Walking through the shopping street in Odense, I pass by a clothing store, Run & Fly, a British clothing brand. Words on the shop window grab my attention, placed right under the brand logo: “Gender Inclusive – Str. 36-54”. That reminds me of an essay, written by a group of students in a course I taught last semester, where the students examined a similar claim by Skims, an American brand of shapewear.[1] Skims seeks to achieve inclusivity by offering products in ten different skin tones and a size scale ranging from XXS to 4X so that they can target ‘everybody’. The way both fashion brands put it, the formula for inclusivity is pretty straightforward and cogent: Offering more sizes and colours to fit as diverse human bodies as possible.

Inclusive design has recently become a value-expressive term not only in fashion but in several industries, referring to both physical and digital products addressing issues of diversity. Especially new-generation companies tend to emphasise inclusive design in their mediation, in their websites, ads, and interviews. In this way, they distinguish themselves from competitors that are organised around mainstream markets. Inclusive design can be considered a remedy to gender-stereotypical design, which is informed by the dualistic views on the needs, desires and abilities of women and men, girls and boys. Beyond gender norms, inclusive design can also challenge other intersecting issues of exclusion, such as ethnicity, age, abilities and social status. As any other popularised concept, one can find several definitions of inclusive design. A quick internet search would yield a good amount of material from principles to method tools. Yet, in practice, how can design be inclusive? Is inclusive design synonymous with ‘design for everybody’ as one can deduce from the argument of the fashion brands I mentioned above? In this article, I will tackle these questions by examining products from various industries.

Dismantling the stereotypes

I would like to start my analysis with a particular product category, toys for children, which has historically had strong ties with gender norms. Traditionally, the toy industry builds on the segregation of boys and girls, maintaining the distinct categories of ‘boys’ toys’ and ‘girls’ toys’. These categories are shaped through the association of certain design elements with either boys or girls: colours (dark and bold colours versus pastel colours), thematic focus (action, competition and aggression versus nurturance, care, and a concern with beauty and appearance), and product types matching these themes (action toys, vehicles, weapons and building toys versus toys related to beauty, cosmetics, childcare and domestic work).[2] Such a dichotomic view is also extended to marketing of toys. When parents enter a toy store or an online shop, they would be immediately guided to separate aisles or web pages, where they are offered toys that ‘appropriately suit’ the gender of their child.

While the toy market is globally patterned by gender-stereotypical design through this recipe, there are also gender-neutral toys, which target both girls and boys. What is striking about such toys is, however, their being more likely to resemble typical boys’ toys than they do girls’ toys. Research has demonstrated that boys do seem reluctant to play with gender-neutral toys until all potential references to girls’ toys are removed from them.[3] Girls, on the other hand, are more likely to cross gender lines in toys, and play with toys that carry masculine connotations. In Denmark, Lego encountered the same challenge, when it promised to promote inclusive design in 2021 by removing gender stereotypes from their products. The company conducted a survey, outcomes of which showed a significant difference between boys’ and girls’ attitudes: Girls are more open, confident and eager to engage in a broad range of activities, whereas boys are often likely to stick to gender-typed activities. The survey also explored the reason behind this difference: Many boys fear that they would be ridiculed if they crossed the gender line. The fear is shared by boys’ parents, who are, compared to girls’ parents, more likely to purchase gender-stereotypical toys for their children.[4]

Value asymmetries leading to one-sided inclusion

Indeed, the term gender-inclusive toy often refers to toys designed to attract girls to the fields of science and technology, providing them with valuable technical skills and self-confidence that will in the future empower them to compete with men on even grounds. Little Rebels, for example, offers a collection of dolls that represent iconic women who have made significant contributions to science and society, such as Marie Skłodowska-Curie. The brand presents these women as role models and thus encourages conversations between adults and girls on science, engineering, social justice, gender equality and global citizenship.[5] Another example is GoldieBlox, whose construction toys specifically aim to attract girls to engineering by providing them with hands-on play experiences that rely on scientific and technological principles.[6] However, toy designers and companies have not yet seemed to find an equivalently ‘convincing’ argument to be offered for designing toys to involve boys in play activities that represent domestic work, care and nurturance. After all, there is a significant asymmetry between the cultural and economic values attached to these as opposed to science and technology. Consequently, inclusive design in toy industry primarily serves to expand the range of girls’ play and learning experiences by engaging them with gender-neutral or gender-typed themes as well as activities that are conventionally associated with boys. Yet when it comes to boys’ play and learning, inclusive design falls short in expanding boys’ exposure to an otherwise narrower range of activities, experiences and skills.

Design for ‘everybody’: Whose body?

Then, replacing gender-typing aspects of a design brief with gender-neutral elements does not necessarily lead to comprehensively inclusive products. Likewise, products ‘for everybody’ are no less problematic, when the diversity that is implied by such a vaguely stated ‘everybody’ is not identified and addressed explicitly. As demonstrated with regard to toy design, gender-stereotypical design is easy to recognise and decipher, especially when it is expressed overtly through product aesthetics. The exclusion caused by gender-blind design is comparatively subtle and it requires a more deliberate effort from the viewer to identify. Several products that are critical for the health and wellbeing of their users are designed for a generic user with a standard male body. A highly disputed example is the dummies used in car crash tests, which are modelled after a medium-sized male body (1.75 m, 78 kg) to represent ‘the user’.[7] This results in the exclusion of women’s bodies, larger bodies, pregnant bodies, older bodies, and all other types of non-standard male bodies from car safety tests. Recent few initiatives in the industry respond to this omission by introducing more inclusive standards for crash test dummies, such as Volvo’s Equal Vehicles for All initiative.[8] Yet, change is slow, and ‘other’ bodies are still peripheral to car safety tests, facing more risk in car accidents.

As human bodies are diverse, so are bodily experiences. The prevalence of self-tracking practices has led to a significant avenue for design of digital apps for tracking personal health and wellbeing. Among these, fitness apps often presume a ‘genderless healthy user’, which, similar to the dummies in crash tests, corresponds to the standard male body, overlooking a range of bodily experiences and health concerns.[9] Menstrual apps, on the contrary, are specifically designed for a female body. As such, one can expect that their design builds on a comprehensive understanding of women’s bodies and experiences. However, surveys and interviews with users on period tracking apps such as My Calendar, Period Tracker, and Clue show that existing apps can too easily fall into the trap of gender-stereotyping, addressing gender in a highly superficial manner in their designs. When app designers neglect users’ bodily experiences of menstruation, they reduce their needs and expectations to graphics and symbols displaying pink flowers, butterflies and hearts.[10] Yet, once designers are interested in why and how users track their cycles, the diversity in their needs and concerns is revealed. There is no universal woman, but multiplicity of experiences of fertility, menstruation, pregnancy and breastfeeding, which are complicated by diverse backgrounds, intersectional identities, widespread norms regarding sexual health and reproduction, and available social support, including the experiences of transgender men. Therefore, similar to ‘everybody’, a presumed category of ‘woman user’ is no friend of inclusive design, as it typically ends up targeting a selective, and usually privileged, group of women. This is the result even when inclusivity is intended, unless its interpretation actually recognises the distanced, underrepresented, or disadvantaged user groups.

Back to the questions

By way of conclusion, let us go back to the questions I posed at the beginning of this article: How can design be inclusive? Is inclusive design synonymous with ‘design for everybody’? I believe the article has discussed a lot of examples to convince the reader that the answer to the second question is a “No”. I hope, examining various product groups, both physical and digital, the article also showed that there is no simple recipe for the first question. Of course, there are obvious principles of inclusive design such as embracing diversity, valuing individual experiences, challenging stereotypes, recognising exclusion, and considering users as active participants of design process. But the practices that conceal omission of certain groups while empowering others (as in gender-blind design), and those that reinforce a dualistic, and thus inadequate, understanding of the society (as in gender-stereotypical design) can take a different form in various products, organisations, design teams, and industries. Therefore, the question of how design can be inclusive demands a close and careful identification of harmful practices and barriers before inclusivity specific to each context of production and use. Such a challenging task can be achieved by the active engagement of and collaboration among all stakeholders influencing and influenced by design.

Sources

[1] I would like to acknowledge the names of the students who wrote the essay on Skims: Frederikke Meng-Thrillingsø, Anne Hye Wills Mathiesen, Simone Amalie Byriel, and Mathilde Reimer Hansen.

[2] Kollmayer, M., M. T. Schultes, B. Schober, T. Hodosi, and C. Spiel. 2018. “Parents’ Judgments about the Desirability of Toys for Their Children: Associations with Gender Role Attitudes, Gender-typing of Toys, and Demographics.” Sex Roles 79, 329-341.

[3] Auster, C. J., and C. S. Mansbach. 2012. “The Gender Marketing of Toys: An Analysis of Color and Type of Toy on the Disney Store Website.” Sex Roles, 67, no. 7-8, 375–388.

[4] The survey results are presented in the article titled “Girls are Ready to Overcome Gender Norms but Society Continues to Enforce Biases that Hamper Their Creative Potential”, which is available online at https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/news/2021/september/lego-ready-for-girls-campaign

[5] Little Rebels’ story is available at https://wearelittlerebels.com/pages/about-us

[6] Further information on Goldieblox is available at https://goldieblox.com/pages/our-story

[7] Gendered Innovations. n.d. “Inclusive Crash Test Dummies: Rethinking Standards and Reference Models.” http://genderedinnovations.stanford.edu/case-studies/crash.html#tabs-2

[8] Further information on Volvo’s initiative is available at https://www.volvocars.com/intl/v/car-safety/eva-initiative-cars-equally-safe

[9] Cifor, M., and P. Garcia. 2019. “Gendered by Design: A Duoethnographic Study of Personal Fitness Tracking Systems.” ACM Transactions on Social Computing 2, no. 4, 1-22.

[10] Epstein, Daniel A., Nicole B. Lee, Jennifer H. Kang, Elena Agapie, Jessica Schroeder, Laura R. Pina, James Fogarty, Julie A. Kientz, and Sean Munson. 2017. “Examining Menstrual Tracking to Inform the Design of Personal Informatics Tools.” In CHI ’17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 6876–6888.