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Richard Grefe, the association's executive director, says he believes women prefer to work with hand-picked teams in smaller studios for carefully chosen clients. Jongerius's experience of teaching in her native Netherlands supports this.via RISD blog"To make it to the top, you need to be outspoken, self-confident and entrepreneurial, apart from having design talent," she says. "I have taught many talented young women and tried like hell to push them, but most were too shy, emotional, cautious and lacked self-confidence and ambition."In other words, women are bedeviled by the same entitlement issues in design as in other professions and, it seems, by similar misperceptions. "When I work with manufacturers and issues arise around construction or mechanical systems, the questioning faces often turn to my male partners," says the furniture designer Rosanne Somerson. "They suggest that I could answer better - I have terrific colleagues - but even then, there are times when my answers are ignored and the question is reiterated to them." It isn't just men who are guilty of this. "If a prospective client calls Pentagram and doesn't ask for a partner by name, I see them thinking, Why did I get the woman? when I walk in," Scher says. "Even the women do it."
After 30 odd years in the global design industry opening doors to new
and frontier markets through exploratory user research, concept design, and innovation strategies, Niti returned to academia as a student to pursue a PhD in Product Development at Aalto University's Design Factory. Her dissertation looks at the contribution of design methods to foster agency and capacity for innovation as a resilience strategy to shocks at the micro-level of the individual. Her research approach has expanded the multidisciplinary lens of viability, feasibility, and desirability to a transdisciplinary one where participants generate the actionable knowledge for their own innovation pathways.
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Is design still a boy's club?
Zaha Hadid is not the only woman architect but, according to the AIA (links on my blog) in 2006 although nearly half of all architecture students are women, they make up only about 26% of all architectural staffs and only 13% of all licensed architects. AIA stats over time show very gradual improvement, however. I wasn't able to find any statistics for other forms of design, but I'm interested if anyone knows of any.
As for minority groups. People of color make up 16% of all architectural staffs, although only 1.5% of licensed architects (about 1600 people) are African American and there are no statistics on Hispanic architects (America's fastest growing group). Black women make up only 0.2% of licensed architects, according to Architect magazine, although they make up 2% of attorneys.
Women interviewed in the Arch. Record article express exactly the kind of experiences as those mentioned above...
Yet it seems "unfashionable" to comment on this, let alone make an issue of it. How many conferences on sustainable design do I attend where the only people on the main stage are older white men? A lot! How many women are now qualified to play those main stage roles? A lot.
(sorry I couldn't get line breaks in this comment...)
and as for the pay difference between men and women, i hate to sound off politically but that's one of the major reasons I'm voting for Obama. Hopefully once he fixes that, it will never be an issue again. It should have never been to begin with.
http://www.idsa.org/whatsnew/sections/dh/activities.html