Dear Fiona, Carlos, and Milena,

There's several answers to the gender question, and it helps to sort 
out the central issues from contingent effects. The degree to which 
gender affects any human activity has several components. It is 
likely that some of these are biological and physical. Males and 
females have different bodies, different hormone structures, even 
some kinds of different brain structures. These affect what women and 
men can do.

What human beings _can_ do is mediated by what human beings permit us 
to do through the patterns, behaviors, history, laws, and culture 
that surround or govern us. Women can drive motor vehicles except 
where the law states that they may not do so. Women can pilot jet 
planes, except where company custom or government edict prohibits 
female pilots. These cultural or social differences get down to the 
old question in human studies of nature versus nurture.

Some issues are contingent in a narrow historical sense. Women enter 
the professions in far greater numbers today than even fifty years 
earlier. In the Chartered Society of Designers, the cohort that forms 
today's associate members in a 50/50 ratio will move upward in 
qualifications and achievements at a relatively equal rate. We can 
expect the proportions of members and fellows to shift toward 
equality as they do. The imbalance of men and women in membership and 
fellowship is an historically contingent artifact of an era in which 
fewer women than men entered the design profession.

A male designer who sometimes chats with me about these issues has 
now chosen the successor at his practice. Over the next decade, he 
will gradually sell the shares in his practice to one of his female 
associates. I've worked with both. They are both good. Longer years 
of experience and greater name value give him an edge today. Greater 
emotional sensitivity and a different style give her a different 
approach. I suspect that the firm will grow and move in new 
directions when she takes charge sometime in the 2010s.

If I think about design research, I find that I spend a little more 
time talking and corresponding with women than with men. In Lisbon, 
someone noted that the podium was generally occupied by slightly 
overweight, aging men with hair loss. (Not the effervescent Eduardo 
Corte-Real, of course, who is slender, energetic, and -- like his 
colleague Martim Lapa -- blessed with luxuriant, dark hair.)

The comment had the ring of truth. Of course, I was in the audience 
at the time, rather than on the podium. But I do have some mildly 
overweight, aging male friends with whom I tear my hair out in grumpy 
emails. Being a grumpy old guy, I suppose our short snippy comments 
account for the majority of my correspondence among research friends, 
but I have as many females among those with whom I correspond. Among 
the blogs and newsletters that I follow carefully, my number one 
daily read is Dori Tunstall followed by Nadia McLaren. The newsletter 
of the month, of course, remains Design Research News. DRN is 
produced by a distinguished aging male -- but he remains the 
exception.

Fiona's comments on textile are quite to the point. This may have 
more to do with the field than with gender, though textile has 
traditionally been a part of women's culture. Interestingly, though, 
the one person I know who works in research on textiles is male, and 
the issues that Fiona notes characterize my experience of him. Is 
this a factor of textile, or of women's culture, or of the way that 
women's culture has influenced textile, thus influencing (or 
selecting for) the men who enter the field?

The same holds for games. I suspect much of the violence of gaming 
has to do with audience and market factors. And all games have an 
element of winning and losing, even chess and bridge. The only game 
designer I know personally is a female. Her success must have 
something to do with an ability to meet market demand.

Sorting out what holds for gender and what holds for society's 
interpretation around gender is a matter for study. Perhaps one's 
gender should not matter for those kinds of research that we believe 
involve objective understandings of a world outside us such as 
chemistry or physics -- or a world of purely logical constructs such 
as mathematics or logic. Nevertheless, this may not be the case. 
Consider the physics research community. Margaret Wertheim (1997) 
explored the world of physicists in a book titled Pythagoras's 
Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender Wars.

One might expect that gender, gender roles, and the human experience 
of being male or female could make a difference to those who work 
with any kind of social research or research involving human action 
or interaction, including much design.

One of the key questions in management studies, for example, is 
whether women bring different skills and qualities to leadership than 
men do. While one might say they do, others argue that successful 
women take on the skills and qualities necessary for success in a 
role by virtue of inhabiting the role. Some women take on 
characteristics formerly attributed to men as they begin to occupy 
positions formerly restricted to men. A female soldier or fighter 
pilot must be a warrior as a man is, prepared to do battle, to kill, 
and to win.

In Scandinavia, many professions once assumed to be male professions 
have been changing. Many of our prime ministers and presidents are 
women, or will be if their parties win election. Some of you know my 
wife Ditte, a deacon and theologian in the Church of Sweden. When she 
was a canon at Lund Cathdral, she worked for Christina Odenberg, the 
first female bishop. Over the past decade, the number of female 
bishops has grown to three. Like the fellows of the Chartered Society 
of Designers, this number should increase as the eligible cohort of 
female priests continues to grow. The Rt. Rev. Bishop Odenberg also 
broke gender barriers as a priest, when she began a sideline career 
as one of Sweden's first female jockeys.

The question of female ordination remains a point of contention in 
many religious denominations -- including some denominations where 
the church accepts female ordination while some bishops and 
congregations do not. I was once headed toward a career in the 
ministry. The school where I occasionally took courses and once or 
twice taught has moved over the past three decades from an all-male 
faculty to a faculty where most professors and the president are 
women. At the time that our first female ministers were ordained, 
however, it bothered many people. Many who had no interest in the 
theological arguments that Biblical fundamentalists or Pauline 
theologians adduce in their opposition to ordaining women still found 
it difficult to accept the female ministry on purely conventional or 
social grounds.

These issues are very much to the point in today's world. The answers 
may not always be simple or straightforward.

Ursula LeGuin's fiction sheds interesting light on this. LeGuin is a 
distinguished author who has chosen the genre of fantasy and science 
fiction because they enable her to tinker with the workings of 
culture, setting characters in them while asking how real women and 
real men might address the challenges of worlds based on the premises 
she sets out. Her Earthsea books are set in a world of magic in which 
language and the names of things give them their substance. The first 
three books -- written in the 1960s -- focus on the adventures of a 
young, male wizard and his mostly male friends. She revisited the 
world of Earthsea in 1990 and again in 2000 and 2001, this time 
focusing on female protagonists, while addressing the issue of sexism 
and gender bias in the wizard's profession. Women play the lead role 
or central roles in other novels such as The Telling, or her recent 
three novels Gifts, Voices, and Powers. I find this progression and 
the way that a great female author give voice to these issues worth 
reflection. LeGuin is one of the models in my research writing 
workshops -- not for the science, but for the skill of giving voice 
to ideas in a clear, elegant way.

For my money, Milena sums it up nicely. Worth a lot more than twenty cents.

Yours,

Ken

--

Reference

Wertheim, Margaret. 1997. Pythagoras's Trousers: God, Physics, and 
the Gender Wars. London: Fourth Estate.

--

Carlos Sapochnik wrote:

Some years ago I looked up the gender balance (M/F) amongst the paid 
members of the Chartered Society of Designers in London. 
Unsurprisingly, it was  Associate Members 50/50, Members 65/35, 
Fellows 90/10.

Fiona Jane Candy wrote:

In the textile workshop I saw and felt the ideas of cloth and its 
construction from many threads and  materials, coming in from many 
directions, compliant, interlaced, interwoven, sociable - knowledge 
transmitted and acquired through empathy, touch, contemplation, mood, 
emotion -  Softness and strength; chaos but also order.

In the games studio I saw and felt the ideas of war and survival, 
killing and fighting,  winning and losing, self sufficiency and 
decisiveness-knowledge transmitted and acquired through cognition, 
action, strategy, emotion - Strength and weakness;  order but also 
chaos.

This is a very impressionistic reply I know (not to mention 
outrageously romantic) - but its an attempt to explain what I was 
thinking and feeling as I encountered the two studio spaces and 
experienced their contrasts and similarities and what I meant how 
ways of thinking are made material and palpable by (what can be 
realistically described as) gendered disciplines.

Milena Droumeva wrote:

I don't think the issue is that anyone is trying  to diminish the 
'professionalism' quality of profession by suggesting that the 
experiences of men and women, both in the world (socialization)  and 
at work (professionalization) and in terms of family (as another 
arena of adult life) may be (and I'm saying may be) fundamentally 
different. In the realm of design, both its theory and its practice, 
I believe it is the same - the fundamentally different gendered 
experiences that men and women designers being to the field do indeed 
lead (I think - I have no 'proof' off hand) to approaching design in 
different ways, using different methods, having different design 
priorities, sensibilities and intuitions. And I think such 
perspectives have to be cherished and recognized, not denied their 
existence! I think if anything, recognizing and fostering such 
differences enriches the field of design, not make it less 
'professional'

-- 

Ken Friedman
Professor

Dean, Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia