Does gender affect your interests within design?
by Jamin HegemanWhile doing some research on design and emotion, I found myself on design-emotion.com. I was struck that only men appeared in the list of interviews, which I found curious. If we are to go with stereotypes, you might assume women would be more interested in the emotional aspects of design.
I wrote about it on my blog, and the site owner of design-emotion.com responded, saying he never realized that all the interviews were with men, but confirmed I was indeed right. He also mentioned that most of the reactions he gets by email are from men. I also got a response from a psychologist that alleged that men and women are drawn to different aspects of particular fields, and perhaps men are drawn to the emotional aspects of design more than women.
I’m not sure what to make of it. What do you think? Does gender affect your interests within design? As a corollary, what draws you to design?
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August 2nd, 2007 at 4:30 am
I actually noticed a similar thing with a list of “Entrepreneurs to be inspired by” that Mind Petals (a blog for young entrepreneurs) put up a couple weeks ago. With the exception of Oprah, all the entrepreneurs were white men.
I think the issue is that men often don’t realize that they’re only showing men. Most of them don’t want to exclude women, it just doesn’t click in their head that they’re not being inclusive. Every time I’ve brought it up to a guy who has done something like that, they’re surprised. They hadn’t looked at it that way at all.
I also receive more comments from men than from women, but I think that’s because there are more male bloggers in my field. Other than that, I don’t know.
August 2nd, 2007 at 5:45 pm
There’s been a decent amount of research in the field of Computer Science showing that women tend to come to that field with very different motivations than men. On the whole, researchers have found that women tend to come to CS and programming because they’re interested in the applications of CS, of using it to solve particular problems or as a tool in a field of interest, rather than for programming for its own sake. (Here’s one interesting article on the topic.) Anecdotally, I’m female, and this is completely true for me - I started programming because I was interested in digital art.
Of course, design has a completely different mythos from programming, and the cultural archtype of a designer is very different from that of a socially-inept programmer geek. I’m not saying that this exact phenomenon carries across both fields. But it does seem to be true that gender affects one’s approach to and interests within a particular field.
August 2nd, 2007 at 9:37 pm
Gender seems to be on the mind of the web world lately. I just finished writing a blog post that could have referenced two conferences (though I chose to only mention one) in response to a blog post based on a study that inspired a study!
At a conference recently I listened to a speaker on gender interaction in online discussions. Her study found men were more likely to speak up than women just to agree or disagree where as women chose their words more carefully. There were, of course, exceptions on both sides.
Based more on the fact that there were exceptions than that there were patterns I tend to think more gender differences can be attributed to socialization. In fact, I’m frequently that exception. I’m a women in web development who thinks of the graphic design element of the development process as her weakness.
I think my life experience is more of an influence on my interest in design than anything else. I enjoy the rational approach, the problem solving, and the knowledge that there is a way to know if I’ve gotten something right or wrong, even if there may be more than one right solution to a problem. As a kid I was involved in a creative problem solving competition and some days web design feels like a natural extension of building rubber band powered vehicles
August 3rd, 2007 at 8:45 am
True, I’ve seen the same thing elsewhere. A few demographic studies of web designers have been done recently, and (surprise!) they’re all white men, too. Being one of the bunch, I was curious and concerned - as may of us were - as to why that was.
Generally, I think gender informs our interests in design. The gender difference may be a testimony to that. I think that’s more likely due to other factors, but your psychologist friend might disagree.
As for my personal approach, I freelance, so it’s a break in routine for me, a way to work creatively. As a web designer, I like to see form and function working together, and I like to work with both sides of that equation.
I also blog about art and activism, so I’m scouring the world for resources on design constantly. Thank you for posting about this, I will share it!
August 3rd, 2007 at 8:51 am
[...] at Adaptive Path recently posted an entry titled “Does gender affect your interests within design?” It is a very worthwhile conversation to have, especially since I have recently read at length about [...]
August 3rd, 2007 at 12:00 pm
I too have witnessed that men just do not notice it if only men are being mentioned in lists like these. I’m sure that if the person that made up the list DID notice it they would be embarassed and add at least one or two names of woman.
But they just do not notice it (and when I point it out to them they get defensive).
I do notice (and it hurts). I think men would notice if such a list consisted of only women. That would grab their attention.
August 5th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
I don’t know if my gender (female) affects my interest in design. But I do tend, as Bri mentions, to be more interested in how development can help my design than the act of programming.
I was thinking about these issues recently when at a web design/dev conference, and there was only one woman presenting (on accessibility, interestingly). Perhaps I’m stereotyping but I think that women on the whole tend to be more self deprecating, to speak up less, and to strive less for the spotlight. So with those factors it’s easier to find male experts (to interview/speak) than female.
August 6th, 2007 at 11:04 am
Some good points here, and things to think about. I was initially interested in why there weren’t more women interested in the emotional aspect of design (as evidenced by the list on design-emotion.com). However, it seems it may just be a symptom of a larger issue in design and elsewhere.
Adaptive Path has a good mix of both male and female designers. So the disparity isn’t so apparent here. But definitely when you look at conference lists and alleged experts, there are less women.
As Colette, said, men don’t seem to notice this. But if the lists were all women, they likely would.
August 12th, 2007 at 12:34 am
Hmmm…frankly, this seems more like a case of a gender-leaning atmosphere created by that specific website. Yes, there’s a great discussion to be had about men/women/gender/design issues…but this website clearly has created its own issues in this area, and I’d be hesitant to extrapolate from this one site.
When we’re in a given location (physical or virtual), we are aware of “what kind of people hang out here” — we may be aware consciously or unconsciously, but we *are* aware. If we’re at a location/website and we don’t see any sign of “my type of people” being there — it tends to discourage participation. That’s basic human tribal and interpersonal programming.
I’m self-aware enough to know that that when I come across a website/community where 100% of the identifiable contributors are men, I’ll think carefully before spending my time and energy in joining the conversation. And I don’t consider myself shy or inhibited around men. But fact is, if it looks like a 100% boys club — I’m more likely to pass on by and find another place that looks more gender-mixed.
All this is why it’s so important for leaders who do want to broad participation to be aware of the unspoken messages they’re sending in their choice of employees, interviewees, photos on websites, etc. The sad thing to me is that the host of that site (a designer by profession, trained in this stuff!) was unaware that all his interviewees/home page photos were of men, until it was pointed out to him. And gosh golly — turns out most of the email to the site is from men too! Gee, isn’t that a surprise.
(In terms of the broader issue of gender & design — I’d hypothesize that with ‘traditional’ product design having roots in manufacturing, and ‘modern UI design’ being rooted in technical/computer training — there’s a genesis for gender disparity starting from those roots — since historically proportionally fewer women than men have tended to specialize in manufacturing/hard product design or in technical disciplines.)
December 31st, 2007 at 10:38 am
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