MINI BRIEF — UX OF GENDERED LANGUAGE

Brief: design a way to counteract gender expectations in professional communication
Timeframe: 06/07/23–13/07/23

Team: Rebecca Hodge, Roshni Suri, Tanya Singh & myself

Towards the end of our summer term we were tasked with writing, executing, delivering and presenting our own design briefs. Design brief is a document that defines the core details of your upcoming design project. As an exercise, writing our own brief allows us to learn to consider aspects of a design project — topic, scope, timeline, resources, research methods, deliverables — from a self-directive perspective, and gain a deeper appreciation for the design work itself.

WRITING OUR BRIEF

Within our second self-directed brief, we focused on the two areas of interest which we all had in common — womanhood and langauge. We were intrigued by the concept of positionality within design and how it is not only something to be aware of, in relation to biases and inclusive design practice, but also something that makes your approach to your work, and your perspective, unique.

Womanhood is part of the position from which we are approaching our work.

Language came organically as our second area of interest— having worked with the topic of dematerialisation of communication, specifically text messages, on our previous project, we were interested in exploring the topic further.

Hence, the UX of Language brief.

First things first, we conducted literature review, looking at sociolinguistics of Janet Holmes and, as put forth by Judith Butler, how the gender differences come through language. Situating the inquiry within professional communication then narrowed down our focus.

EMAIL LIKE A MAN — IS THERE A FEMALE LANGUAGE?

Having read into the theoretical grounding of language and womanhood, we researched what the popular culture says about the language of women in the professional world. TikTok (1, 2) has a lot to say on the subject matter, the content category Writing An Email Like a Man having more than 12.8M views. Women on TikTok are creating videos in which they are editing their emails, to sound more like their male colleagues — less sparkly, less verbose, just 'cold hard facts'.

examples of email edits from TikTok (female — left v. male — right)

But the question we asked ourselves is — are women consistently conscious of this language difference or is this an effort of post-production?

And — no matter what this TikTok trend might suggest — is there something wrong with 'writing like a woman'?

DIRECTED STORYTELLING — IS THERE A FEMALE LANGUAGE?

We talked to women in our circles — women (24 and 25) working in a creative field, woman (24) working in finance, woman (40) running her own business, woman (30) working as information officer, woman (31) working as an auditor & analysed their responses in relationship to their use of language in professional communication — specifically, emails.

We have made the decision to focus our attention on analysing the interviews with the 24, 24, 25 women after discovering that these women, who were lower on the food chain in their professions / had less experience, were a lot more mindful of how they come across and how they carry themselves in the professional environment.

directed storytelling thematic coding synthesis

Findings from Directed Storytelling:

1. women are aware of the difference between male and female professional communication, and they either use the difference to their advantage or avoid highlighting it — based on the environment they are moving through
2. women perceive this difference in language as something inherent which needs to be 'managed' and 'navigated' in order to succeed

Women do use their more 'feminine' qualities when it suits them. In creative fields, good relationships are everything, which makes the qualities associated with female language — such as politeness, charm, openness — desirable. The difference in language for which women are often condemned, here, is used to the advantage of women.

In male-dominated fields, women are more cautious of not coming across as 'girly' and model their language on the men in the office. Confidence in being ‘womanly’ in communication is contingent on whether there are successful female role-models in their workspace (if there are, younger woman have something to look up to and don’ t have to model their self-presentation on ‘the men in charge’)

All in all, there is a difference in expression and expectation, women are aware of it and make it work the best they can — what can we do about the unbearable weight of the societal expectations when it comes to gendered differences?

Not much in one week.

Moving forward, we decided to — rather than juxtaposing men and women in the professional world— focus solely on empowering women to be who they are, to be fully wholly unapologetically themselves — soft if they wish to, loud if they wish to, to speak their mind and stop comparing themselves to their male colleagues as the standard of professionalism.

To be difficult women, if they so please.

MAKING A CASE FOR THE DIFFICULT WOMAN

We talked to the difficult women in our lives — the women who chose to not subscribe to the expectations and just did their own thing. we asked them what they understood under the term ‘difficult woman’ and when they felt ‘difficult’. We also asked the men in our lives and gathered the responses for analysis.

The responses varied. Men often described a difficult person, without making any gender-specific connotations, while women were more aware of what the colloquial ‘difficult woman’ meant. This (made us angry) did give us confidence in moving forward with this topic — if our boldness makes us difficult, then so be it.

We are taking the term 'difficult women' back, we are owning it as our own. It is our own.

INSPIRATION

To compose our work conceptually, we took inspiration from art, advertising and other visual work in which gender expectations or the drift between the signified and signifier play a central role.

We leaned into the expectation v. reality juxtaposition surrounding of the term ‘difficult woman’ and outlined some campaign ideas which put the language question front and centre. The campaign makes use of the language which describes a difficult woman — confrontational, demanding, direct, assertive, confident, open, bold, loud stubborn — and subverts them in a creative form.

'I AM A DIFFICULT WOMAN' CAMPAIGN

We focused on using language and simple visuals to communicate the current drift between the colloquially used 'difficult woman' and the qualities that this term connotes—highlighting the fact that these qualities are discouraged in women, but celebrated in men.

We centred around intervention around mirrors and bathrooms, prompting women to include the image of themselves — looking at themselves in the mirror — in the conversation about 'difficult women'.

It is you, not some imaginary woman, it is you, who is confident, bold and loud! And that is great.

mock-up of the mirror stickers. the photographability of the campaign also endows it with the potential to become a #difficultwoman social media movement

Moving the issue at hand from a wide allusive social struggle against the Goliath of gendered expectations, to a more focused personal interaction— hopefully — accomplishes the shift in thinking and conviction on a woman-to-woman basis.

I am a difficult woman — are you?

REFLECTIONS & FINAL THOUGHTS

I am happy we gave this topic a chance — we are all passionate about the issue of gender equality and we are all difficult women returning to the professional world after the MA. Our attempt to pierce through the sociopolitical and cultural complexity of the gendered world left me with more questions than answers.

The professional world is a layered space — using 'feminine language' in the creative fields such as design is not the same as using 'feminine language' in the (typically) boys' club world of finance. And more than that, is feminine language even real? Is there anything biological about the way we talk, network or understand politeness? Janet Holmes and Judith Butler don' t think so. And if all is just a result of socialisation, how can we begin to approach that? And even if so, the socialisation is now done — we are polite and we use a lot of !!! — how do we proceed? And is there anything inherently wrong with exclamation points? Who is to say.

I am certain, that there is someone out there who could answer all of these, just as I have complete confidence that design has the capacity to effectively address at least some parts of this Goliath of a challenge. It might even be us one day, but it was a bit too much to tackle in one week. Nevertheless, I would not call this project a failure per se— we are leaving this week with some interesting questions about the nature of womanhood and with a little more pride in being difficult.