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.