Designing tangible tactics so womxn of colour can thrive in the workplace —
This post is part of Unconforming’s Expert Panel — a series of conversations trying to answer one question: how can we design for women? We originally share these in our newsletter, Unconforming.
Tell us about your work:
I am a designer, writer, and photographer, born in Tehran, Iran. I grew up in Toronto, Canada and recently moved to Kigali, Rwanda to join YLabs, a non-profit design studio that specializes in creating healthcare solutions for youth and adolescents. I work predominantly on sexual and reproductive health projects that are intended to decrease unintended pregnancies, increase HIV testing, and prevent unsafe abortions across Africa. My biggest project at the moment is called CyberRwanda, a digital platform that aims to improve the health and livelihoods of youth. It focuses on three main aspects:
Stories – Comics and illustrations allow youth to follow characters and their stories as they navigate work, life, and love.
Shop – Youth can order products such as sanitary pads and contraceptives anonymously, and pick it up from local pharmacies.
Learn – FAQs and resources cover anything from puberty and fertility awareness to employment assistance and resume development.
I co-founded Thousand&One with my sister, Zahra in May of this year. We are Muslim-identifying, Iranian-Canadian women, who have spent our lives growing up in the West. We realized that no matter what space we operated in, both personal and professional, where a soccer field, a committee at school, in our industries – academia and technology, they were not designed with us in mind.
This has created lifelong frustration, exclusion, and mental exhaustion. And so Thousand&One was born out of the need to create a community that can grow and heal collectively, in order to thrive in the workplace. It is a community of womxn of colour by womxn of colour, and while we acknowledge that we can’t change unjust systems overnight, we need to be able to find solutions that fit the needs of this community, so they are able to navigate these structures in ways that work for them.
Our approach is fully community-driven; currently we are trying to better understand the experiences and barriers WOC experience at work through a research study. We’ve also noticed a huge gap in the existing research – in North America, research around Women of Colour is more focused on Black, Indigenous, Hispanic / Latinx, and Asian American women. There’s very little talk about the experience of Middle Eastern and Muslim women.
Islamophobia is a huge issue, and the political discourse and landscape post 9/11 has presented many challenges for this community, manifesting in subtle as well as more direct implications, with little to no resources to help navigate our way through.
What have you learned about women and girls through your work?
Cultural context cannot be overlooked
I think it’s important to recognize that naturally, women and girls are impacted by their environments and communities. In my recent work at YLabs and in Rwanda, I have learned to be conscious of the impact of culture and family in the lives of women and girls. It’s important to understand that many decisions and thought processes around their future are influenced by their communities, whether that be their families, teachers, advisors, providers, and friends.
Being mindful about this and checking our unconscious biases throughout the research and design process allows us to design for women and girls in ways that suit their specific needs and context.
Intersectional perspectives over one-size-fits-all
There are 1.8 billion Muslims in the world, but there’s a very one dimensional way that the general population perceives the religion and people of that faith, even though there are many nuances that will impact the way people practice.
Being a Muslim Iranian woman, and growing up in the West post 9/11 has taught me firsthand what it means to be intersectional in our thinking and approach to research and community building. Similarly, women of colour are clumped together a lot, but there’s no one-size-fits-all, and our efforts at Thousand&One are focused on honoring individual experiences and identities, while at the same time celebrating the collective struggle of these women. Intersectionality must be at the heart of our work when we are designing for women.
Women are not allowed to fail
Women of colour have to work 10 times harder to get where they are. Many of us carry this pressure due to the immigrant mentality of having to succeed, but society and workplaces also perpetuate this. I’ve heard embracing failure as a philosophy at many organizations, but when women and especially women of colour are held to a much higher standard than others, the consequences of failing or making mistakes becomes detrimental to their career growth. The freedom and opportunity to fail and make mistakes is a privilege not granted to everyone. And the repercussions are not the same for all parties involved.
Women face recurring challenges, without tangible solutions
The challenges that women, and women of colour face are recurring. Whenever there’s a space for women of color to get together to talk about the challenges they experience, I’ve noticed that we all profusely nod along. It makes me wonder: there’s so much overlap, and so many of us have stepped up to talk and voice our concerns, but very little work has been done that truly impacts our daily lives.
To me, this signifies that not much has been done by those in power to shift from talking about change to actually implementing it. It’s convenient to talk about diversity and inclusion initiatives, but it takes hard work to take action, change policy, dismantle processes, and create new ones that benefit all.
What are some examples you’re seeing that are truly designing for women?
Re-framing of DEI to Justice Equity and Belonging
I think historically, we’ve seen that the majority of solutions that design for women and with women in mind are around fertility and pregnancy. While this is important, there is a wide range of solutions that women need, both in their personal and professional lives, that we have not even begun to tap into.
We’re starting to see terminology in the workplace adapt to acknowledge what we truly need. Justice, equity and belonging have become part of the DEI conversation, and this reframing is helping us design a bit more intentionally and impactfully for women of colour. That said, the tools and resources to help women of colour navigate challenges and make sense of the issues they experience on a daily basis, are few and far between.
While it’s great that we now recognize there is a problem, I’ve learned that when it comes to making changes that impact the lives of women and especially women of colour, we have failed significantly. And until we prioritize the importance of truly designing for women, we will continue to cause harm.
About Hanieh Khosroshahi
Hanieh is a UX researcher and designer who uses creative problem solving, storytelling, and systems thinking to design products and services that are innovative, impactful, and accessible. She currently works at YLabs, a non-profit design studio working to improve health and economic opportunity for youth. She uses Human-Centred Design to solve complex social challenges to produce impactful and equitable outcomes for communities.
With a background in the arts and journalism, and a MSc in Human-Computer Interaction from the University of York in England, she approaches complex social challenges through an inter-disciplinary and equity-focused lens. She is also a UX instructor at Juno College of Technology and a design mentor at Springboard. She runs on coffee, enjoys climbing peaks, and reading a good book.