Designing Invention for Women with Katrine Marçal
Tell us a bit about the women’s lens in your work.
I write about Economics, which is heavily male-dominated and often not used to taking in the female perspective. My latest book, Mother of Invention is always asking that question: what about women? I’ve found that this is an incredibly valuable question to ask because it sheds light on what’s lacking which is often needed for everyone. For example, if you ask that question about the economy, you come to unpaid care work and you can open so many doors for your thinking. It’s about more than equality – especially including all of the things that have been coded as feminine and therefore been excluded, especially in Economics. The solutions to our challenges lie in putting women front and center in a new kind of economic paradigm.
I’ve found that there are 2 main factors that hold innovation back:
Exclusion of women - the way we tell the history of innovation by excluding women, because women’s ideas are not funded, and because there is an absence of women from many fields.
Insistence of categorizing certain things as feminine and therefore “gender contaminated.” In essence it means that it’s not as innovative, technical or something that men would want because it’s not compatible with their masculinity.
What have you learned from your research at the intersection of women, Economics and invention?
We are blinded by our perceptions of femininity and masculinity
Suitcases on wheels were originally created for women, then it became a product for everyone. Electric cars were first perceived as feminine – and now more men than women drive them. Computer programming used to be female-dominated and now it’s male-dominated. We are always so sure about what’s feminine and what’s masculine, but in reality this has been changing throughout history. These ideas about gender blind us, and prevent us from seeing fantastic innovation when it’s staring us in the face.
The connotations of what is feminine hurts women, and everyone else too
Comfort and to some extent safety – for example, cars with roofs or ones that didn’t require cranking to get started – was first considered feminine and therefore “less than” or “not as good as.” But everyone can benefit from a comfortable and safe car. The idea that comfort and safety are feminine and therefore shouldn’t go mainstream and therefore shouldn’t be invested in because they can only be marketed to women doesn’t make sense – but that’s how they came about. Many of these innovations were developed with women in mind, or a human being in mind that is feminine and therefore “allowed to demand comfort in a different way.” Today, a roof on a car is such an obvious design feature, but it took years for it to go mainstream. There is a resistance to ideas that didn’t seem “macho” and not something that men were allowed to want. These are barriers to innovation.
Women have fantastic ideas, but they not considered “sexy” enough to receive funding
The way venture capital works today has a logic and fee structure that has its roots in the whaling industry – only ideas for which you can say that they will either be massive or fail spectacularly are likely to get funding. Women’s ideas are generally not of that nature – rather they are practical, innovative solutions to fix problems – and come across as “modest” or “not sexy enough” to investors. Women’s ideas are usually profitable at an early stage, but might not have the potential to become dominant monopolies, but the financial system is not good at finding, funding and scaling these. Only 2-3% of VC funding goes to women – this cannot be solved by teaching women to pitch in a different way. This can only be solved by designing the financial system differently.
What are some common misconceptions about designing for women?
Woman is a “type of man”—and therefore designing for her is “charity”
Design often thinks of women as a type of man—I saw this somewhere and thought about how such thinking can lead to feeling like you’re doing women a favor by designing for them. Designing for women isn’t less valuable, it should not be driven by charity or seen as a CSR effort.
Designing for women makes business sense. They maximize utilization of services they sign up for and like – making them significantly more profitable than men. They have lower risk - in e-commerce for instance men make 3-5 times more returns than women (i.e. return costs from men are 3-5 times higher for men).
It is a no brainer to design for women in any business.
Pinking it and shrinking it is enough
In designing for women, most companies do the superficial (pointless) stuff. Example: Make it pink! From debit cards to digital applications this is the easiest thing to do – pink it. In doing so, all they do is shrink it. Examples include: pink debit cards, marketing collateral with images of women shopping or doing household chores or rewards with spa vouchers.
I say, don’t stop at the pink, if you find that women love color, treat them to the rainbow. In this case it will invariably lead you to the pot of gold.
Look beyond the stats to (in)validate all those female stereotypes...
There’s a stereotype that in gambling, women play games of chance (slot machines) and men play games of strategy (poker, blackjack). It took a female researcher to debunk this myth, finding that 50% of the users in online fantasy league games are now women and that they perform better than men because they cash out at a high – as opposed to men who continue playing expecting their winning streak to continue. But on a casino floor, we don’t see this play out. The blackjack tables are in fact full of men with women on the slot machines or on the fringe of the floor. This too, is by design. Casinos are designed for men. They are far away (women find it harder to leave family behind to access them), skimpily clad waitresses serving alcohol are really serving men, dimly lit rooms – of course casinos are less inviting for women. Online gambling allows women to play anonymously and on their own terms. Seeing other women play online creates social proof for her and decreases the stigma around gender-based gambling.
Another stereotype is that women aren’t good at tech. In India, this plays out as women not performing as well in their engineering university entrance examinations. But there’s so much more to this story. Studying for the exams requires staying away from family in a hostel together with a group or attending extra tutoring classes away from home. These conditions are much more suited to men who have the freedom of leaving home, whereas daughters are always “protected” with parents feeling uncomfortable or unsafe sending their girls away. This leads to the theory that women are not capable enough to pass these exams.
Overtime, such myths add up to generalised beliefs that “women are not capable of complex things.” It’s reductionist thinking and costs the world a contribution from 51% of the world!
What advice would you have for someone creating a product, service, or community for women?
Know your history
It is a useful exercise to look at concrete examples of when innovation was held back because of gender perceptions. It makes one think about the ways in which they might be blinded by their own biases. Particularly the history of innovation which has generally been told by excluding women – wherein that which is innovated by women, such as ceramics or sewing, is not categorised as innovation or technology, even though these too, are clearly innovations. This gives the impression that anything important ever has been created by men and women have been lucky enough to benefit from them.
Design beyond assumptions about women and stereotypes
Women are such an incredibly powerful force as consumers – 80% of all consumer decisions are thought to be influenced by women and still we don’t innovate for women or design for women. That’s a market failure and it’s an anomaly. People assume that women like pink, and they fail to understand that what women might need is more often complicated than what stereotypes say.
Where do you wish to see more Design for Women?
Financial Design: Setup economic empowerment on a different logic
Women don’t fit into the current “completely fail or take over the world” funding logic. Funding needs to be set up on different incentives. SheEO is a great example – a non-profit fund where women pay a small sum as an activator every month and decide together which female-led ventures receive financial support. There’s other holes in the financial system too – for example, pensions are set up to leave women behind. Women lose out because they’re more likely to be paid less, or be out of the workforce and therefore earn less – and they live longer.
About Katrine Marçal
Katrine Marçal is a bestselling author on women and innovation. Her first book Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? has been translated into more than 20 languages. Margaret Atwood called it "a smart, funny and readable book on women, economics and money". It was named one of The Guardian's books of the year in 2015. BBC also named Katrine one of its 100 Women in 2015.
Katrine works for the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. She has given keynotes at institutions such as Oxford University Business and Economics Programme, London School of Economics and The Royal School of Technology in Stockholm. In her role as a financial journalist she has interviewed many of the world's leading economic thinkers. Some of her interviews have been viewed more than a million times on YouTube.
Katrine's second book Mother Of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored In An Economy Built For Men became a bestseller in Sweden in 2020 and will be published in several languages during 2021 and 2022.
She lives in the English countryside with her husband and three children.