Safe Spaces for Women
Safe Spaces are a key design principle to successfully Design for Women. How might we embed safety into any experience women might engage with?
Recently, I signed up for an online course that requires the students to work together in teams — potentially with strangers. Overwhelmed to see 50+ teams to choose from, I keyword searched “women,” and requested to join the only result that returned. I had a spot.
Soon after, the team organiser emailed us to say that she was continuing to get other requests from women wanting to join our team because they too, wanted to work with other women. This is an online course, I would have imagined that time zone would be most prioritised. It is also a social impact course — one that isn’t male-dominated like other fields or considered aggressive — and yet our team was getting such requests. I shouldn’t have been surprised.
Although women are often pitted against each other, they love working together. Partially, what’s behind this is that simply being in an exclusively female environment can create a safe space for women.
Practitioners that design with a women-centric lens prioritise creating safe spaces. Some have found that taking men out of the equation reduces competition and pressure, making the space feel safer. Others use codes of conduct to repeatedly set expectations of behaviours that will not be tolerated, and have found that to increase safety — even in a women’s-only space.
As safety began appearing frequently in my conversations with experts, it became clear that safe spaces are a key principle to successfully Design for Women. What fascinated me, however, was that women-centric community leaders found their spaces & communities to be more generous, transparent, supportive, and reciprocal than they could have ever imagined.
It makes me wonder: did safety give rise to generosity & reciprocity, or vice versa? What are the connections between safe spaces, generosity, reciprocity, supportiveness — and how might understanding these connections help us embed safety into any experience a woman might engage with?
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!
