Reversing the data gap and design bias in innovation - WIN London Mind Salons
Women in Innovation believe that positive, constructive and critical conversations about female leadership are vital to build community, drive innovation and support gender equality in business. And to continue to facilitate rich conversation and knowledge sharing from our remote settings, WIN London launched Mind Salons; online breakfast discussions centred on specific challenges faced by women in innovation.
Looking to reconnect and inspire your team and networks? The Mind Salons are designed to be replicated by you, so that you can engage and develop your own community. Download the Mind Salon Toolkit here to learn how.
This month the Mind Salons posed the question "What can we do to reverse the data gap and design bias in innovation?".
‘‘Designers may believe they are making products for everyone, but in reality they are mainly making them for men. It’s time to start designing women in’’
- Carolina Criado-Perez in The Guardian
Author Carolina Criado-Perez outlines her case of the gender data gap in her book, Invisible Women, raising points from how voice recognition software is designed mostly to recognise low pitch voices, to the limited research on the health risk of chemicals that are found in products traditionally used in ‘women’s work’. While product designers often believe they are making products for everyone, the reality is often that they are designed based on research from men. This data gap and design bias in innovation has a negative impact on everyday lived experiences of women around the world.
So, how can we ensure research, design and innovation doesn’t overlook women and create blind spots in our process? In our Salon discussions we unearthed 3 important considerations to apply going forward:
1. Historically gendered expectations create blindspots in innovation
Historically the positions, roles and expectations for women and men were radically different. With men often being the leaders and the decision makers, the male perspective and needs became the default design priority. In a world informed by historically different gender roles that we now perceive to be structurally unbalanced representations, favouring one experience over the other means that female representation in research and design often remains, as the title of Criado-Perez’s book suggests, ‘invisible’.
Ask yourself:
How is your perception of gender roles and expectations different from the previous generation - your parents and grandparents?
Who are you designing a product for and what legacy gender assumptions might have influenced the research we already have on this topic?
Going back to the theory of Man the Hunter, the lives of men have been taken to represent those of humans overall. When it comes to the other half of humanity, there is often nothing but silence. And these silences are everywhere. Films, news, literature, science, city planning, economics, the stories we tell ourselves about our past, present and future, are all marked – disfigured – by a female-shaped “absent presence”. This is the gender data gap.
- Carolina Criado-Perez in The Guardian
2. Gender bias isn’t the only watch out in our decision making
Gender inequality isn’t the only challenge for innovation. The research and design process also struggles to take into account diversity in race and socioeconomic backgrounds, physical ability, as well as lived experience. In order to counter this and create a more inclusive process of innovation, we need to acknowledge the unconscious bias that may be present and challenge what ‘standard’ looks like, in data sets, research methods and design development specifically.
Ask yourself:
How will we define ‘diverse and inclusive’ in this design process beyond gender?
Who might be underrepresented in this process and how do we access their perspective?
The data from the article is shocking, just not surprising. The data is easy to question, not easy to change
- WIN Mind Salon attendee
3. Challenging bias needs to happen at an organisational level
Change is most often not established by individual action, it tends to require collective effort. While we all agree that collaboration brings us further, Mind Salon attendees pointed out that finding allies and (senior) support to tackle data gaps and design can prove difficult in a professional setting. Gender equality in design and innovation can be seen as a systematic problem or a political and sensitive topic area rather than a commercial opportunity. We need to impact sustained change by leveraging objective facts, anecdotes and empathic storytelling qualities to drive awareness, conversation and education at an organisational level.
Ask yourself:
How can our business, our clients and our projects gain from reversing the gender data gap in design?
How can you craft your rational, data-oriented facts into an actionable narrative to inspire change in your organisation, project or team?
Thank you to WIN’s Justine, Meredith and Christina for hosting such thought provoking Mind Salons. And thank you to the WIN London community for attending the session and sharing such rich ideas and provocations - it was a real pleasure to spend our ‘digital’ mornings together. Keep an eye out for the next Mind Salon invites, where we will explore: How can we make the most of working remotely for ourselves and for gender equality at work? & How are gendered narratives shaping the conversation on different leadership styles?
If you have any suggestions for topics or themes for future Mind Salons or would like to (co-)lead a session, don’t hesitate to reach out, we’d love to hear from you!
The Mind Salons are designed to be replicated so that you can engage and develop your own community.
If you’d be interested in hosting your own Mind Salon on the topic of reversing data gaps, you can download the Mind Salon Toolkit here.
Editorial: Joëlla Bril
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