"Design and engineering consultancies create products for a global market, but the teams themselves rarely have diversity that reflects global perspectives.
The impact of having such a limited set of voices in the rooms where design decisions are made has far reaching implications. We’ll look at a few examples of how these missing perspectives lead to design “solutions” that create unexpected negative consequences for many, and shortchange us all...
Women are stereotypically considered less “handy” than men. You’ll see fewer women than men in a shop or on a job site, and fewer women own power tools themselves. Building/fixing things in general has culturally and historically been considered “men’s work”. So when a designer approaches creating a new power tool it’s likely that the target demographic is men, rather than a more inclusive concept like “everyone who wants or needs to build something”.
So it’s no surprise that tools are often designed in a way that’s more difficult for women to use...
Once after presenting a version of this article as a slide talk, a woman from the crowd approached me and said she was a developer who purchased the Pebble when it first came out. She developed three apps to work with Pebble but the watch was huge. It pinched her wrist and was so uncomfortable to wear that she couldn’t stand wearing it all day to fully test the apps she was working on. She eventually stopped developing for the platform...
a recent Carnegie Mellon study demonstrated that men are much more likely than women to be shown Google ads for high paying jobs. The researchers didn’t know for certain if that was due to bias in Google’s algorithms or that the companies posting these ads chose to target men."
This is what happens when we blindly trust dudes.
The seatbelt thing? Seriously?
I shared this with my mother and she was astounded and then asked outloud "Don't these men have any compassion for the women in their lives?" - and I think it's less that, and more that once a standard is set (ex. "a model of a man can represent all humans") we often don't question it and assume that the standard was established because it is effective.
This is a reminder to question the status quo.
(credit to EG)
Related: a great article on how hard it is for women to find prosthetics that fit; Medicine Bias killing women (and articles about specific diseases); more on the male-standard-bias in biomedical research;
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