A Guide to Allyship, Part 1: Realization and Understanding
Part one, The first step is realizing the need for allies and understanding the importance of their role.
“Ally” may be a term you have heard before or maybe it’s a totally new concept meaning “supporter of a disadvantaged group.” Whatever the case, we’re here to meet you where you’re at and help you in your journey to hopefully become a better ally to all marginalized groups, including women in industrial design. We hope you enjoy part one as much as we do, enjoy!
Realize where you have bias.
Have you ever thought that women may not have the skills necessary to be an industrial designer? Have you made assumptions about their skill sets or drive?
It’s possible you did these things without even realizing it. We all make assumptions about people based on unconscious bias, usually fueled by a stereotype. However, using those assumptions to form lasting opinions about a group of people can be dangerous for everyone.
The first step to retraining your assumptions is to recognize that you have them. Understanding where you have bias will allow you to catch yourself when you’re making an unfair assumption.
Featured Lea Stewart, Senior Manager of Industrial Design in the Baby Division, and her colleague Jason Kehrer, Director Innovation at Newell Brands in Kalamazoo, Michigan
Beginning To Understand how bias impacts your actions. Starting with microaggressions and prejudices.
Once you’re able to recognize assumptions you may be making, it will be easier to understand how those affect interactions you have with those around you. If we don’t understand how our bias affects our actions, we can, usually unintentionally, subject people to microaggressions. This is when someone expresses prejudice towards a marginalized group without realizing it.
An assumption example could be thinking that a female designer would be a better fit to do presentations and research rather than technical CAD. A microaggression example, driven from this bias, could be the assumptive questions asked during a female candidate’s interview about her role in a group project.
Over time, these subtle prejudices become unbearable for marginalized groups and lead to unhappy employees leaving the field. Understanding how your bias directly impacts your actions, and the environment for those around you, is a crucial first step to becoming a good ally.
Recognize that ALLIES play a critical role in accelerating gender equality for women & non-binary in Industrial Design.
If you are going to try and change a system, you need a broader base of people to change that infrastructure. We all need to realize that our behaviors, whether overt or unaware, are either reinforcing good or causing something to step backward.
Realization of the gender gap and the need for allyship in ID is the first step. It is not comfortable, but it doesn’t have to be a “feel bad” exercise. The starting point for your reflection practice could be: “It is a man’s world and that is the way it. What can I do now? I want to be forward-thinking.”
Recognize that gender equality makes economic sense. Gender balance in design means better products for everyone.
A 2015 study by McKinsey’s Women in The Workplace 2015 projected that if women participated in the economy identically to men, we would see an added 28 trillion dollars (26%) to the annual global GDP, the Gross Domestic Product. It just makes business sense to align our teams with the consumers that we are designing for.
Bias could be hurting your design outcomes. A global Boston Consulting Group study found that women make 85% of purchase decisions. Are you making assumptions about what women find appealing, how they would use a product, or what their built environments are like? That’s not only a miss when it comes to fulfilling customer needs. It also means you may be losing out on business.
Recognize women don’t have all the solutions to this problem.
The gender equity problem is so systematic that it is a mental overload for a minority to educate a majority. It can also be intimidating. Imagine you are a woman who finally got her foot in the door in a design group full of men.
It will likely not be your first move to propose the topic of how they can be allies. If you aren’t hearing anything from your female colleagues, don’t assume there isn’t any ally work to be done.
Women don’t automatically have the solutions to these problems or know what to tell others to do. Even if we had all the answers, it might be tricky for us to tell others how to act. Taking the first step to letting someone know you’re there to support them can go a long way.
Try Reflecting on how Covid has affected or burdened working women disproportionately.
Featured Lea Stewart, Senior Manager of Industrial Design in the Baby Division, and her colleague Jason Kehrer, Director Innovation at Newell Brands in Kalamazoo, Michigan
For example, orthodoxies of women as primary caregivers have been magnified by COVID. Back in April, Elissa Sangster at Forbes spelled out some really great advice for allyship during COVID. To tailor this advice specifically to Women in Industrial Design, we suggest that you ask women about their reality, but feel free to keep it in the work context.
You can use some of that bandwidth to reflect on what someone else’s reality might be during the COVID-19 pandemic. Examples of things to reflect on might be:
Do I have “luxuries” in my work space that others may not?
Can I use some of the mental bandwidth I have to help an ally that may be struggling with things like caregiving and working at the same time?
We hope this has been an insightful first step towards helping you become a better ally. We have also put together some suggested realization mantras for all our Women in Industrial Design allies.
Mantra ONE. I play a critical role in accelerating gender equality in industrial design.
Mantra TWO. I have bias, just like everyone else.
Mantra THREE. Women don’t have all the solutions to this problem either, we are in this together.
Mantra FOUR. Gender equality makes economic sense.
Mantra FIVE. Gender balance in design will mean better products for users.
Mantra SIX. Unrecognized and unaddressed bias could be hurting my design outcomes.