Gender, design, and innovation
Gender can be a lens to view the world, so let’s look at design from a gender perspective. Our society is built on certain ideas about ourselves as humans, and those ideas determine how we solve problems, design solutions, and deliver these amongst ourselves. What gender has to do with design, how it is linked to design, and why it matters— you’ll find out in this article.
What has gender got to do with design and innovation?
I strongly believe in design as a tool to solve peoples’ problems, and genuinely try to use it best I can, to work out people’s actual problems. It’s not the only way to see design, though. Design can be used to achieve a range of different goals, some more altruistic than others.
Gender as a lens
Gender theory can be a lens to view the world through, as well as the designed services and products around us. When applying gender as a lens to look at design and innovation, we observe the industry and relate it back to the theories of gender.
In Gender In World Perspective (2015) Connell and Pearse talk about gender theory, both from a variety of personal perspectives, as well as the social context in which we continuously make gender through our interactions. Gender in this context is the different identities that we associate with physical sex, as well as the power structure. However, it’s not as simple as the good old nature vs. nurture.
Gender is not just handed down from the older generation, instead it is developed throughout life in collaboration with others and as responses to others. In every interaction with people and systems around us, we contribute to the idea of what gender is. The reason gender is an interesting perspective, is that it comes with a social hierarchy and distribution of power accordingly.
Changing gender roles to uphold power structures
The book mentioned above, also presents examples of the gender roles that can change, depending on the context. Looking at manhood in the mines of South Africa, T. Dunbar Moodie (Going for Gold, 1994) documented the experiences of a series of men. Being a homogenous group living and working away from their hometowns, they were reconstructing the same power structures that existed between men and women, to now exist amongst men only. It is a good example on how gender roles are not set in stone themselves, they are fluid. The tasks or chores connected to one gender, can be transferred to other people, to make sure that the power structures remain.
From a design point of view, we can see how values associated with different designed artefacts change. Pink used to be seen as a very masculine colour, and today it represents the girl’s side of every toy store. It also explains the difficulty of fully understanding our users without blindly following stereotypes. Understanding and recognising these values and and power structures, is part of understanding how designed artefacts are perceived and used, an important tool for a designer.
An example of gender as a lens
In a class at Luleå Technical University, Dr. Mohammed-Aminu Sanda described a project from the rural parts of northern Nigeria, where a large portion of people work in agriculture. Men work as farmers or employed to do work at farms, and women as housewives with their own small scale production of oil from the commonly found peanut. Since most women are responsible for the home and household, this is one of few ways they can earn a little money on the side, for themselves. The extraction of oil has been done manually requiring a lot of physical labour for a relatively small yield. The amount of money a Nigerian woman can earn doing this is therefore rather limited.
The problem must have been widely known, that women don’t earn much money, because UNESCO, UNIFEM, US AID, and WHO came together and funded research for how this problem could be solved. The problem was phrased as how can we improve the technology which these women depend on to extract the oil from the peanut.
As a designer and problem lover I shiver (in a bad way) at the problem statement, and would have liked to see something along the lines with how can we improve women’s opportunities of increasing their income? I think it’s our responsibility not to assume there’s a particular solution before we fully understand the problem.
A technical solution was presented, that indeed could extract oil in a less labour intensive way, and it was handed out to women who started using it. After a while somehow, when husbands and men around these women realised the potential of the technology, they took over the production of oil, and also the income when selling the oil. The project failed, and a new initiative was launched, funded by the World Bank and UNICEF. Instead of just improving the oil extraction, this new initiative sought to also make a technology suitable for women, in the context of rural northern Nigeria. Women were interviewed and observed, and their cultural context studied.
The Nigerian women got a new invention given to them, one that looked so similar to their original tool, that the men still thought of it as a feminine type of tool, and refrained from taking over. Dr. Mohammed-Aminu Sanda presents two lessons learned from this project, that set out to empower women.
The first lesson was that there is always a risk that men will take over if the initiative seems successful, and that technology that is being developed for women therefore must be appropriated to the limitations that women already live with. The second lesson was that if a product is being designed for a woman, the research needs to be based on real women in their contexts, but also that the consequences of the woman as an end user, because she is a woman, must be taken into consideration.
Do I agree with Dr. Mohammed-Aminu Sanda on this? No, I think there are other lessons to be learnt, the main one being that gendered power structures really do lead to different types of design for different people. Is the problem really that the tools given to the women were too masculine, or is the problem that women have very few options and opportunities to make money because of social expectations due to the fact that they are women?
It is not that women’s context and circumstances shouldn’t be taken into account, but it is interesting when large organisations invest money in trying to solve symptoms of a much larger problem. Caroline Criado Perez writes in Invisible Women (2019) (Here’s a book review) about a similar project in India, where stoves for indoor use were redesigned in an attempt to save the lives of the (mostly) women who use them, since the toxic smoke is dangerous to be around and inhale. She attributes the failed projects on the neglect of women and women’s context, in the design process.
What neither of these projects do, is to look at why women categorically are doing all the cooking, or all the peanut oil production, instead of having a paid job? Is it likely that it is by choice, or are these roles assigned to their gender, so strictly aligned to the dichotomy of gender, that sharing the burden, or doing something else, is unimaginable?
How gender power structures affect design
A different approach
When designing products and services my team and I have two goals, one is to make sure that what we do solve the actual problem that our potential users have, and then solving it in a way that works for them. This is of course easy to state in an article, when in reality needs and wants are interwoven and embedded in social norms and contexts. But all this has to be taken into account, nothing exists on its own.
User centred innovation always starts and finishes with the user, and the final product or service has to always be measured back to the user’s needs. When looking at the problem statement presented in the peanut oil case, the technical solution came before the needs were identified. This is what I would call a product centred approach, and that is very much in line with what Vandana Shiva describes in Staying Alive (1989) as a reductionist western development model. Reductionism is the ism of reducing complex system into bits that can be easily understood. (With the risk of excluding and ignoring the importance of the bigger picture.)
Many layers of “why?”
A user centred approach in the peanut case, would start by looking at the defined problem, women want to earn more money, and then continue on a qualitative path, setting out to really understand why that is the problem. A woman has a few “jobs to be done” in her life, and her “job to be done” is not to produce peanut oil for the sake of it, it is to earn extra money for herself and her family. Why is it that she needs extra money? She might want to invest in solar panels or pay for a stand at the market, why does she want to do that? A user centred approach works when we understand the human and her needs, and can identify the actual problem that might be five or more “whys” deep.
I would also argue that this is the only way we can start developing sustainable innovations and solutions. Why? Well, because if we are familiar with the ecological, social and economical aspects of the problem, we won’t risk designing a solution that forgets to take the woman’s social context in account, or the planetary limitations for that matter.
I would also argue that it’s the only way to really help us out of our habits to design based on subconscious preconceptions. Understanding and recognising gender patterns and structures is important, because sometimes they might be causing a particular problem, for a particular user.
Doing gender
In every design or innovation, product or service, we continue “doing more gender”, whether we are challenging or reinforcing the norms. And it seems quite likely that we will be both challenging and reinforcing gender constructs simultaneously, like in the peanut case. The concept of technology is for men was reinforced when de-scoping the level of advancements the new innovation would provide, yet the idea to empower women financially was challenging the idea of them as “only housewives”.
And what might seem as a small step for women (toward equality) is often a huge step for men, as described by Connell and Pearse (2015). What seems like a win one day can always be lost. Equality is a gift from the privileged norm, and is implemented on their terms. Affirmative design as a concept, assumes that there’s a hierarchy, the powerful affirming the powerless.
A designer’s responsibility
We are all contributing to, and challenging gender roles subconsciously all the time. That is not the problem. The greatest challenge for anyone working with the design and development of new products and services, is their own responsibility when it comes to the contributing to the inequalities of our current power structures.
Whether I’m designing smart home monitoring systems, education technologies, medical technologies or financial services, I bring in the perspective of gender. I will use my qualitative design research methods to get to the bottom of the real problem, and strive to really understand that. It is my opinion that I have a huge responsibility for the products and services that emerge from my design studio, and that the way I shape these products and services, will greatly impact the people who interact with them.
Starting is better than not
It is overwhelming at first, but having heard from fellow designers how they start approaching this is inspiring. I’ve heard stories from researchers who realise that they’ve only interviewed one type of person by accident. That they’ve now started analysing if the place and time when they recruit respondents might leave them with a biased group of participants. I’ve heard stories from fellow designers who have worked hard to get a specific female perspective on technology, because all the material they have is based on men.
These are things we as designers and product developers can do. We can look at our processes and apply a lens of our choice. In most cases these perspectives are warmly welcomed by organisations who just hadn’t thought about it before. We just have to acknowledge the social structures, acknowledge our own part and contribution, and then acknowledge opportunities where we can bring in different perspectives.
