From polarimagazine.com
According to Susan Tick’s article,“His & Hers: Designing for a Post-Gender Society”, “today’s design landscape is deeply rooted in Modernism, a movement shaped by a predominately male perspective.” She argues for a change in this design to make it more “gender-neutral”. She suggests for designers to learn more about “society’s issues” and apply what they have learned to their designing process. An example of this is the design of the “workplace.” Today in the workplace, the “barriers and hierarchies” ,due to gender, are beginning to fade away. Women are taking more leadership roles in the workplace, challenging the “gender roles” that were once there. There is also the “new wave of feminism” and the LGBT rights movement challenging this concept. Tick states that people are now “craving more softness in interiors, with the open plan, the influence of hospitality, and and emphasis on tactile and textural materials.” Then she argues that this would be the best time for designer to think about “how they incorporate gender sensitivity in to their work.”
After discussing the workplace, Tick explains the “human phenomenon” of “masculine and feminine definitions being switched and obscured.” Examples of this can be found in fashion, which “embraces” this idea. She provides an examples of this by talking about the “military look” of “Alexander Wang’s women’s coat from Fall 2015” and Annemiek van deer Beek’s make-up line for men.
Tick also argues that “Gender roles” cause “outward appearances” to be confusing. Although people are assigned a certain gender at birth, they are allowed to decide what gender they identify” as. In fact, there are some college with students refusing to put their gender down on forms because they don’t want to be “identified” as male or female. There are even middle school children doing the same. Some schools are okay with this, and Tick encourages designers to keep up with these “trends.” She said that the view of transgender people has changed and provides an example of this. According to Tick, Maritine Rothblatt, CEO of United Therapeutics became the “highest paid female executive in the United States even though she was born biologically a male.”
Towards the end of the article, Tick talks about some of the changes that have been made so far, like the “gender-neutral or unisex bathrooms” at Google and provides an example of a time where these types of bathrooms would have been useful. Her example was a case where a worker had a “gender-reassignment surgery” done over their break. Apparently, the coworkers were not okay with this person using the bathrooms, because of and She explains the importance of “making people feel accommodated”,not only in the bathrooms, but everywhere. This leads to the subject of Americans with disabilities and how they also experience a disadvantage, but Tick says that “gender issues” can not be handled to same way that their issues are handled, with “regulations and compliance.”It also will take time, considering “we are only at the very beginning with gender-neutral design.”