Research: How do Women Industrial Designers Succeed in the Workplace?
Author: Cathy Lockhart
In Australia, despite comprising half of the design student population, women remain under-represented in the design world and rarely hold senior leadership roles or win high profile design awards. This qualitative research, focussing on the workplace experience of nineteen female industrial designers, explores how these women achieve success and the facilitators and barriers. Overall, success was defined as happiness, work-life balance and enjoyment and engagement with the design process; impact was also important, with one defining success as seeing a stranger using a product she had designed. Most found the industry to be male dominated and struggled to secure their first job, explaining the challenge of learning specific software programs and then developing the confidence and courage to actively contribute design ideas. A variety of different strategies was utilised to secure their first job, contacts, mentors and role models later empowering over half to develop their own design start-ups. The decision to be- come an entrepreneur was a conscious choice, enabling these women to follow their design passion with more flexible, parenting-friendly hours. This qualitative research provides some nuanced insights into how these women navigated entrenched gender stereotypes and traditionally masculine workplace norms. The findings suggest the need for more radical approaches to facilitating women’s recruitment, retention, and progression.
Full text available from PAD, you can find the article on page 283.
