Women, Empowerment and Collages
When my team began to plan the May edition of the XX+UX Happy Hour, we decided on a theme pretty quickly: Empowering Women. After all, we are working for a company founded by two female doctors, led by a female CEO and empowers many women by addressing their skincare problems and through entrepreneurship opportunities.
After some deliberation we landed on collage making as the creative medium for the attendees to express themselves. Not to mention that it would be easy to prepare since we have a constant stream of women’s and business magazines passing through our office. All we had to do was to hoard them for a few months and add some photo boards, scissors and glue to the mix and voila!
Creating The Invite
What better way to get some excitement around collages than creating a collage for our invitation? So we decided to create a collage of the XX+UX logo.
During the cutting, composing and pasting process we all started noticing the significant lack of any digital technology in women’s magazines. There were no women sitting with their laptops, fiddling with their cellphones, wearing their fitness trackers while running in these magazines. It was also not easy to find any images of women outside a certain age group.
Of course, we weren’t the first ones to notice this trend. As Belinda Parmar wrote for The Guardian in 2013:
“Lady Geek’s own analysis of this month’s women’s magazines (including Glamour, Elle and Marie Claire) exposes a near absence of technology topics or gadgets. We found that on average, fewer than 2% of pages refer to anything tech-related, and not a single page in November’s editions has an article primarily about technology.”
If you look at the websites of some of these magazines, they now have technology sections, even if a few clicks away but still not much change in their print versions.
The First Collage
When we finally put up the collage we created for the invite, we were shocked to see that it had a disturbing amount of sultry, pouty young women. There were no older women, no geeks, no overweight women, no businesswomen, no scientists, no moms… Of course, there wasn’t much technology either.
So what did we do? Of course, we cheated. We googled for technology, regular women, Hillary Clinton in an orange pantsuit and digitally altered our collage.
Day of the Happy Hour
By the happy hour rolled around, we had added art and technology magazines to our mix of business and women’s magazines in order to diversify the images and content.
While the drinks and food were being set up, someone had the helpful idea to cut out some pages from magazines to give the attendees a bit of a head start. After about 15 minutes, one of my team started mumbling: “No women… Still no women…. Wow, all guys”. She was going through an issue of Wired and was past half of the magazine before she saw a photo of a woman.
So, are technology magazines by men for men? If women’s magazines don’t have technology and technology magazines don’t have women, where is technology for women?
At this point, we even pondered out loud whether the attendees were going to be able to create collages about empowering women with what we had.
The Silver Lining
Luckily, the women who came to our event didn’t need the print validation to be able to create powerful messages through their collages. We were amazed by the work that was created and everyone seemed to have a lot of fun.
When we talk about the woman problem in technology, are we looking at only one side of the problem? It’s clear that a lot of women’s magazines are pretty accepting of the traditional gender norms too. Women don’t need magazines to feel empowered but it sure would help.
