ヽ༼ ツ ༽ﾉ Nº305 Pink It & Shrink It 🎀🦩

This week's title comes from a recent Appleman Cycles post:

"'Pink it and Shrink it' was a term I heard when bike companies started making 'women specific' designs. They'd take the smallest frame sizes and offer them in pink and whammo blammo, a whole new product 🙄" – Matt Appleman

We're all familiar with this phenomenon in cycling, but it's not just bikes or even aesthetics! Karen Korellis Reuther, a former Creative Executive at NIKE and Reebok and is currently a Senior Fellow at Harvard University's Advanced Leadership Initiative in Cambridge, MA, makes the point that not accommodating women's needs in the design of products has led to a world that is less hospitable and more dangerous for women.

"'SHRINK IT AND PINK IT' is a common phrase used in the product creation world for designing products for women. Women are too often left no choice than to use products that were designed by men for men, just scaled down and colored pink, or some stereotypical feminine color. In the best case it can be insulting, in the worst case it can be deadly." – Karen Korellis Reuther

💥🚕 Women are 73% more likely to be injured in a car crash than men
🪖 In the military, women suffer pelvic fractures at a much higher rate than their male counterparts
🩺 In healthcare, personal protective equipment (PPE) that fits women properly is challenging to find.
👩🏻‍🚒 Female firefighters experience a four times greater rate of injury than men, in part because of ill-fitting personal protective equipment.
👤 Not until 2011 did the US start using a female crash-test dummy — albeit a “shrink it and pink it” version.
♀️ Women represent over half of the global population
💰 In the US, they influence nearly 90% of all purchasing decisions
🇺🇸 Only 19% of practicing industrial design positions & only 11% of design leadership roles are held by women
🇬🇧 5% of practicing industrial designers are women

This means that most cars, electronics, furniture, bicycles, sporting goods, appliances, medical devices, sneakers, and more are designed by men problem-solving & innovating with a homogeneous, primarily white-male approach. Karen's article points out that though as many women as men graduate with industrial design degrees, they often leave the profession within 3–5 years.

I agree with her call for more women to lead product design and implementation and to encourage women to pursue careers in industrial design, architecture, and engineering. Let's consider the female body through relevant data collection and legislate policies based on that data. Female designers need to flourish and gain influence and power because, to quote Karen once more" **"because women won't forget that women exist."**

As always, thank you all for reading!

with appreciation,

Jon

p.s.

More relevant reading; last year Simone Giuliani wrote: "Beyond pink it and shrink it: Women’s market is “the hottest thing in cycling” in the United States"