Designing cross-sex experiences
How women relate to each other and how they relate to men must play a greater role in design
I have often wondered why women feel safest in exclusively women groups. Gender-based violence threats aside, I have heard women-centric community builders say that women-only spaces are a key component of feeling safe.
There is something about women’s inter-relationality at play here.
Andrew Solomon, in his article about polygamy and polyamory quotes one of his interviewees: “Women are quite social pack creatures. We need women” — and reflects that he hears this often from polygamous wives. Gender practitioner Uloma Obga told me, “In general, men are more solitary and not necessarily likely to share what they’re experiencing with others — even with a product. Women like to share and work through things together…when they get access to something, they like to share it, so designing for them has a multiplier effect.” This sort of relationality has also led to an upside for women during COVID19 — we were able to grow and maintain our personal and professional networks at a higher rate than men.
I’ve felt this relationality with other women inherently, but not understood it rationally. Anthropologist Anna Machin’s work on love in the context of romance and friendship shed some light for me. She says:
“Cross-sex cooperation is cognitively the costliest of all cooperation – the most time-consuming and emotionally draining of relationships – because of the need to trade unequal currencies, and because you must ‘mind read’ a brain that probably operates in a distinctly different way than yours.”
Further, she says that women to women relationality is more emotionally intimate compared to men relationality which is based on humour and “relaxing together.”
What should all of this mean when we’re designing for women? For many gender practitioners, incorporating a community around their product or service is starting to play a bigger role. But what Machin’s work made me think about is how we should be designing cross-sex interactions knowing what we do now about having to trade “unequal [brain] currencies.”
It has me asking the question: What might a truly safe cross-sex interaction look like?
This post is an excerpt from Unconforming: a newsletter about Design for Women. Unconforming goes out every two weeks and also shares learnings from experts, job and other opportunities, examples and articles — all to make an impact in the women’s space. Sign up here to get it in your inbox!
