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.”
