An absence can’t always be easily explained. Statistics might confirm the presence of an absence that’s felt, but numbers don’t always speak to how or why that absence came into being. Research from the UK’s Design Museum in 2018 found that just one in five working designers are women, despite the fact that they make up seven out of 10 students studying design. Many were outraged by the findings. But for most of that one in five, there was a unanimous eye roll—a sigh as something already known was simply confirmed.
What happens in that time between the classroom and the office? The patriarchal dynamics that hinder women in the workplace at large are well-documented: there’s the old glass ceiling barring the careers of high-achievers; subtle and not-so-subtle sexism, sexual harassment, and abuse of power; the firmly entrenched gender pay gap; the challenge of managing maternity leave and childcare costs for parents. Then, there are the additional obstacles hindering women at the intersection of more than one historically marginalised group, including those oppressed due to race, class, ability, sexuality, and more. There are also the struggles of those whose gender identity does not conform to the binary. As the feminist writer Audre Lorde once said, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
The design profession is not immune from systematic oppression, though it does have its own specific histories in relation to gender. This project focuses most frequently on the issues faced by designing women, and it defines woman as any one who identifies herself as such. In hearing from a global range of women about their experiences in design, this article maps some of the broad and pervasive factors contributing to the exclusionary status-quo.
In design today, women and men exist in the same institutions and businesses, and they emerge from the same educational systems. Yet their experiences within these structures are very divergent. In the past, gendered experiences in the field of graphic design were even more different. During the early twentieth century in Europe and North America, many art schools turned their emphasis towards training a professional class of designers; traditional gender roles meant women were sidelined, as they were considered less suitable for management roles. It should be remembered that in many countries, women were only given the right to vote in the early and mid-twentieth century, and their participation in the labor force has been historically determined by men in most trades across the world.
Women existed in the design trade in the early and mid-twentieth century, but they were largely invisible—hired to carry out laborious grunt work instead of client-facing, big picture thinking. Historically, for example, non-unionized young women were hired to typeset or clean metal fonts—forms of maintenance work essential to production yet undervalued. Women were often “office girls,” and few held top titles, such as art director or creative director. Historically feminized tasks and processes—repetitive, detail oriented labor like sewing, cleaning, and organizing—were given to women, contributing to a gendered distribution of roles in the field, which separated maintenance labor from creative work and expertise.
“At agencies in South Korea in the ’60s and ’70s, women were also often hired to do detailed work,” says Na Kim, a graphic designer from Seoul and one of four curators behind The W Show: A List of Graphic Designers, a 2017 exhibition highlighting Korean women in design past and present. “Women wouldn’t be the ones to design a book cover for instance. Instead, they’d be the ones to layout the text.” Mira Malhotra, a graphic designer and founder of Studio Kohl in Mumbai, and a publisher of feminist comics journal Bystander, observes a similar distribution historically in India: “In the past, graphic design has been more associated with advertizing—and advertizing was very male-dominated here,” she says. It’s in the more decorative, detailed arena of children’s book illustration where you’ll traditionally find “a ton of women,” says Malhotra.
The London-based design educator Ruth Sykes—who’s behind the research project ‘Graphics UK Women’—emphasizes that women have been far more likely to work in-house at large agencies than in prominent independent studios. Benefits such as insurance schemes and parental leave policies could be contributing factors. “And traditionally it’s been the man’s role to operate independently,” says Sykes. As a result, women’s contributions to graphic design have remained in the dark—they haven’t been thoroughly recorded, archived, and recounted.
“When graphic design historians collate history books, they’re often more likely to write about work from independent design agencies that had a more varied and supposedly cutting-edge output,” says Sykes. “Yet because women were more likely to find work within in-house agencies—producing great work but work which was not seen as creatively valuable as that from the independent agencies—it’s been less likely to be written about.” Additionally, and for similar reasons, women’s graphic design work hasn’t been archived as meticulously as that by independent, male practitioners; often archivists only preserve work that seems significant, or that has been signed, and historically men were much more likely to sign work than women. Sykes also notes that, likely due to their skills, graphic designers love producing monographs, but the conventional economics of monograph making mean that readers want an array of pictures of work, and women might not have had the length of career to fill a book.
“When a lecturer asks students to do a history project on a graphic designer, there literally aren’t enough monographs on women graphic designers in the library to go around a class of say 30 students,” says Sykes.
So-called craft processes have also been classified as distinct from modern design. “Through this division, the histories and practises of indigenous cultures, as well as those of women, have been relegated,” says Anja Neidhardt, a design writer and co-creator of the Swiss research group Depatriarchise Design. "A lot of design by women—including domestic labor like knitting, sewing, and weaving—has been excluded from design history.” Historically, there has been a deeply entrenched hierarchy between men as creators and women as muses; the creative output of women has therefore not been taken as seriously when it is considered at all.
Through a combination of all these factors and more, a male-dominated graphic design canon of designers and design work has been firmly entrenched. The prevailing narratives privilege polemical gestures and celebrated individuals, while the issues and output of women and minority designers remain secondary from such accounts. Design history is so often a history of publicity—of self promotion, high-end catalogs, and keynote lectures. And the resulting lack of diverse representation has lead to a lack of designer role-models that young women and minorities can identify with and learn from. This absence can make it difficult to find one’s direction in the move from lecture hall to office desk.
“Seeing someone of your own gender, with your own skin tone, or someone of own class or caste doing something rad is half the battle won,” says Malhotra from Mumbai. “You don’t find it as difficult then, to see yourself in a similar role. Role-models are about seeing possibility for yourself; when you have them, there’s a greater likelihood that you’ll fulfil your ambition.” Studies have confirmed Malhotra’s sentiment. In 2017, for example, the University of Massachusetts studied the value of mentorship by pairing female engineering undergraduates with female mentors for an entire year. It found that those paired with women felt far more self-assured, motivated, and less anxious that those working with a male mentor.
A historical lack, or rather erasure, reverberates and repeats over time: prestigious journals, magazines, conferences, and the design media at large have typically reflected the socially-accepted, sexist status quo, reaffirming an exclusionary canon for graphic design. And imbalance, of course, perpetuates into the present: In 2019 for example, a report from AIGA’s Eye on Design found that across major design conferences in Europe, the average number of women speaking at events was 35.7%. The report also underlines how women are consistently allotted less time on stage than their male counterparts.
“Being surrounded by mostly white, male designers has an impact on the self-confidence of designers who are less or aren’t represented,” agrees Loraine Furter, a graphic designer and researcher based in Brussels who specializes in intersectional design projects. “Conferences and big studios are still led by men who, consciously or not, work with other men, and that—combined with a lack of role-models—creates a situation in which female-identifying designers refuse to speak at conferences because they feel less legitimate. Or, they don’t apply for high job positions or specific educational programs for the same reason.”
In recent years, much has been said and written about “bro culture,” and a toxic, heteronormative “boys’ clubs” mentality naturally contributes to feelings of exclusion in design, especially amongst female-identifying graduates first entering the field. In part, this has contributed to a climate where despite the fact that 70% of graphic design students are women, only 11% are Creative Directors. “I’ve always observed a strong sense of brotherhood in the workplace,” says Kim of her experience working in Seoul. “Smoking and drinking together is very common in Korea—and it’s important for networking. Whether or not you participate in these activities really effects whether you get work as a freelancer and who will collaborate with you.”
Malhotra also describes having felt excluded in Mumbai agencies from “the ‘I’ll scratch your back, if you scratch mine’ brotherhood.” She notes that an exclusionary mentality extends to the global design scene at large, too, which is not just overwhelmingly male in its tight-knit circles, but also overwhelmingly white: “I find few minority groups in design, mostly because there’s a lot of undercutting and cliquism (it's a small industry),” she says. “It’s hard enough to choose the instability of a creative job as a minority, but additionally one has to gain access to networks that don’t necessarily prioritize making you feel welcome.”
For Isabel Seiffert, one-half of Switzerland’s Offshore Studio, intimidating “boys club” networks deterred her from applying to the studios that she was most interested in after graduating. “I felt like I didn’t know a single woman who had a job that I wanted,” she says. “Instead, I could see all these male designers I admired hanging out in big groups of other men having beers together, sharing images of themselves on social media. I’d see one guy using the typeface of another; I’d see them wearing each others’ t-shirts, and creating this hype around themselves. You see that there are these bro friendship circles—and you see that that’s how jobs get distributed.” Experiences like these help contextualize the reasons for a landscape lacking in women in leadership roles (in 2015, The Drum’s list of the top 100 “designerati” featured only 13 women.)
When anyone feels uncertain about their own validity in a certain space, they’re less likely to speak up, creating a cycle in which one’s own lack of confidence leads to taking fewer risks and, therefore, being less trusted as a leader by colleagues. “A confident or even over-confident person will jump in and try something, even when they might not succeed,” says design historian and educator Ellen Lupton, whose writing on women in design has greatly informed a growing dialogue in recent decades. “Furthermore, those who do express confidence may be penalized in the workplace, creating another negative cycle.”
As an educator at the Maryland Institute College of Art in the USA, Lupton observes how a gendered “confidence gap” entrenches itself early on in the classroom. “Women make up the majority of our students, and women from Asia are a growing group,” she says. “Thus, the male students are a minority, and this scarcity may actually contribute to the prestige of the male within a classroom setting. In a room full of female students, many of whom come from cultures where deference to authority is valued over outspoken expression, the male students may emerge as creative leaders. It’s not enough that women, including women of color, are a large demographic group in a design program; faculty still have to create a context in which anyone can come forth and flourish.”
Such experiences—socially-constructed through gender and identity—are deeply formative and make it all the more challenging to break through the so-called glass ceiling. Biases undermine one’s confidence—sometimes subtly, sometimes less so. “Occasionally, during the first meeting with a client they’ll subconsciously walk towards my co-founder first, who’s a man,” oberseves Seiffert of Offshore Studio. And in response to such biases, a degree of additional emotional labor can be necessary—that practise of making others around you comfortable with your presence by acting in such a way that reinforces proscribed norms. “I’ve found the printers that I collaborate are mostly older guys; they’ll often try to advise you if you’re a woman, and tell you you’re doing it wrong,” adds Kim. “You have to be extra kind, smile even more, to get the printer to do what you want.”
Seiffert notes that there’s a double bind that occurs one needs to play two ultimately irreconcilable parts to succeed: “What are your options? You’re shy, or you’re confident. But if you’re confident, then you appear arrogant and people are repulsed by it. Either way, you’re trapped.” In patriarchal societies, confidence can often be seen as an abrasive quality, unless women can temper assertiveness with more stereotypically feminine traits like empathy. Such emotional labor, even when done successfully, can erode one’s perceived expertise.
“We can still see in some institutions the remnants of an ‘old boy’ culture, where gender stereotypes abound,” says Teal Triggs, an educator at the Royal College of Art in London, and co-founder of the influential Women’s Design + Research Unit (WD+RU) in 1994. Speaking from the perspective of working in design education, she notes that many “female educators are still marginalized in subtle ways such as being talked-over in meetings or seen in roles as educational caretakers rather than potential leaders.”
