Sorry to re-open an older thread but I thought I’d add my 2cents.
I’m a Product & Furniture Design Final Year Student, at Nottingham Trent University. By coincidence my dissertation is on this very topic. Like many of you my course has a 50:50 Split of men and women. And yet the statistics (that I’ve found) show around 25% women working in the industry compared to the men.
I’ve considered the topic from all kinds of issues, from sexual discrimination to the creative and design-based nature of women vs men. The research and interviews I’ve conducted so far have come across the following:
-Women are equally creative as men, according to a study conducted by Ravenna Helson at the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research, University of California, Berkeley, Men and women are equally creative although in different ways. A Summary is that men tend to have connected ‘pockets’ of information that they refer to. Whereas women have a cloud of information with strong emotional connections to and from the products.
-It’s not to do with the way in which women work either, all designers have different approaches to designs and design work, no matter who the designer is or their sex there is almost no correlation for every designers design process. So the design process by nature doesnt seem to be at fault, as all designers processes are so different.
-Historically yes women have been treated badly, weather design power couples having the main focus on the men of the two, such as Charles and Ray Eames. Plus the Bauhaus in 1915 had an infamous attitude to hiring sexually blind, however they had such a high level of women coming into the work place that it actually scared the bauhaus quite a bit. Thus a lot of women (on the design level) were moved to things like textiles and craft to ‘keep them out of the way’ (that discovery really surprised me).
-From the interviews conducted with women in the design industry, so far there is a fair amount of discrimination about. Things like manufactures/builders/fitters not trusting that a woman would know how to actually assemble a product or interior layout. One person I interviewed even said that the builder would listen to her then turn to her male intern and ask her if she really wanted that all done and if she knew what she was talking about.
-Sadly a lot of design and manufacturing companies are still run by the baby boomers, who are still in old-boys clubs and like a stationary atmosphere of women in certain places vs men in others.
As my studies and interviews go on I’ll keep updating this post as it’s a really interesting subject that needs a lot more looked into. Especially from an industry which is supposed to always be thinking differently and helping move the world forward.