Barriers to getting a Job in UX as faced by Women — First Part

It’s a good time to get into UX Design/UX research.

Picture Courtesy: Karl Solano in Unsplash.com

At least, that’s what my research participants (all 15 of them) heard, as a world-changing, norm-changing, work-changing, pandemic set in.

In my research, where I explored the challenges faced by women jobseekers in UX, I didn’t ask any of my participants how did the pandemic affect them, yet all of them talked about it. I wanted to know about how they came to the point of considering UX as a career option, because I was interested to know about the alleged problem one gets to hear about in almost every quarters of UX corridors and rooms nowadays — that an influx of newcomers are creating this situation of massive job applications, and of diluting the discipline, understanding & rigor of UX.

There’s a saying in my mother-tongue - “Tidal waters adulterate freshwaters”- idiomatically applied to newcomers. The question has become — are we dealing with new blood that energizes a discipline, or is it just muddy tidal waters?

Is it akin to a situation of how new immigrants in a country face obstacles — to settle down, to feel belonged, to be thought about as legit citizens — with all of these processes leading to a segmented, divisive and unintegrated society?

Why the Influx?

The question of “Why the influx” is tied up with the question of whether it’s a simple case of demand and supply — whether people are minimizing their own chances by flocking into a domain and THAT is creating this problem of having barriers to entry. Now, as to why there is an influx, what came up in this study, without me asking a question about it — was that it is the effect of pandemic.

The pandemic has hit a reset button for many. Many people lost jobs, quit their jobs, had breakups, revisited what they were doing with their lives, and revisited existential questions of who they were. People felt a bit lost. And they wanted to maximize their chances of survival. They wanted to grow.

And someone, somewhere — be it friends, families, acquaintances, random strangers on Reddit or TikTok or other social media platform — told these people:

“It’s a good time to get into UX.”

“You will be a great match”.

“UX is multidisciplinary field, is a welcoming community, and encourages diversity of background and experiences.”

Hence started the journey into the Promised Land.

Is the influx creating a situation that’s making things difficult for everyone?

We won’t know that for certain through small-scale qualitative studies like these. Based on the reports we see of the hundreds of applications placed for a single job opportunity, we can safely say that — With growth in UX, there have also been a growth in frustration among jobseekers.

And all of these people, were really striking in their passion of wanting to work collaboratively in solving problems, and putting their experience to impactful use in UX. None of them came to UX because they had heard about this easy field to get into. They came to UX because they believed, with their skills and experience, they can build something better.

Picture Courtesy: Ian Schneider in Unsplash.com

Context

I had started this research to explore whether the barriers to recruiting and retention of women that are seen to exist in tech, are also existing in UX. There was little research on the challenges faced by women job seekers in UX — a core domain in tech.

So, I was interested to know about:

• What are some challenges faced by women job-seekers in UX?
• How far do those challenges match, or do not match with their expectations?
• What are their needs?
• How do they navigate challenges and strategize?
• What barriers do women face?
• What are some support mechanisms they find useful in this journey of job search?
• What works and what doesn’t work in the job search process?
• What are some helpful digital platforms in the process? How are they helpful?

Picture Courtesy: Markus Winkler on Unsplash.com

Method:

• I interviewed 15 women, who were looking for jobs in UX (either design, or research). Interviews were done till themes saturated and no prior number of interviews were fixed prior to doing the study.
• I went for Maximum Variability Sampling, to capture as many range of experiences.
• Timeline: IDI-s were done over 2 weeks,
• Ages of participants ranged from 20 years to 50+ years.
• By the time of interview, 4 had found a job in UX, 2 were in unsatisfied UX-related job (not quite in the domain of UX, but related to it), and the rest were still looking for jobs. 12 out of 15 women are US residents.
• All research participants were assured of confidentiality and anonymity of information shared with me.

The Big Picture: Barriers

Picture Courtesy: Tim Hufner in Unsplash.com

To give a bird’s eye view (by the way, my name means a kind of bird) of the big picture, there are 2 kind or barriers — the first one being Generic to hiring practices in Tech, such as:

A. Being a woman — which amounts to competence and experience getting nullified when a woman has resume gaps owing to child-bearing/rearing and other caregiving roles.

Participant # 10 describes it succinctly in how gender and ageism does an interweaving dance together when it comes to being a woman:

I do have gaps in my resume…so as a woman, I was rearing children. I had three kids and for five years there’s this gap — looked like kind of a big break. I was working, you know, freelancing. So …um, most men don’t have to explain that away.

My age probably also factored in. I’m 41 years old. And there’s a certain expectation that if you’re a man or woman or whatever, you’re supposed to reach a certain level, at a certain time in your life. So, it’s not necessarily that I had to explain the gap, but also “Why don’t you have experience doing this yet? Why don’t you have experience doing that yet?” And it’s because my career slowed down for five years while I was having kids.

B. Being ghosted, which impedes opportunities for growth & learning. As Participant # 2 said, which was also echoed by a lot of other participants:

I don’t know what I’m missing. So I don’t know how to fix it. There’s no feedback.

The second kind of barriers are specific to UX, it being a growing field:

C. Gatekeeping - the hinges of which however differ, based on who these women are, and how they perceive things.

D. Not having industry experience, or rather, I’d call it as industry-agreed-upon experience + education. Gaining industry experience is also said to be difficult. For example, Participant#6, a person with a PhD and looked upon as “from the academia”, who is currently in a UX-y kinda job (Technically it’s User Research, but she says it’s not really UX research where she wants to get in), said:

It’s really difficult to get that experience. And I don’t know if it is because when you’re an academic, or you come from an academic background, people understand that you will be very good at the very wide explorative research. And so they put you there. So you’re building up all of that experience and expertise at that part of the process. But you’re never getting the chance to do the… much cutting the … sort of stuff that really makes an impact on should we launch this product or not. Should we do this? Should we do that? How can we make this better for users? You’re always just really far, far beyond UI… before you even sort of talk to users. I want to ask “Do you understand what this is? How would you go about doing this task, etc?” But I don’t get to do that.”

E. Recruiting & Hiring practices: Jobseekers reported Hiring Managers not knowing what they want, not being aligned with their company policies, and using interviews as a process to arrive at an understanding of what they want. Although experiences were seen to vary, overall, recruiters were also not thought to be a helpful resource in getting a job or a foot in the door, but are said to be lacking in domain knowledge, contributing to conflicting information and consequent ghosting.

F. Temporal: The growth in UX job market does not correspond to hiring people in junior levels or the influx of newcomers, as all participants were seen to be aware of. Participant #13 describes:

So market is hot, but for mid -to-senior level. For junior level, demand is really low, because people just don’t want to waste time with training, like Amazon doesn’t even hire anyone less than 3 years of experience. You can’t even get your foot in the door. Startups don’t have that much money to train you, and then hire somebody who’s like unicorns in general — someone who can do everything. So, there isn’t really a place or rather there’s limited place for junior level designers with patience to be nurtured and supported.

G. Preference to hire a “fitted persona”: All participants talked about a “persona” that they would have to put in, while doing interviews so as to get people interested in them. They wondered whether introverts have a place in these jobs. They wondered whether their accents were responsible for not going beyond the final interview round. They saw the rejection letters that talked about “team-fit” and wondered how their personality assessments were made by hiring managers, in about 45 minutes.

Picture Courtesy: Engin Akyurt on Unsplash.com

Participants wondered about a lot of things, but all of them agreed in how a mask needs to be put on in order to signify “fit” — as told by both groups of people - who got into jobs through walking through miles of rejections, as well as those who are still walking their rejection miles.

This situation only encourages development of automatons and negates diversity in personality, thought and experience, as well as authenticity.

Let’s delve deeper into the stories of women jobseekers, through Personas, which were developed based on at which point do they start their journey of getting a foot in the door in UX jobs.

Persona 1: Alone Allison

Persona 1 — Alone Allison- is a young, white woman in her 20s, with mostly a Bachelor’s degree, or at most, undergoing a Master’s degree, and someone who is looking for jobs in UX for the past few months to a year. She has some bootcamp experience, or some have done some courses, to get her foot in the door of UX.

As to needs, this segment needs direction as to the next steps, and clear, true, accurate information and resource-rich connections.

So, what do they find in this journey?

• They find pricey bootcamps and courses guaranteeing them a job. They also find big UX voices ripping apart bootcamps and a particular course from a particular well-known company. In addition, they find themselves regretting that they did that bootcamp, investing not just their money and time, but also emotions.
• Once they graduate, they find a BIG difference between theory and practice in how UX is done, versus how UX is taught.

As Participant #3 said,

The end goal is to get a UX design job. And it’s like, the actual UX design roles, seemingly are so different than the actual process we learn. So it’s almost like… we should have broken down job postings, and done UX design that way, you know, just throughout the course, just go see job postings, - ‘Okay, let’s look at what they want here’. You know, it’s almost like…it’d be a more tangible, legitimate way to do it.

[In Bootcamps…] I wish there had been guest speakers who were hiring managers and these were more focused on real world — as in “Meet this person, he’s going to be hiring you…versus… ‘Now we’re going to do a travel app. This is figma. This is Adobe XD…’ And then you waste an hour watching the instructor show us figma and of course, we’re asleep at the wheel because it’s like, I have no idea what you’re doing, bro. It should be like — ‘Go watch these tutorials here’. Then, ‘Talk to the hiring manager.’ That’s what we’re missing. That’s the connection we’re missing. Like, we we all do the same cookie cutter stuff, you know, something from a government website, something from a fucking travel app something and it’s useless... like it’s… actually useless.

Further down the road, the challenges of this segment or persona, are having a mass of conflicting information around them:

• While some hiring managers said portfolios are required, some said they are not even looked upon.
• Should they apply to entry level junior job roles or apply to those ones which are asking for some 2–3 years of experience?
• “How do I decide which jobs are right for me?” Participant # 4 , a bootcamp graduate said determining the right fit between their personality and jobs is a big challenge:

There are so many job postings out there. And I know that there are people who will literally throw themselves at any job posting. I find it really challenging in trying to determine when I should and shouldn’t apply. I see something that seems interesting, but maybe it’s different...in field or maybe it’s UI based. And I’m not necessarily looking for UI role, but I’d have this thought that maybe I should apply anyway. How do I decide? It’s hard to tell…right? A lot of times, I have to go to these websites, check out these companies, make a judgement based on a website… you know, and it’s tough, right? Because a lot of times, I can’t know, if this company is going to be a good fit just based on what I read on the website, and what I see. So yeah, I still struggle with with sort of knowing — when to take action and when to pass.

• Does networking work or should they just keep on applying to as many jobs as they could find? Participant #6, for example, describes what the dilemma looks like for a lot of job applicants, as they find time racing against them when it comes to working through referrals:

I would like ask them like, ‘Hey, would you be willing to refer me?’ but a lot of times, they took too long to …like, do it, and then the job would close before I could actually get in there.

So I don’t know, kind of since then, I’ve been doing a lot of cold applying just because I feel like I don’t have a lot of options. I’ve probably submitted about, like, at least 200 applications to internships in this past four months.

There’s a sea of conflicting information, for this segment.

• The other challenge being pointed out was being ghosted and so not knowing what to fix and how to fix, noticing lots of “bro”-s in tech, which makes women wonder whether they are entering a particularly difficult domain that favors a particular gender.
• It was also found in the study that A LOT of these women are really struggling with mental health concerns as a result of their job search.

Particular barriers identified for this persona are differential wage situation for women, and generic ones, as well as Gatekeeping….by other women. A lot of white women talked about how they believe they are subject to gatekeeping by other women in powerful positions in UX.

So their strategies to deal with these are aggressive, numerous cold applications, to the point — that they cut down on applications because as several participants said, they have run out of places to apply (and get rejected) and they have run out of connections:

Participant # 6:

I don’t have any contacts left, that haven’t helped me already.

The support they have are minimal, and resource-poor, from both personal and professional perspectives, which explains their mental health struggles. Even in the few situations where they do have support, it is very dependent on them being extremely proactive, to get such support. This picture of having minimal support is in stark contrast with Persona 2 — Resilient Rihanna (scroll down to know more about her).

So, what should change, according to them?

• They would like no more secrecy regarding salaries, and
• They would like hiring managers and recruiters, actually knowing what they are looking for.

Persona 2: Resilient Rihanna

Persona 2 — Resilient Rihanna — is a young woman, a PoC, in their 20s, with a bachelor’s degree. This segment tends to get into courses instead of bootcamps. They would also be looking for a job for at least 2 years — longer than the earlier persona — Allison.

Their needs, as they mentioned, are more internships, AND, more mentorships — they said they would really appreciate someone like them, who would guide them as to particular obstacles and navigate their career better.

So what do they find once they set out in this journey?

A massive majority of the PoC participants would say they expected, and do find a difficult terrain in UX job search journey.

They also said that they learnt that not all kinds of help in this journey would be helpful — some would be there just to pull them down — and therefore sifting is necessary.

Their challenges were:

• Being told that a bachelor’s degree is not good enough to get a foot in the door in UX - that they would need to do a Masters or a PhD. This particular point in the story would however soon change, as we would see in a little while. For people who lacked a bachelor’s but had loads of experience in carving out experiences, and project management — they felt they were just “not the right kind of minority”.
• Another challenge identified were confusing language in everything — in terms of job descriptions and job titles to what hiring managers and recruiters were sending out in terms of messaging, etc.

Their barriers are:

• Gatekeeping by not having access to learning resources and facing closed doors.

Participant # 7, a young Black woman in her 20s, had got a job after making an incredible journey of learning and applications, had this to say:

This would probably be controversial. I think a lot of people gatekeep a lot. I feel like there’s a lot of things you can learn. But I feel it’s not even distributed a lot. And I think that’s one thing which is really hard. Like, it’s really hard for me to actually find examples of portfolios that worked, or find really good reliable sources to cater to my resume. I had to actually work in the field to understand what they’re looking for a lot of times, it’s just me guessing and things like that.

The major point is that this is just not one PoC who were describing something that they experienced. Almost all PoC research participants talked about restricted access to learning and resources in terms of what is the “real deal”.

• The other barrier identified were Recruiters only running towards people who’d be recently laid off — such as Robinhood, Netflix, Peloton, Carvana, and not giving a chance to people like them, that is, people who were in the job search process for years.

So, therefore, their strategies were:

• Tap onto ethnic networks for support and networking
• Send in a few hundred applications, in a span of very few months.
• They would also send in cold applications, and would be completely invested in preparing themselves for the job market.
• In addition, this segment also shows strong resiliency, which probably derives from the support system they have:

Participant # 7 who had recently got a job, said how she navigated a particularly hard terrain and carved her own way, staying clear of exploitative tendencies that could come about for PoCs in entry level roles :

I’d read the job description — it would say “You need this amount of experience”, and then I’d think about what are all the ways I can get that? What are all the ways I could freelance? I’ve never felt this in my life. I knew nothing about taxes, and I thought I’ll figure it out later. But at the moment, I’d think ‘What do I need to do?’ So it was lots of things on the spot. And I had to be extremely realistic. But what I had to do, and the sacrifices that I had to make — I know that a lot of people can’t do that.

And I also was very honest with the people I was working with. I think it’s really easy when you’re at this lower level that you get taken advantage of. People think, she can just work and make some money. They know that you’re going to work really hard if you’re entry level because you want a job and you want to prove yourself and things like that.

So I feel like…in some places that I worked — they took advantage of the fact that I was gonna work really hard, and I was gonna do really good. But I was very honest with them continuously — “Hey, this is what I want. I’m not resting until I get what I want. And if you’re not going to be on this journey of me doing that, then it’s been nice knowing you, and I’ll see if there are opportunities for that in the future.”

According to them, the things that should change:

• Hirevue interviews, which they feel are devoid of any human touch.
• The culture of having a team-fit or putting on a mask, just to have a special kind of persona.
• The cultural practice of the PoC woman taking in and doing more than their fair share of work in spite of family constraints and things like pregnancy, should change.
• They would also like more FTE roles, instead of going the route of unpaid labor of volunteering, or underpaid labor such as in internships or contractual position.

Persona 3: PhD Paizley

Persona 3 — PhD Paizley- was modeled on those who have higher degrees — mostly PhDs or a Masters. Some of these people would get some bootcamp training or do some courses, and fall in the older age group of being 30 + to about 50 years. The average time of looking for job would be the same as Resilient Rihanna, 2 years, but of course, some would get lucky to land a role in a much fewer time span (a few months).

This segment needs remote jobs, owing to their caregiving roles in the family, and more FTE roles in UX research — all participants in this segment would like to move to UX research.This segment LOVES doing research.

In their journey, they encounter the idea that non-UX research experiences are not research and that their skills and experiences of doing extensive research are not perceived as being transferable.

So therefore, their challenges are:

• In contrast to the challenge of Persona 2 — who are told that they need a PhD to get jobs in UX — are that they are also viewed similarly — not fit to get into UX.
• That they need to learn the new lingo of delivering research, which requires a significant amount of time and money investments, with job applications already being a stressful process.

For this segment the barriers are:

• Gatekeeping by UX veterans, who are people in UX research for the last 10–20 years, who believe PhDs do not know how to do research.
• Lack of clarity in the hiring process, where they believed hiring managers would often use them as a litmus test to arrive at what they wanted in a job candidate. Many from this segment would believe they would be used as a case statistic to be interviewed.
• Stereotyping of people from academia being misfits for the industry,

So then, their strategies are:

• Understating or downplaying their PhD:

I don’t tell people that I have a PhD. I don’t bring that up. I just say — I have experience in research, and I have training, I have built myself out the past few years, so that I have practical experience in this field, and I try to emphasize my work experience rather than my actual degree. And people have been fine with that.

• Lots and lots and lots of networking and asking for referrals,
• Sending in lots of cold applications, as well as customized and curated job applications — whatever works — according to them,
• Treating this experience as a learning curve, and putting on a “hardy, professional” persona, as said by Participant #13:

I’ve had a lot of experience doing interviews, and I would say that at this point, um, interviewing is much easier than when I was starting out. I feel like it was it was a real learning curve.

For me, in terms of interviewing -like, speaking in general, is not my forte, I am not a very outgoing kind of person. I wouldn’t say that I have low self-esteem, or low self-confidence or anything like that. I’m just…in terms of personality, very introverted. So going into interviews, I think the biggest resource for me has really been… just the experience of going through it so many times that it’s almost like I built up like this interviewer, *hername* persona. That’s where I’m at right now. I’m just this different person for like those interview times, just to kind of separate myself from the stressful experience, which, you know, it is really stressful, to be constantly doing it. For one thing, it takes up a lot of time. And then sometimes, you kind of just don’t know, what’s going to come up in an interview, and I find that really stressful.

But my persona for the interviews, you know, she can take it all.

In terms of Support, they find lots of support from other women, and people from academia who have made the transition.

What should change according to them?

• They would like more clarity and accountability in the hiring process,
• Alignment of hiring managers with their company policies, and
• No more microaggressions and condescension in treatment of the job candidate.

A valid question in any research is why should we care about it.

To answer this question, I’d draw attention to the facts:

• The labor market in UX growing. A growing domain needs the right people. In case of UX — if industry standards are to be maintained, then the alleged problem which is really being talked about a lot nowadays — of diluting standards — need to be addressed.
• When there’s an influx of disgruntled people with unmet needs and deep pain points, it leads to a situation of normlessness (see Theory of Anomie), which has already been manifesting in variable standards of doing UX, with bootcamps and particular courses being denigrated. All of these situations could be avoided, by going to the root of the problem — listening to the challenges, needs and pain points of the users, i.e. jobseekers in UX.
• Opportunities to provide stronger support for women in UX could be uncovered, which could lead to development of requisite products, e.g. job search platforms could be enhanced/developed, based on addressing the needs and use-case scenarios of jobseekers, i.e. where they are at in their journey, and the kind of help they would appreciate.

Picture Courtesy: Markus Spiske in Unsplash.com

The frustrations are growing, as one research participant said:

There’s no rhyme or reason — there’s a billion UX jobs, and then no one can find one.

Finding the rhyme or reason of patterned behavior is the job of UX. As part of the community, this should be addressed, and fixed.

So, What’s the Moral of the Story?

The experience of getting a job in UX particularly, is extremely demoralizing, because:

1. The process lacks “Information Scent”: Jobseekers are shooting in the dark, due to confusing and conflicting information as to what is required, having no feedback, and no clue about where to go next.
2. The experience is described as as dehumanizing. Jobseekers consistently called for a humanized experience.
3. The system to find a good job in UX, is lacking in the bedrocks of good UX, such as: Clarity, Feedback, & Empathy. Even for people who have landed with a foot in the door, there is no set formula to cracking this.

Picture Courtesy: Olesya Grichina on Unsplash.com

The next part — The Second Part — talks about What’s the Story with regards to networking, What Works, What are some helpful digital platforms, and how could they improve, what are my recommendations with this whole situation, and finally, top 3 advice from jobseeker to jobseeker, woman-to-woman.

Click here to read: The Second Part: https://medium.com/@koyelranu_68089/barriers-to-getting-a-job-in-ux-as-faced-by-women-second-part-bd0061221274

Questions? Comments? Tell me toll-free at LinkedIn or at koyelranu@gmail.com.

References:

1. Ashcraft, Catherine, Brad McLain, and Elizabeth Eger. (2016) “Women in Tech: The Facts”. NCWIT.
2. Corneliussen, H. G. (2014) ‘Making the Invisible Become Visible: Recognizing Women’s Relationship with Technology’, International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology, 6, (2), p.209–222.
3. Dray et al (2013). “Exploring the representation of women perspectives in technology”. Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. p. 2447–2454. https://doi.org/10.1145/2468356.2468799
4. Etzkowitz, Henry, Carol Kemelgor, Michael Neuschatz, Brian Uzzi. (1992). “Athena Unbound: Barriers to women in academic science and engineering”. Science and Public Policy, Volume 19, Issue 3, June 1992, Pages 157–179, https://doi.org/10.1093/spp/19.3.157
5. Hardey, M. (2019). “The culture of women in tech : an unsuitable job for a woman.” Emerald Publishing Limited