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Industrial Design: Why Is It Still a Man's World?
Thank you for championing this movement and change we so desperately need to see Ti! You’re an inspiration to so many and exactly the kind of leader we need in this industry.
This has been changing far too slowly. Here in Quebec, the statistics are around 30% female industrial designers.
Install slip slabs that sit flush on the top sill and as soon as they grab the heavy edge it teeters up and locks vertically in place creating a featureless panel with nothing to hold and out of arms reach of the top edge until security can unlock them and reset them.
I’m sorry that your post caused such negative feedback and misogyny to emerge and dogpile. YD seems like it often does a disservice to the entire design profession. Shameful of them to appropriate your content. 50% of my hires in the past five years have been female. Other interesting levers to pull in the recruiting and hiring process could be the authorship of the job posting (typically written by me), or the pre screening effects of HR (typically 100% female). But in general the applications fall in line with your statistics above.
Man, I don't know where they get these guys... "I could take care of 10 children and it would barely start to resemble the effort I put into having a successful design career." Buddy, trust me, you wouldn't last a week!
As a former industrial designer, and later a full-time stay-at-home Dad for three years, I think I have the qualifications to comment on the utter BS that guys like that spew out. 70 hr. work weeks? Being an at-home parent is so much more than 70 hr.s a week, not the least of which because weeks and months become utterly meaningless. Weekends are not time off, there are no "ends" to your "project" when it's a kid, and you get no yearly bonus for doing a stellar job. There are no High Fives with your bros over a beer about how the client just loved that last presentation. You also don't get a promotion at the end of it all, though you will have the immense satisfaction of having raised and shaped a decent human being. I wouldn't trade that time for any position, anywhere, for any amount of money.
Thinking back to my ID dept. at school we were just about 50/50 in gender diversity. Decades later... I'm not sure, and so many of us have changed careers multiple times (now I'm a full-time animator). A few of my female classmates are definitely up towards the top of their field, but they tend to lead in-house design departments, not generalist design firms. I sure don't have any answers, but what I do know: every single excuse for why it "should" be this way is both a lie and a bulls-eye of the problem itself.