Gendered Design and its historical wars ⚖️

Hawa Mahal in Jaipur has been touted as one of the most splendid monuments by India’s travel industry. I drove past this gorgeous structure a few months ago. It made me travel back in time only to feel heavily disconcerted about how gender politics has long been influencing design around us. And how it took some very strong voices to combat for equality in design.

Hawa Mahal (The Palace of Winds) designed for royal ladies to observe everyday life without being seen

As beautiful as it looks, the reason for its existence can be quite heartbreaking for a progressive woman in this age. Built in 1799 AD by Maharaja Sawai Pratap Singh, it was constructed so that women of royal families could get a view of everyday life through the windows because of social restrictions.

It was designed for women to peep through this slitted windows to experience the magnificent city life as they never appeared in pubic. Never!

Socio-cultural impositions like this have had long-lasting consequences on how our built environment gets designed. Not just our cities, but buildings, products, and clothing from across the world reflect unequal gender power dynamics. Limited participation by other genders and less focus on their needs have led to gender-skewed decisions in urban planning, architecture & product design. Whether it’s zoning of work areas vs residential areas or our public parks, male-centered design process has been a key contributor in making cities unsafe and less happier for the rest.

Photo by Himanshu Singh Gurjar on Unsplash

Gendering in built environment

Identifying sexism in urban planning only gained momentum mid last century. Circa 1950 Jane Jacobs, an influential author, and activist was a pioneer in initiating dialogues around humans and cities. She intensely studied the relationship of people with public spaces and developed the concept of “eyes on the street” to foster informal surveillance. For her, one of the main characteristics of a living in an urban center is that a gender-neutral crowd feels safe and secure in public spaces, despite being among complete strangers. Quite a strong voice!

Jane Jacobs, an influential author and activist

Later in the 1990s, Vienna pioneered its ‘gender-mainstreaming’ strategies to make gender-neutral cities.

It took them almost 30 years but now Aspern, a neighbourhood in Vienna prides itself in the practice of ensuring all genders are accounted for equally in policy, legislation and resource allocation.

Eva Kail, CEO of the city of Vienna was a forerunner of gender mainstreaming. In her leadership, women-architects were heavily encouraged to design social residential projects. One of the iconic projects was Frauen-Werk-Stadt complex which was built by women. From pram storage on every floor and wide stairwells to encourage neighbourly interactions; to flexible flat layouts and high-quality secondary rooms; to the height of the building, low enough to ensure ‘eyes upon the street’ - everything was designed for all. Kail fought her way to make that happen!

Flexible flat layouts of the Frauen-Werk-Stadt complex made by an all-women team

Design process of our future physical spaces is increasingly going to hinge on AI. How do we free this process from amplification of gender inequalities? Until recently Google’s translation algorithm had skewed relationships. Words such as intelligent, successful and ambitious were assigned masculine pronouns whereas words like emotional, vulnerable and sweet were assigned feminine pronouns.

What gives me hope is to see work from recent graduates like Hannah Rozenberg. Architecture being her medium, she developed a ML based program to quantify linguistic associations into “gender units” (GU), with positive numbers indicating more female words and negative more male. “Building Without Bias seeks to discover whether architecture can be used as a tool to reveal, rethink, and revise the biases that are embedded within technology and society”- UrbanNext

Building Without Bias - a ML based tool to quantify linguistic gender associations

Another example of progressive thought leadership comes from a project named Stalled. It’s mission is to address the problems of sex-segregated bathrooms in public spaces. Transgender historian Susan Stryker is a key player in the functional team behind this. One of their concepts revolves around conceiving the airport restroom as a “semi-open agora-like precinct that is animated by three parallel activity zones, each dedicated to grooming, washing and eliminating.” - Stalled.

Airport restroom takes departure from the standard dimensions of a typical gender-segregated public restroom.

Sexism in Cars, pockets and so much more!

Not just architecture and urban planning but the automobile industry was also blinded to gender equality until beginning of this century. Car crash test dummies were made for the 50th percentile male represented by a 171-pound, 5-foot-9-inch man that was standardised in the 1970s

This led to a study which alarmingly concluded that women were 17% more likelier of dying in car accidents.

It took someone like Dr. Astrid Linder and her 20 years of traffic safety research, to develop EvaRID, the first and so far only virtual average female crash test dummy in the world, to help increase traffic safety for “everyone”.

Crash test dummies used until lately simulated a 5foot 9inch male.

Astrid Linder talks about Eva, the female crash test dummy.

And how can we forget the humble pocket and sexism in the design of this simple piece of extreme utility! Complains around unpocketability of smart phones have done their rounds in past. In fact, we were lot more gender-neutral about pockets in the medieval period when everyone carried little bags tied to waists or belts. In the late seventeenth century pockets started to make it’s way into men’s garments. And by the mid-eighteenth century, neoclassical fashion had no room for pockets in garments with feminine notions.

“Men have pockets to keep things in, women for decoration” - Christian Dior, 1954 : Source

Clever piece of data visualisation: ‘Women’s pockets are inferior’ - Source

Now is the time for Bias Correction. Speak up!

Contemporary voices like that of Caroline Criado Perez are backing up gendered debates with compelling data points. Her latest book ‘Invisible women’, sheds light on many such hidden data points of gender inequality.

It is encouraging to see how the tech industry is embracing Diversity & Inclusion. A lot of this could be for PR glory, but I am hoping there are genuine thinkers too. While well-designed campaigns like #biascorrect by Catalyst are trying to uncover unconscious bias hidden in labelling at work, it will take deep rooted transformation to eradicate this inequality in design.

Famous algorithmic bias of cooking being associated with feminine notions. [Source]

In our near future, AI will reflect and amplify implicit biases once left uneducated. If people from under-represented genders today don’t speak up like all our older leaders did, we will continue to live in gendered cities with gendered technologies for the next generations.

I love this woman ✊[Source - internet]