- Hey everyone, welcome back to my channel.
For today's design chat, I want to talk to you
about being a female in the design industry.
Now I'm very lucky that I have not felt like I have been
discriminated against in any way because of my gender
when applying for a job or when working at a company
and I know that I'm very lucky because of that
and very thankful for it because I know that that is not
the same situation that everyone's in.
I mean discrimination based on gender happens across
the world no matter what industry you're in I'm sure,
I can't personally speak to whether it's worse
in the design industry than in others.
But today I want to talk to you about what I've noticed
about the gender gap in design.
So when I was at university, if I'm remembering correctly,
the majority of my class were female.
And this was in the graphic design major that I was part of.
I think when you look over to animation
and motion graphics perhaps, that was a bit more
male dominated but for the most part my experience
at university was that there were more female designers
than there were male.
When I went into my first job after university,
I was at a very small company
and I was the only designer for a time
and I also both worked with a male and a female designer
at varying points, so again I didn't really notice it
that much but that was when I was doing print design.
When I made the switch over to working in tech
and being a web designer, that is when I noticed
that the design world there is very male dominated.
I joined the company as the second female designer
and I think there maybe like, eight or so designers total,
so you know the ratio's not great already.
But then by the time I left, I think we were up to like,
20 designers total maybe more
and from what I can remember, there were only four of us
who were female.
Again like I said at the start, I was never treated
any differently because I was a woman,
but it's just interesting to note that most of the
designers that were working on the team
were hired were male.
And I didn't really notice until recently
but because I did a lot of my learning at this roll,
it was amazing for increasing my design knowledge,
about web design in particular and growing my skills,
but because I was learning in that male dominated
environment, I think it had a big impact
on my design style and it's not just this work environment
that I was in but actually I feel like the whole tech
design industry is dominated by white male designers.
I don't know if saying that white males dominate
the design industry is a fact, I don't actually
have any statistics on it and it might turn out
to be more diverse than we think,
it's just that white males are who we see
speaking at conferences and talking about design,
writing about design.
They're the ones who are speaking confidently about it
and I suppose that comes with the privilege
that happens when you are a white male,
that you have that air of confidence
more naturally than perhaps someone who isn't.
Just an idea, again, I don't have the stats on that,
but it seems likely and yeah, a lot of the design
discussion that I see online does come from a lot of males
and there's very few female voices in the conversation.
Just by the way I'm not at all trying to attack anyone
by saying this, I have many good friends
who just so happen to be white male designers
and they're lovely people but I think it's important
to talk about these things because diversity
is needed and we can all learn from it
and I think it's a good thing to have this discussion.
Right now at my current job, I am on a very small
marketing team, it's just me the designer,
another woman Dani who is our writer
and then our male manager Barrett.
We were having a discussion the other when
I was showing some designs to them,
asking for feedback, and Barrett commented
that the look of them was very white male millennial.
And I sort of thought about it and realized,
I don't know perhaps the fact that I've been surrounded
by so many males throughout my web design
current outside of school I suppose, learning,
that my style has unintentionally been influenced by that.
And I reflected when I was creating these designs
that I showed to my team and realized a lot of times
I would be heading in one direction,
and then stop myself because I'd be thinking,
no that's too girly, let's shift back a bit.
My own stuff as you'll know if you watch my videos
and my vlogs or whatever,
I don't shy away from more feminine
elements like, soft colors and script fonts, you know.
I go full in on them.
But I don't know, something I had in my mind
that my professional design couldn't look too feminine
because that wasn't professional and excuse my language,
but that is just bulls**t.
So we had an awesome chat within our team
about connecting with that feminine energy
and bringing that out in design more
and how that's totally okay and will fit in
absolutely perfectly with our target audience
and you know, our aims and what we're doing
and so I shouldn't be afraid of that.
Design shouldn't have a gender.
I mean, it's just bloody pixels
and so this is not something I should be worrying about.
Anyway, I don't really know what my point
is with this video, I just wanted to talk about
my experience as a woman in the design industry.
And how I've been affected in a not necessarily
a negative way by being surrounded
by a lot of male designers.
Like I've said many times before, I don't want this
to be just a one way discussion, I really want to know
what you think about this so in your career
or your industry your school whatever,
what's your experience with gender diversity in design.
I'd love to hear about it down below in the comments.
It would be also be really cool if you wanted
to leave links to your favorite female
or non-binary designers down below in the comments
because I'm sure those voices are out there,
it's just that they're not as loud as the main ones
that we see, so I want to try and make sure
I involve of them in my feed and in my life
so that I can get inspired from much more diverse sources,
if that make sense.
Yeah, let me know what you think,
give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it.
And if you like to see more
just chat's like this, I suppose.
Thank you for watching and I will see you next time, bye.