hella Jongerius:

Good call, Eva Zeisel, how could I miss her!

I do think it is important to have role models out there. In recent years I think we have downplayed role models culturally due to a little bit of cynicism out there. I do think they are important for kids and teens, and even us older types to point the way like a beacon of possibility.

There are lots of different types of male designer role models, from corporate leaders like Dieter Rams (Braun), Jay Mays (VW nor Ford), John Hoke (Nike), Tinker Hatfield (Nike), and Eliot Noyes (IBM), Jonathan Ive (Apple) and Peter Schreyer (Audi now Kia) to the founders of consulting groups like Hartmut Esslinger (frog), Gianfranco Zaccai (Continuum), Loewy, Teague, Dreyfus, Giorgetto Giugiaro (ItalDesign), to the international stars like Stark, Rashid, Newson, to the crop of relatively younger designer like Scott Wilson and Yves Behar… plus all of the more boutique designer… anyway you get the idea.

My point is that I hope there are some in this generation of female industrial designers with en eye on working hard enough to become a role model for others. I think there already are in research, interaction, and strategy, and it would be fantastic to have more in product design.

I too feel role models are necessary. I tend to think the downplay you’re commenting on is based on how our society treats our heroes. There’s no privacy anymore. Heroes aren’t allowed to be human. If they make a mistake, it’s in the media in a blink.

There’s an unattainable level of perfectionism that is expected from heroes anymore.

A good friend of mine - a woman - was until recently design director of a respected and fun exhibit/museum design/build group in the Seattle area. She finally gave it up because her husband was making coin at MS and they had a kid, so it didn’t make sense for her to stay with the company, even part time. Maybe its some pre-cognition of this eventual state of affairs that dissuades a portion of the women from staying in the field? Super wide generalization, I know… on the other hand she, and other female designers I know, have taken their skills and experiences and branched out to apply it either toward their own art or craft, or to support their own companies (e.g. coffee shop with furniture, interior, artwork all designed or curated by the ex-designer).

I think it was in a book by Nick Harkaway, called Gone-Away World, where he presents the idea that if you want to make a really really excellent nuclear weapon that can kill tons of people and do lots of damage, you hire a bunch of males. If you want to have a discussion or negotiation on whether you should use that weapon, you should have some (or all) females making that decision. Harkaway is black humor cyberpunk SF so I don’t mean this literally. But some part of the sentiment feels true, that of having a larger POV.

Greetings from MassArt. We are about 50/50 right now.

At least at my school, ID is one of the most intense degree concentrations that is humanly possible. By the last year of study, a lot of people drop out to pursue less time-intensive degrees in sculpture or painting or the like.

Personal musings:

As a really young Spongy Orange, I was enamored with the construction workers and carpenters who came to work on my parent’s now beautiful but at the time crappy home. A lot of my ID folks have related similar experiences but it seems to be more common among men. All of us are at MassArt because someone, probably whomever decided to feed and clothe us, encouraged creativity at an early age. Here it seems that creativity at a young age for the gentlemen was through building and using tools. For the ladies, it was encouraged in crafting or painting.Ultimately, I think both are about finding design solutions but it just so happens that the creativity that many of the women in my department feel an affinity with is craft-based. Their interests fit in ID but fit better elsewhere in some cases. It’s even visible in material choices. On a recent project, the women of the department produced an amazing amount of beautiful work composed of a variety of materials but drawing a lot of inspiration from soft goods whereas the men produced a lot of hard-lined metal and wood stuff.

Culture-wise, there’s a lot of unintentional “manliness” that occurs in the department. Power tools, wood dust, Bondo; it sounds like an episode of Home Improvement. Our collective self-flagellation and conscious decision to partially isolate and ignore society on the basis of more/better work also plays into that “manliness”. Tough it out, brag about it later- you’re a design machine. Art historically, I sometimes feel like a Symbolist painter withdrawing from society to drag the deepest creativity out of myself possible. It’s a shared feeling.

I believe that the women of my department are producing work that is just as important as the fellows. I also believe that, in a perfect world, companies are looking to hire the most-qualified designers that theoretically will add to the bottom line to the greatest degree independent of race, gender, blah blah blah. If all this is true, then it follows that something is occurring early on in the life of young women designers that change their predilections JUST ENOUGH to push them out of ID. What is this mystery stimulus?

Tune in next week.

front paged: Forum Frenzy: Women in Industrial Design - Core77

Wow!! Thank you Yo for the post on core77 and to everyone who participated in taking the time to respond to my lingering curiosity.

Reading through this (and again, very much thank you for posting it!), it made me wonder if having a group for ID women would be helpful/good support. There is AWID, but I’ve never heard anything about them, and I don’t know how many members they have. Do you know anything about it/does anyone?

It might get decried as being misandry, but there are concerns women have that men don’t, especially in fields where more often than not, women are the minority. In my work-life, I have had both men and women as mentors, but with some topics, speaking to someone of the same gender means being met with more empathy. And there are situations women are more likely to experience than men, e.g. harassment (both outside the workplace and sometimes inside), which can be frightening to deal with alone.

@Sarahsitz, I found about AWID while googling “women in industrial design” just last week, prior to posting this topic to core forum board. AWID’s website looks very outdated and not at all resourceful…not quite sure how active it is in the design community. If anyone is an active member/contributor, please feel free to chime in! There is also a group on linkedin which might be worth joining? Sign Up | LinkedIn

@leezard: I like your thought on that. All ID programs do a good job of weeding out students who are just not fit for this field of work, and within that percent there are only a handful of female designers who follow through to be in ID post graduating. I’m a tomboy myself so that logic certainly applies in my case :slight_smile:

@jon_wienbrenner: Could you drop in a study link regarding the study of women inclined to be more competitive around other women? Thanks for pitching the thought from a male employer’s perspective…I never thought to think of it from that angle. :laughing: I have high hopes and believe that good design work will surpass biases of gender, race, etc and that this is becoming true of all professional fields beyond ID. A good friend (co-worker) of mine who also attended the IDSA conference noted how your presentation inspired her to follow suit in being curious and observant to everything at all times…Part of me struggles with keeping focus and retaining memory of objects worth nothing–your ADDesigner-trait sparked me to start a blog to record mechanically-based objects discovered…so thank y…squirrel!

@yo, AH! Kimberly Wu’s work is mind blowing. Her style of illustration is unusually unique. Build block’s products are absolutely gorgeous… high quality of detailed work is worth praising.

@Ujay: Perhaps it’s a known fact, but I only started noticing how my design team(of 4 guys and 2 girls) at work sometimes has tendency to drift off into technical details and nerd out about how a product is going to be constructed, with slightly less interest in how it will be used or what the overall interaction is going to be. We go in full circle of development, so it’s interesting to observe how we all as individual take various focus + approach to designing a product…

I am so glad you brought this theme up, smyoung, because I too have pondered this as well for the longest time, since my school days. I do have my own theories and some have already been highlighted but here is my take on it:

When I was in school, our ID dept was on the same floor as the Interior Design dept. Not too long after befriending a few interior design majors and always passing by their studios, did I notice 99 percent of the student body being female (and as someone else noticed, impeccably dressed and made up EVERYDAY!). Many of the young women I befriended were mostly clueless as to what ID was (as most lay people are) and most of the time, they were under the misconception that it was engineering-based or mechanical in nature. The name “industrial” threw most of them off because it gave connotations of “industry”, hence “too mechanical and industrial-gritty for me”. When they came to realize the aesthetic nature of ID (color, texture, form… aspects they admired within interior design as well) and the problem solving involved, some were pleasantly surprised they had not gone in the direction of ID vs. Interiors. I know, because I also thought I wanted to do interiors at first (I am male) and hadn’t heard of ID at the time. I soon came to realize after careful analysis of my sketches that my emphasis and attraction was always focused on the actual objects within the rooms I was designing and not the rooms themselves.

I have personally witnessed throughout my 4 year stint in school, several interiors majors in our ID classes who enjoyed the experience of building models, sketching, etc… especially if the projects involved furniture, chairs, lighting, housewares, appliances, etc. Two young women I know of actually switched mid-way through their education. When talking to them in depth, I came to notice that they too thought they wanted to be interior designers, like I did, but then realized they were most attracted to the three-dimensionality of ID, home decor and housewares, etc. I am still baffled more women are not involved in ID because not only do women mostly make purchasing decisions in the home and are more involved in how their homes look, but most of the products that they themselves enjoy are designed by men, who sometimes have no clue as to what women need. As we all know by now, most design geared towards women is a “shrink and pink” job. We truly DO need more women in ID and a female perspective. The same goes for fashion, which is baffling: why do women rely on men to design for them?!

I think ID needs more exposure in high schools and in the media. Anyone notice that even in TV sitcoms or dramas, when a character is involved in design, it’s always either fashion or interiors? Even reality TV hasn’t caught up! All I see are competition shows dedicated to remaking rooms or fashion-related. Ugh.

ID certainly is slowing gaining a reputation, with the advent of internet, blogs dedicated to design, etc… so I predict soon there to be a change in gender demographics within our profession. It’s only a matter of time. :slight_smile:

I apologize for hijacking your topic, Smyoung, but now that we are on the subject of workforce diversity, where are the gay industrial designers? Either they weren’t out when I was in school or they weren’t existent. I take that back… there were 2 that I found out towards graduation were gay ; only because of their Facebook page, but the rest of the men seemed very tough and rumble straight men (not that gay men can’t be “masculine”) and very obvious of their love for cars, machines, tools and of course, women (sex jokes, crass comments, etc) which drove them to ID.

Before I offend anyone on the forum; I am not generalizing and claiming all straight men speak crass about women/sex or that all gay men are feminine or interested in housewares and interiors either. Just had to make that clear.

I am just making this observation from my own experience from meeting so far many married/dating, hetero industrial designers throughout my business involvements and interviews, etc… and from the ones I encounter online or in person when a student. There are design fields that are filled with creative and openly gay men, such as fashion and interiors, but for some reason, I don’t see a lot of gay men within industrial design. I could be wrong as I am fairly new to the industry and maybe many of straight men/women on here can vouch for knowing an out gay industrial designer in their midst, but it just seems that ID, just like women, doesn’t seem to attract many gay men.

Can anyone comment?