WOMEN IN DESIGN AND MULTIMEDIA

Green Fashionista posted a really great comment this week regarding her noticing the gender inequality at the Pentagram design firm: "I find it interesting that only 2 of the 17 partners at Pentagram are female..."

On the eve of the New Year, I think this is an important topic to consider in going forward into 2009 and beyond. Six years ago when I started teaching in the Design department at Butte, it was immediately clear how wide the gender gap was between men and women taking classes or going for degrees in our Graphic Design and Multimedia Design programs. At best, one out of fifteen of the students attending classes were women. The percentages are often larger now, but still far below what they should be. Where the percentages have gotten higher is in the Graphic Design classes (typography, Intro to Graphic Design), but not the Multimedia classes (Flash, Web Design).

Here is an example of what I often see:
In my Careers in Multimedia class this coming Spring 09 semester, two of the twenty-seven students enrolled are women.
In my Typography class, nine of the twenty-one students are women.
In my Intro to Multimedia Production class, two of the twenty-one students are women.

Just this small sampling of my own classes is troubling on many different levels. Where are the women that should be going into Web design and Multimedia industries? What is happening in high school design classes? Are young women being directed away from multimedia or just not being informed of the opportunities? What will the high-tech design industry gender-gap be like ten or twenty-years from now?

Graphic Design focusing on print is a great industry for a career, but statistics show that Web designers, Web developers, and Multimedia designers on average make higher wages than Graphic Designers who limit their skills to print design.

Here are a few statistics from the AIGA's salary survey results for 2008. These are the lower end of the scale:
Solo Designer (can be print and Web) $40,000
Graphic Designer: $38,000
Web Designer: $44,000
Web Developer: $50,000
Web Producer: $60,000

There is a glass ceiling in many areas where women and men work the same jobs, but imagine how low that ceiling will be when the majority of high-end Web and Multimedia designers are men. Kottke.org has an interesting piece on Gender diversity at Web Conferences

In the Design Observer, a well-known design site (edited by Michael Bierut, a Pentagram NY Partner, and also edited by Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel of Winterhouse design studio), Drenttel wrote of a recent flag design competition hosted by Adbusters magazine. Drenttel's point of the article was to show a gender discrimination on the jury, which was comprised of 7 jurors, all of them white males. He noted that all the jurors were respected and qualified designers, but wrote "…how did we get to the point where a jury was formed with no representation from a larger, more diverse community?"

It's a good article, but more important to me are the number of posts and comments to this article that followed, mostly by men, who are not able to, or do not want to grasp the idea of equality or the inequality in the design industries.

Another great article in the Design Observer by Michael Bierut can be found here inThe Graphic Glass Ceiling. Read the quote from Milton Glaser and follow the links to the Gothamist for more info.

Here is a great article on Zeldman.com. "Women in Web design: just the stats." In this article regarding IT workers (not specifically Web designers or graphic designers), three items emerge:

• Men outnumber women in this workforce by over three to one.
• The percentage of women employed in the field is declining instead of growing.
• Women who participate in the field may not be promoted as often or as high as their male colleagues.

The article is definitely worth reading.

Back here at Butte, in our own design department, you'll notice that we have no women teaching classes as Associate faculty in either the Graphic Design or Multimedia programs. This has been a major concern for me since I started teaching. Every time I meet a woman designer who is qualified to teach, I almost beg them to consider teaching a class or two for us. As you can see, my attempts at recruiting still haven't paid off for our students. And to me, this is the most important element of not having women design instructors in our program. I believe that without a mix of women and men teaching in our programs, we are doing a disservice to our students. How can we show that the design industry is a viable opportunity for women, when we don't have women designers teaching our classes and showing the students this is true?

This should give you all some information to think about in the coming year. Let's see what changes we can make. If you know a talented woman designer who may like to teach, send her our way.

Here are the links for today:
Women of Design. A new book I just purchased a couple of weeks ago. Great book!
Women Designer's Group

and just a few of the women designers I admire:

April Greiman
Bonnie Siegler and Emily Oberman
Jennifer Morla
Margo Chase
Amy Franceschini

See you in the new year.

-daniel