Watering the [gender] plant everyday
What if everyone wore women-centric glasses?
Towards the end of last year on a call, a practitioner posed the following question:
“What will it take to water the gender plant everyday?”
I wrote this down in my notes immediately and thought about it a fair bit over the holidays.
One of the tools I introduce during our signature Design for Women Workshops is what we call the women-centric design glasses. Putting these on, I tell the attendees, helps you look at and evaluate the world through a women-centric lens. It helps you see the numerous unintended consequences for women we create when we don’t design with a women-centric lens.
I have these glasses on all the time. It can be exhausting and feel isolating. But, I guess I have to, this is my work. I think this is also what that practitioner was getting at with watering the plant. As an internal advocate for gender within her organisation, she’s having to play the same role I do — for her team. But she’s wondering if there’s a way to share that burden with others, because tending to that plant alone is exhausting and isolating. I wonder the same.
In my workshops, I talk about the hard realities of inclusive design — there’s no shortcut, it’s an everyday practice to water that plant. But I also dare to dream. I’m dreaming that one day everyone will look at the world through women-centric glasses, and maybe soon it will integrate into us so much that it won’t even feel like we’re wearing glasses anymore.
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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!
