1. Please could you tell me more about the Women's Design + Research Unit (WD+RU)
Shift has changed slightly, in the 1990’s its was about the underrepresentation of women in design, because they were a lot less visible, I mean you might think its bad now, but back in the 90’s it was much worst. You ask people to name a woman designer, and they would think you one name, April Grimer and get stuck. And I think that’s shifted a bit over time, I mean its been 10 years and I think things have changed in the industry, s the projects we tend to work on now are more about using a sort of feminist philosophy to inform our approach. A lot of our projects now are to do with social issues and communities and that kind of work, so its less about, we’re just about the women, we are about a feminist approach to design, which is also inclusive of men,
2. Within the Faculty of Design do you think there is enough being done to promote female graphic designers? Both past and present.
I mean we have very strong female students, in terms of results and output from the course, maybe even more so than male students. We tend to have at least a 50/50 balance, if not tipped more towards women, certainly on my pathway. So I think the women are defiantly there, in doing the design and getting the good grades and getting out there and seem to be being quite successful. I don’t know weather there is anything specifically that we would do to promote them above male students because I’m sure they quite need that,
Do you think they have knowledge of female designers in the industry already?
Do you mean role models? It is a bit more tricky, I mean we do try, certainly on my pathway I’m very aware of it, so I do try to kind of so if I am showing examples of work or whatever I try and show a broad range of work and make sure that it is more inclusive. So you are not just holding up male superstars. And I know we try quite hard, we have a joint first year and the teaching teams we have to put together for that, and we are very conscious of that and trying to keep an even mix of staff. So there are as many female members of staff visible as there are male. I mean it is unfortunate that in the way of pathway leaders , we now only have 2 female out of 6 but that’s bound to sort of vary a bit.
3. Do you think that women bring different attributes and/or attitudes to graphic design? If so, what?
This is the big one, are we all equal and the same or are we all equal but different kind of argument, which is sort of tricky when you start to think, because when you think you have an answer to this, you’ll see an example of something that disapproves your theory, so I guess its quite difficult to say. I guess the way Teal and I work, we make a very deliberate choice about the type of projects we get involved in and maybe how we approach people and things like that, we probably is formed from a feminist past, because we are probably more old school feminist, obviously being that much older. So we are probably a bit more conscious of it but I’m not sure for students weather they really see those distinctions anymore. I mean yes you probably do get quite a lot of women who want to work in the charity sector or who want to do more worth while design than go into advertising. But not exclusively so by any means. In terms of role models what is interesting is, I’m quite please that we are getting some really good female graduates from this course and are in the position to offer internships and things to our students, so I think we are kind of creating our own role models al little bit, because if you look at the advertising industry that’s still much more male dominated than the general design industry. I would say in general design, it’s a lot more equal but advertising is still quite a hard nut to crack I think for women. There is still prejudice I think for women, it’s a bit of a macho work ethic that tends to go with advertising, its all about being kind of tough enough and all of that and I think that can come across as a bit off-putting. And people think well my work life balance is more than this and also a little bit of old fashion prejudice. About 3 years ago I had a student who had an interview at an ad agency for an internship and they were a traditional old school kind of ad agency, and she was being interviewed by someone who had been in the business 50 years and she was basically told, women can’t do advertising. And you just kind of think if there are still dinosaurs out there with that kind of attitude. Bt I think its on the way I think there is enough new, young, interesting agencies that are coming up who don’t have that kind of
4. Do female Graphic Designers get the recognition they deserve? For example are they under-represented in industry events and media etc?
yes I think they can be, I think are under represented in the design press because basically all journalists are fairly lazy if they don’t have to do any research and they can just grab well known names or whatever for pieces then they will do obviously because it makes their job easier. And I think that pool of names tends to be male dominated, of the people they will go to for comments, so if you look in creative review or design week and its who is saying what about this week its nearly always all the usual suspects. So I think it’s a bit of lazy journalism on some parts.
Events wise you usually see that people are conscious, I don’t think you would ever see an all male line up, like the fuse thing, I think people are a little more aware but again they probably have to work a bit harder to find the women to go onto panels and things so it tends to be a little bit of tokenism, sometimes only one or two and predominately male. And so I think it maybe is that thing about self-publicity, that if I did have to generalise I would have to say that a lot of women are less bothered about self publicity. They just get on with it and do their job and they are not kind of attention seeking in the same way. And men will pull themselves up they for spokesmen or sitting on juries or whatever it is. Its not that they are more arrogant it’s that they are more willing to put themselves forward maybe.
5. Following on from the previous question, what are the barriers or choices for women Graphic Designers that affect them from gaining wider recognition and kudos?
I think a lot of it is to do with their own self confidence as much as anything, there is a theory, which I have seen elsewhere not necessarily related to graphic design, there is that kind of fear of feeling a bit fake in what you are doing, that kind of anxiety you get of “I’m in this job do I deserve it, will people find me out” And there has been psychological studies on this which prove that women suffer from that more than men proportionately so they might feel a little under confidence in there abilities and business position. So maybe there is a bit of that, so maybe it is a bit to do with female psychology, there has been a bit of press about it. So if you are feeling I’m lucky to be here, you are much less likely to push yourself forward, its more “oo I’ve got a job”, I don’t know weather it’s an education matter or weather its something just inherent, that you can’t change. I mean I don’t think there is outright prejudice these days, but you have got to kind of put your self out there a bit and go for it really.
6. With more female graphic design graduates emerging in recent years do you think this will affect industry? And how?
Well I can’t really say that I have got my finger on the pulse of industry because I’m not in it anymore so its kind of a little hard to tell as I said I get the sense that knowing where our graduates go to that a lot of female graduates do get quite good jobs and do get into companies. I suppose what I don’t know so much about more is whether there still is a glass ceiling that maybe prevents them from rising above a certain level. Which has always traditionally been a problem and I suspect that there is still a little bit of that, but again there is all of that business then it is a tough career design and if you make the decision to take time out to have kids or look after relatives or whatever, that’s probably quite a tough call because you are probably never going to get that extra level that easily.
No comments:
Post a Comment