Pouring a pipeline of women in design.

The gendered pipeline of graduates emerging from graphic design qualifications, in Australia, has become a playful data visualisation where the statistics have been poured as brightly coloured slushies.

Collating data from Monash University since 1970, each decade of graduates has been broken down into a slushie recipe. Percentages of women are shown as a raspberry flavour, percentages of men are shown as a blue lagoon flavour while unknown and other genders are shown as a yellow pineapple flavour. Pouring each of the five decades offers the opportunity to play with the data and contemplate what the resulting gender mix means to the experience of women as they enter the workforce.

The final slushies reveal a consistent pattern where women make up the majority of design graduates. The percentages of female design graduates are shown to be steadily increasing – beginning with an average of 56% in the 1970s to an average of 71% in the decade beginning with 2010. Below you can see animated gifs that visualise each of these decades as slushies, which are free to download and share on social media.

This visualisation explores the fallacy that such a significant female pipeline should ensure an equitable workplace and challenges the design industry to contemplate how this pipeline has impacted equitable career opportunities, hiring practices and studio environments. The comparison of each decade aims to ignite conversations and thoughts on the data so that you can begin commenting on the visibility of women in Australian graphic design.
 

Read more in Plotting the Historical Pipeline of Women in Graphic Design, by Jane Connory, on the Design History Australia Research Network (DHARN).

The Clash of Two Cultures ...

“Between the two a gulf of … hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other."

This sentiment of hate could to refer to countless current social situations but was written in the 1950s about a guy who was a part of both literary and scientific cultures  - giving him a privileged insight and an understanding of the absurdity of both.

Snow didn’t touch on gender or design - in his paper called ‘The Two Cultures’ - but these are the two cultures intertwined in my research. And like Snow, I see from the inside out how each begins to have a distorted view of each other in a complex and overlapping manner. 

As a woman I am hopelessly optimistic, as the scientists in Snow’s writing, that my gender has value and a unique voice that can contribute significantly to the outcomes I make as a designer. But Snow lumps all scientists into one homogeneous lot, a group who are more likely to understand each other than those outside their circle. Women on the other hand no longer wish to be painted with the same brush as each other. Every life experienced as a woman is unique and representative only of herself. Here lies the similarities with designers - each, regardless of their discipline brings a personal process and narrative to the problems they must solve, improving the outcomes with increased diversity in the collaborative group.

So female designers must be celebrated and included - historically and in a contemporary sense - for what their contribution ought to do, or as Snow explains...

“The clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures - of two galaxies... - ought to produce creative chances." 

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Reference: Snow, C.P. "The Two Cultures." London: Cambridge University Press, 1959.