Shrink It and Pink It: Gender Bias in Product Design
“SHRINK IT AND PINK IT” is a common phrase used in the product creation world for designing products for women. Women are too often left no choice than to use products that were designed by men for men, just scaled down and colored pink, or some stereotypical feminine color. In the best case it can be insulting, in the worst case it can be deadly.
Women are 73% more likely to be injured in a car crash than men.
In the military, women suffer pelvic fractures at a much higher rate than their male counterparts.
All a result of using products where the female population is an afterthought, if any thought at all. The female body is often invisible. Not accommodating it in the design of products has led to a world that is less hospitable and more dangerous for women. A world designed by men for men isn’t just a matter of style, or an issue of preference for women — we are excluding half of humanity for so many of the products being created. We need to fix that.
Women represent over half of the global population and in the US, they influence nearly 90% of all purchasing decisions. Yet only 19% of practicing industrial designers, also known as product designers, are women, and only 11% of design leadership roles are held by women. In the UK, the statistic is even more troubling, with women only representing 5% of practicing industrial designers.
These are the designers of our cars, electronics, furniture, bicycles, sporting goods, appliances, medical devices, sneakers and much more. Although women are graduating with degrees in industrial design in equal numbers as males, within 3 to 5 years of graduation they leave the profession. This dearth of female designers results in products perpetuating stereotypes of female consumers and misses the actual needs of the user group. The percentage of practicing female architects in the US is in similar proportion to industrial designers. Today, almost 50% of the students in US architectural programs are women. However, the number of women who graduate from architectural programs to become registered architects falls dramatically: currently, only 17% of registered architects are women. Furthermore, the number of women that achieve upper management levels, become partner, and own architectural firms, has not increased at the same rate or in the same proportion as their male counterparts. From private homes to public buildings, data shows the design of public bathrooms to the default HVAC settings in public spaces to lighting on our streets — the comfort, safety and functionality for women is too often left behind, as those occupying the seats of creativity and power continue to be primarily male.
I learned what that means during my own career. For a pre-Title IX, sports-loving woman, working in design at leading sports footwear and apparel brands was a dream come true. It was an incredible ride during the extraordinary rise of sneakers. But I also saw how the sector’s predominantly male echo chambers reinforced men’s preferences and biases in big and small ways every day. And those echo chambers spanned the spectrum of product design. From personal razors, cell phones to power tools which often make claims of being “unisex”, men decide what “unisex” means — and not surprisingly, it ends up pretty much meaning “male”.
It should come as no surprise that with approximately 80% of practicing industrial designers and architects being men, studios across the globe employ a homogenous, primarily white-male approach to problem solving and innovation. As Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg shares in his Harvard Business Review article Are You Solving the Right Problems?, “creative solutions nearly always come from an alternative definition of your problem”. This alternative definition can only come from reframing problems, but to reframe problems we need to diversify the framers. This includes leveraging the tacit knowledge that a female designer brings to the table and making sure that the problem is being solved for women: Gender diversity in design and design for gender diversity. Our companies cannot afford to continue to lose the expertise female practitioners bring to the table. The implications that come with low female representation in design range from little attention to user-centric and inclusive design principles, a lack of authentic consumer connection to increased injuries, and in the worst-case accidental deaths.
Female soldiers are far more likely to fracture their pelvis than males, as a result of the biased design of military boots, course requirements and backpacks. Ignoring the specific anatomy of the female foot, measuring on disproportional stride lengths and the design of backpacks that do not accommodate the female torso have put our female soldiers at a higher risk than their male counterparts. A critical stage in the design of any footwear is the choice of a shoe last, described in Footwear Pattern Making and Last Design as the starting point of every shoe design, or the “heart of the shoe”. The shape of the last determines the fit, performance, ergonomics, and style of a shoe, and is also what makes a shoe suitable for playing basketball, climbing mountains, or running a marathon. Authors Wade and Andrea Motawi say, “Great looking shoe design is nothing if the last is not appropriate for the shoe’s function”. In the quest for function, and the subsequent search for the proper last, a basic understanding of the gendered foot has been overlooked in many cases including the design of “unisex” military boots. Laura Youngson, the CEO and founder of Ida Sports, created her footwear company specializing in female soccer boots to accommodate the nuances of the female athlete’s foot. These nuances in comparison to the male foot include a big toe that is shallower, an arch that is higher, and a foot that is smaller for a given body height. The majority of running shoes on the market today are designed with a male last, truly a “shrink it and pink it” solution — selling shoes for female runners that were made to fit a man’s foot. There has been some recent attention to this as reported in the Retail Dive and perhaps there will be a day when our female feet will only meet shoes that were designed on a last that better reflects our anatomy. This has been a very slow change in a fast-paced industry.
In healthcare, personal protective equipment (PPE) that fits women properly is challenging to find. With gowns that are too long, and gloves, safety goggles and masks that are too big, the safety, health and performance of our female frontline workers is put at risk, on the job, every day. In Fit For Women? Safe and Dignified PPE for Women Health Workers, the Women in Global Health (WGH) report notes that most PPE was designed to fit average European or US men, despite women making up around 70% of frontline health care workers (HCW) globally. Inadequate PPE increases health risks and mental distress for women including increased exposure to infections and feeling expendable. Only 14% of female HCW’s used PPE that was fitted for them during the COVID-19 pandemic. PPE design does not address diversity among women, their different body and face shapes and range of headdresses. Some PPE coveralls cannot be removed for women to use the toilet without being discarded, resulting in discomfort and loss of dignity.
Female firefighters experience a four times greater rate of injury than men, in part because of ill-fitting personal protective equipment. There is an added obstacle to the risk of being a female firefighter, and that is women need to learn how to walk and move in men's boots and men's gear. Per A Critical Review of Female Firefighter Protective Clothing and Equipment Workplace Challenges, these barriers limit workplace entrance and performance, both psychological and physiological. With this added complexity, one can begin to understand why so few women have been promoted into positions of leadership in firefighting. While most female firefighters have learned to adapt and overcome the challenges brought by the ill-fitting gear, this is not acceptable. Our female frontline workers and firefighters should not be placed at increased risk because they have no choice than to wear “unisex” protective equipment. Firefighters, female and male, have reported their protective boots to be bulky and ill-fitting, which they believe restrict the lower body movement on the unpredictable fireground. Measurements found the foot width of firefighters was larger than the general population and the feet of female firefighters were slimmer than males. Protective boots should be designed based on the foot shape and dimensions of the actual population, with consideration of sex differences and the impact of weight-bearing for their safety. The selection of the last needs to consider function and gender first.
The auto industry and the design of our automobiles has historically ignored women. In her book, Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez surfaces the history of the well-known, but poorly understood crash-test dummy. Although the first male crash-test dummy was used in 1951, it was not until 60 years later in 2011 that the US started to use a female crash-test dummy — albeit a “shrink it and pink it” version. Those “unisex”-looking crash test dummies are 171 pounds and 5’9” tall: the height and weight of an “average” American man in the 1970’s, and disregards the difference in female bone structures, breasts, hips, and neck musculature. Today, even though there were 2.5 million more women than men with driver’s licenses in the US in 2018, the frontal crash test the National Highway Safety Transportation Association (NHSTA) requires to be awarded the 5-Star New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) Safety Rating is only performed using a male crash-test dummy in the driver’s seat. There is no mandated test that simulates a female driver. The results of these tests represent the standard to which automakers design their cars. Our government’s biased car safety tests make women in car crashes more likely to sustain serious injury and more likely to die than men. Seatbelt design ignores the female anatomy so severely that many pregnant women cannot even buckle up. Automotive engineers, former congressional members, and groups like the Verity Now Coalition are calling on the US government to make changes. Reaching out to Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, requesting that the federal government require organizations to use an average-sized female dummy, has not yielded the results our female drivers deserve. NCAP does not require female crash tests in the same number and nature of tests as men, with the most modern and biofidelic crash test equipment. Women aren’t just smaller men.
The use of state-of-the-art technologies, policies that address design inequalities, and more women designing for our built world all need to be activated to deliver design justice for women.
I became an industrial designer because I loved figuring out how to solve problems for people. For me, form always follows function and connecting to hearts and minds continues to fuel my passion for design. I have dedicated my entire career to design and have succeeded on the playing fields of major brands, but there is still so much work to do. At the culmination of my career, with a seat at the table, dominated by male voices, I realized that I couldn’t solve gender discrimination in design through design alone. There is more gender diversity in the workforce than ever before, but inclusion and impact that occurs in leadership positions is not happening at a comparable pace. Without enough women influencing product design, we will continue to design for a man’s world. We need our female designers to flourish and move into roles of influence and power — because women won’t forget that women exist.
Cases of "shrink it and pink it" from sneakers to cars can range from insulting to expensive, dangerous, or deadly when women are considered smaller men. They can affect the person using the product like the marathon runner clocking those many miles in a shoe that was not designed for the specific anatomy of her foot. They can affect others like the patient at the hands of a female surgeon using surgical tools that were designed for her male colleague’s hands. Or they can affect both, risking the life of a female firefighter who is less protected and performs less effectively in her lifesaving role due to the ill fit of her firefighting kit.
Technology exists today that can provide accurate data for all body shapes and sizes. The use of 3D body scanners to gather data on female frontline workers can help design equipment that fits. Policy that mandates its use in the design of this equipment can guarantee that the safety of our female workers is valued equally to their male counterparts.
We need more women leading how products are envisioned, designed, and implemented otherwise we will continue to design for a man's world. We need to encourage women to pursue careers in industrial design, architecture and engineering. We need to consider the female body, through the collection and utilization of relevant data and we need policies crafted that use that data. Universities can better prepare a future generation of designers to create products, places and services that are more equitable across gender lines. Starting with the importance of the design brief. As the starting point for any design, we need to educate and provide students with the ability to understand, analyze, assess, challenge and formulate an inclusive design brief.
Leaders in product creation must encourage women to pursue paths in industrial design and accelerate their careers. Policymakers must ensure that they consider and craft policy around the female body. And if we really want change, we all can start by demanding better products through our power as consumers. We women deserve better military boots than “shrink and pink” versions of the male ones. We deserve PPE that protects women as well as men. We deserve cars tested with genuinely female crash-test dummies. And we deserve seat belts that fit. We all must insist that products provide a safe, inclusive, and hospitable experience for her.
About the Author:
Karen Korellis Reuther is a former Creative Executive at NIKE and Reebok and is currently a Senior Fellow at Harvard University's Advanced Leadership Initiative in Cambridge, MA.