Degendering Design
Behind the Design

Degendering Design

Led by our Senior Design Manager, Daniel Powell, and Executive Coach / DEI Expert, Brooks E. Scott, this conversation challenges the traditional 'masculine vs. feminine' framework that has long dominated home design. Together, we can create more inclusive and welcoming spaces.

 

Transcription

Everyone, thank you so much for making some time with us today. My name is Brooks E. Scott. I am the Chief Culture Curator of Emerging Path Coaching. I'm an executive coach and a DEI advisor. I've been doing this work for a bunch of years, and I'm really excited to be here with my friend Daniel Powell from Parachute here.
So we're going to be having a conversation about expanding the approach of design past the gender stereotype, something that's really important that's happening in our culture and our society right now, and kind of have a little bit of a conversation and share some points with all of you about some things we can think about as we're looking past these gender stereotypes.
Daniel, why don't you introduce yourself to everyone here?
Hi, I'm Daniel Powell. I'm the Senior Design Manager here at Parachute Home, and I'm really excited to be here and part of this important discussion.
So, Daniel, I'm really happy to finally get to meet you in person. I've been a DEI strategic advisor for Parachute for over two years now and working with the company and the employees, and really cool to be here and sit down with you in the flesh. So I'm happy to be here with you today.
Glad to have you here.
So before we begin this conversation today, I want to make sure that our audience understands a couple of points that are going to be really important for this conversation:
  1. Case studies, research, and gender pronouns. A lot of these case studies that have been done have been done from a very binary perspective between gender, between a man and a woman. We can't just change that language because we're trying to be inclusive. If this is the language that was used in those case studies, that's the language that we're going to have to use here today.
  2. People who are non-binary and people who are transgender may have similar experiences to cisgendered people, and may also have broader experiences as well.
  3. Your personal anecdotes are not overwhelming forms of evidence. Just because you've had one example of something that's happened in your life that may negate some of the things that we're talking about here does not mean that this is the overall experience for everyone else.
  4. This is two Americans here, and so we're speaking about this from our biased perspective. You have bias. I have bias. I teach this stuff for a living, and I still have bias. So we're showing up here being as inclusive as possible, but we're also showing up here from our perspective that we have as two Americans here.

 

So there's going to be four parts of our discussion here today:
  1. We're going to talk about how gender stereotypes are culturally constructed.
  2. Our next generation of customers are already moving past these gender stereotypes.
  3. Breaking free of these ideas can really start to open up design possibilities and really excited and curious to hear what I'm going to learn from you on that section.
  4. What does this mean for all of you, and what does this mean for Parachute Home?

 

So we're going to be talking a lot about design work here, and I'm not a designer. I'm an executive coach, interpersonal communications expert. I do DEI advising, but you are our resident designer here. So why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, and how did you get here?
Yeah, I grew up in the Bay Area, and I went to design school there. Straight out of college was hired by Restoration Hardware, where I really cut my teeth in the design industry, specifically the home goods industry. Then I moved down to L.A. and started working for Parachute. I've been with the company for about two years, and it's been a really wonderful experience.
When I started working here at Parachute, I spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to build out this initial launch collection of furniture. And so as I was doing competitive analysis, as I was doing mood boards, and really trying to figure out what the story of Parachute furniture is, I really noticed that there was a pervasive, that gender stereotypes were pervasive in design. We looked at it as an opportunity to really start fresh and do something new. We knew that we wanted it to be a collection that really spoke to a wide variety of customers, and not only spoke to our existing customers, but also spoke to new customers.
So you mentioned that the concepts of masculinity and femininity was showing up in a lot of work in the design world. So how did we get here?
So I don't think there's a particular point in time where this happened, but I think a really good starting point is the 1940s, and an example of this is children's clothing. Up until that point, it was really just plain white baby dresses, and I think we've all seen pictures of our grandparents and maybe even our parents wearing just these white dresses, and those were really just a form of function, that families could bleach them and start fresh the next day, right? But in the 1940s, we started to see marketing for pastel blues for boys and pastel pinks for girls, and we started to see this delineation happen. So in addition to colors, we started to see trims, like fringes and whatnot,start to adorn clothing, and you would see those also be sex-specific. Fast-forwarding today, we still see that continuing, but we've even seen the introduction of gender-neutral, which is represented by yellow. And you see a baby's room be yellow or their clothes be yellow just to be signified gender neutrality. But that in itself is just adding another label to the existing labels and still creating that separation that a girl can't wear blue and a boy can't wear pink. Yeah. And not only from that perspective, too, we're also limiting the way that we can design and purchase products. Because if we're limiting the gender neutral to yellow or to green, that's also confining people to a stereotype as well. Definitely.
These are just messages that are hammered into us over and over from the time that we're just small children. And we don't really have a choice at that age to participate in it or not. It just kind of becomes part of us. And so these stereotypes are just ingrained in who we are as a culture. Even the princesses and the superheroes that were marketed all the way up until like the razors that we shave our bodies with or the deodorant that we put on our body. You know, the marketing around them tells us how to be a man. It tells us what we should like. And I think that this is actually really problematic because sometimes we don't actually identify with those messages. And then it leaves us oftentimes feeling maybe inadequate or it makes us feel like we don't belong. Like maybe there's something wrong with us.
There's even a really well-known commercial that Old Spice did where a man was riding on a horse down the beach and some other settings. And he tells us that we can smell like a manly man. Yeah, not just a man, but a manly man. Yeah, yeah. And so as we think about these kind of different constructs and how people are supposed to be, how people are supposed to smell, this isn't something that just affects men. It's also something that affects women and other people as well. So we think about people in our society who are non-binary people, people who are transgender people, can have these similar experiences of being taught and reinforced about how someone is supposed to be in relation to the construct around gender. Definitely.
And I think that like, you know, we talked about Old Spice. I think it's secret that says made for a man, strong enough for a man, made for a woman. Yeah, exactly. And it's funny how like deodorant of all things kind of really leans into this messaging. Products are made and then the marketing behind it just really reinforces these stereotypes. If we are a part of the construct of how these things are supposed to be, then it kind of feels like we can be a part of the deconstruction of this as well.
Yeah, I mean, I think that these stereotypes permeate design and that's really what led us to this conversation, right? As I was building this hard goods brand for Parachute, I just noticed that it was very pervasive. And I noticed that interior design really kind of fell victim to this as well, almost more than any other industry too. So I was just noticing that we used words like masculine and feminine to describe a room. And in our culture, in our society, we have a general idea of what that means. But it's very narrow and it prescribes that look to a specific gender. Kind of taking a grouping of inanimate objects and applying a gender to them. There's not inherently a gender to a rug and a lamp and a table, right? But what we do is we take this grouping and then we apply it to a group of society. What if you like a dark room, right, or a masculine room, we'll say, and you're a woman? How does that make you feel?
And it's the same, it goes back to those products that we were talking about. Here we have two rooms that could be traditionally defined as masculine and feminine. But what I'd like to challenge people to do is to use actual descriptive words to describe these. So for the masculine style room, you could use:
  • Dark
  • Moody
  • Tonal
  • Minimal
For the feminine room, you could use:
  • Light
  • Bright
  • Pink
  • Inspiring

 

And by using these terms, we really paint a picture of what the room looks like and we actually open it up to all types of people. So whether you're a man or a woman or you're non-binary, you don't feel alienated from one of these rooms. As I'm listening to you speak, I'm reminded of some things that the parents say to the kids all the time. Use your words. Use your words to describe your emotions and what you're seeing. And we as adults, we're not using our words when we are describing these rooms, when we call them masculine and feminine.
And also, secondly too, we're actually saying that this room, the masculine room, is attached to a man, and the feminine room is attached to a woman. And so there is masculinity in all of us, and there's femininity in all of us. And what happens, even though we know that this is true, we attach a gender specifically to that. So I think part of the discussion also is, how do we start to deconstruct that notion? How do we start to pull that away so that we can see, we can open up the possibilities for designing products and marketing products to people that really appeal to what's good for them and not to what is the stereotype that they've been associated with?
Yeah, and it turns out that the next generation of customers is actually already thinking like this. The Harvard Business Review recently did a study where they compared millennials to Gen Z's view on gender, and it was even more advanced. The report highlighted that Gen Z has way more progressive views, and the shift between generations is dramatic. Every generation has some kind of thought or stereotype that people in culture and society are thinking about, talking about. There was that for baby boomers, there was that for millennials, and there's also going to be one for Gen Z.
And so what I'm seeing from my perspective, from the courses that I'm teaching and the companies I'm interacting with, people who are in the Gen Z population collectively have a sharper focus and more care and concern for inclusion than I've seen other generations have. Now, inclusion has always been something that's been important for every generation, but collectively speaking, a lot of people in the Gen Z population are thinking about these areas of inclusion. We're having conversations about neurodiversity in the workplace and race and gender and sexual orientation and disability, intersectionality, all of these things the other generations weren't really leaning into collectively as much as Gen Z is.
So I think it's kind of a smart business decision for companies to really start to think about how they're marketing and designing their products. To your point, the study actually found some really interesting statistics:
  1. They found that people under the age of 25, more than 50% of them know someone using a nontraditional gender pronoun.
  2. They also found that 59% believe online forms and documents should include terms other than man and woman.

 

I thought this one quote from the study really summed up the attitude Gen Z has towards brands that apply gender towards design. And that's, I think it's absurd that stores and brands split everything into male and female. After all, fabric is genderless. Fabric is genderless. Inanimate objects are genderless. And so a great opportunity for companies to think about their messaging. Because some companies are telling people who should and who should not be buying these particular products.
There are brands that have been around for decades that are reexamining the way that they market and the delineation that they have between boys and girls. And Hasbro is a really great example of this. So they've always had this really binary delineation of boys toys and girls toys. And in 2017, the CEO found out that 30% of My Little Pony customers were actually boys. And it was that finding that he realized that they could do away with that delineation. And so toys are just toys and they're for all customers.
I was one of those 30%. I used to love My Little Pony. I actually used to take my G.I. Joes and my Transformers and I'd have them all battling together with my My Little Ponies. Strawberry Shortcake, Rainbow Bright. I used to love those toys. But I'm sure there were people that had a problem with the fact that a boy was playing with those toys. And now we're cutting people off from this market because of these stereotypes. Well, that's a great example of why brands should remove this old delineation of products because they can now include all kids in their My Little Pony brand.
Specialized is another example of a company that is changing the way that they're thinking from their traditional methods. They knew that they wanted to create bikes that were meant for performance. And so they did a study on different people and they found something surprising, which was there's more difference between two women and two men than there are between a man and a woman. And so that led them to this way of thinking that was where there's a difference, we designed for it.
I remember when I was a kid, that question of how tall are you. I remember thinking about the way that men's seats were designed and women's seats were designed. And the girl's seat was wider with like extra padding and the guy's seat was very kind of thin. And God forbid you rolled up to school with a girl's seat on your bike if your seat broke or something. And so it's a really interesting thing. And so if we're thinking about people's body shapes, maybe the seat design selection should come down to the size of your hips or the size of your pelvic area and not just if you are a man or a woman. And that's a great point. And that's what led Specialized to thinking about the athlete's body and not gender.
The traditional way of shopping for a bike was always, "I want a bike, are you a man or are you a woman?" And this new way of thinking and this new information that we had now is leading the Specialized to ask their customers first if they want a bike, how tall are you? Yeah, I mean, the height is everything about the bike right there. I remember that is the question that they do ask next, but why does gender have anything to do with that before we go to height?
Another area that's a good point you bring up is women's bikes traditionally have a step through and they don't have that crossbar and the men's has a crossbar. But there's no real reason for that based on a man's body or a woman's body. What would make more sense is if we marketed the step through style bicycle to those that had less mobility, maybe like the elderly.
So Danny, we talked about these examples of the Specialized bikes and My Little Pony and thinking about gender from the binary perspective as we are designing products, as we're marketing products, how we are turning certain people off to wanting to buy something depending on how it's being described.
So what does this all mean for Parachute? What does this all mean for our audience? That's a good question. So I think the reality is that we're all designers. At the beginning of this conversation, you mentioned that I was the design expert and we've been talking a lot about design. You're a DEI expert and you're designing trainings and you're designing DEI conferences. And so you have the opportunity to integrate any of this information and to make a change to be more inclusive.
I think that throughout the day, each and every one of us really has an opportunity, whether it's at work or at home, to make decisions and to design our day to be more inclusive. So questions that we can ask ourselves are:
  • Are we bringing in gender or gendering this product when we don't need to?
  • We can ask ourselves, who do we think this product is for and why do we think that?
  • And are there other customer segments who share some characteristics with this group who might also be interested in this product?

 

Thank you for that. And I never thought about my job as me being a designer before, but you're right. This is what I do. And I love this sentiment. And this is a challenge, I think, for Parachute to think of everyone who's working for the company, that you are all designers and you have a tremendous opportunity to really build something that can influence people.
And so as Parachute's looking at the social media pictures and the models that are modeling the products, the challenge is, the challenge for Parachute is to continue to look at this from an inclusive way so that we can all start to be better with the way that we're marketing our products. And I'm really proud to be a part.

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