As a female designer we often get relegated to the ‘make things pretty’ corner. On a number of occasions when people find out I am a designer they often say, ‘oh you make things pretty’ or ‘cute’. However as a lover of all thing cute, I am torn between wanting to own/embrace the cute, or reject it to keep up with the boys club.
If you weren’t sure, the boys club in the design/advertising industry is still officially ‘a thing’. When we think about discrimination in tech we think about the main offenders – startups, software and games industries. But there’s plenty of others including the property industry, with women holding only 28% of leadership roles.
I found an interactive graphic on Mumbrella that shows in Australia whilst agencies are around 49% female/51% men, only 23% of creative roles are held by women.
In the US a survey in 2014 found still only 11% of Creative Directors (CDs) were female …still a long way off from 50%.
Why is it important that women are evenly represented in creative departments or as CDs? This is where ideas are generated and put out into the universe. Through large scale advertising/awareness we can bust myths and force brands to be better people. 91% of women reported they didn’t think that advertisers understood them. As Russel Howcroft from Gruen would say, ‘What an opportunity’.
Want some numbers to back this up? Women control well over 73% of consumer purchasing and $20 trillion of the world’s annual consumer spending. This unprecedented rate of female influence is important for brands to wrap their heads around. We are more likely to share a brand’s message with others, represent the majority of early tech adopters and are serious social gamers.
Also in my experience as a leader, women are better designers than men (but I’ll save that rant for another day) as we tend to be more intuitive, aware and open to new possibilities.
Recently Donald Trump called American presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton ‘a nasty women’. Instead of ignoring his crude comment, her campaign decided to own #NastyWomen which spawned a kazillion memes on Twitter (from both men and women).
The thesaurus says we can use other words instead of cute such as: adorable, lovely, sweet, appealing, dear, darling, delightful, pretty… none of these really say badass cool/cute.
So what do we need? A new word, a new understanding or just more public awareness that gender equality (or more importantly diversity) in the workplace can help change the way the world thinks, solves problems and gets on with making our world a better place.
Now I’ve managed to compile my thoughts into a blog post, what’s my take on this cute conundrum? I really have to embrace the cute. Let it hug me tightly with it’s immensely warm, loving and fun attitude to life.
♥︎ MORE
- If you are teaching design, here is a PDF of 50 things you can do to encourage more women into leadership roles in the design industry.
- If you want to support some awesome initiatives, events and learning that I am personally involved in, become a Girl Geek Academy member to help us to teach 1 million girl geeks to build technology and create startups by 2025.
- If you are wondering where the super-cute cat feature image came from, download this FREE Chrome plugin called TabbyCat, which loads a new kitty into your browser window when you ‘command-t’. It’s so incredibly cute and the more you use it, the more loot/accessories you get for your cat. Brilliant.