In October 2022, an article published by Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative pointed to the dangers of the so-called “shrink it and pink it” approach to scaling down products for female consumers.
As a result of ill-fitting protective equipment, the article’s author, Karen Korellis Reuther, wrote that female firefighters experience “a four times greater rate of injury than men,” and that “women are 73% more likely to be injured” than men due to biases in safety tests.
Now, Reuther has expanded her research into the new book, “Man-Made: How We Designed a World That Leaves Women Out and How We Can Make it Right,” which further explores the real-world impact of measuring against the “male standard.”
“As I continued to research, I was really surprised by the number of examples,” said Reuther, a former Nike and Reebok executive who lectures at Harvard Graduate School of Design. “I talk about it in terms of a continuum from insulting to deadly. In every one of these cases, the world is not being designed for women, whether it’s what we put on our bodies, what we use, or the objects and places that surround our bodies.”
“Man-Made” is divided into three sections, with tales of injury and “significant personal sacrifice” — such as a female police officer opting for breast reduction surgery in order to wear body armor without discomfort — leading to stories of innovative woman designers. In the book’s second section, “Inclusion by Design,” Reuther describes an incident when NASA postponed its first “all-female spacewalk” in 2019 due to there only being one medium-sized spacesuit on board the International Space Station.
Astronaut Christina Koch would get to complete her mission, while fellow astronaut Anne McClain was replaced by a male counterpart. Though three all-female space walks have occurred since 2019, Reuther writes that male concentration of power tends to keep women “at arm’s length” in STEM professions.
“What we missed was the opportunity to have two women and their perspective together in a spacewalk, and to learn about their experiences,” Reuther said.
The book also tells the story of soccer player Laura Youngson, who set out to revolutionize athletic footwear for women facing a higher prevalence of ACL injuries and chronic pain back in 2018 through her company, IDA Sports. Before designing the first explicitly women-targeted soccer cleat, she described how professional female soccer players were wearing “men’s and kids’ shoes” that didn’t account for key differences in female feet.
“Women’s hips in general tend to be further apart, and so our angles that we’re making with the ground are different,” Youngson said. “We don’t have the same body mass in general, so [with] how much we’re putting pressure through the foot and pressure into the ground, that ground-to-shoe contact has to be different.”
Though Youngson identified a major hole in the sporting goods market, she still faced the “artificial barriers” put in place to stymie woman-centric product development, often centering around profit concerns from male shareholders. Instead of petitioning larger apparel brands to build specialized cleats, she took IDA cleats to athletes across the world, which allowed female soccer players to spend more time on the pitch and less time in recovery.
“[A] semi-professional player had been wearing something like 30 different shoes to try and find one that fit and had pain in her foot,” Youngson said. “She came across [IDA Sports] and the pain went away. And I was like, ‘This is why I’m doing this ... Can we solve someone’s pain issue, and give them a better playing experience?’”
In documenting the IDA model, and detailing changes occurring everywhere “from boardrooms to ballots,” “Man-Made” advocates for more fields to invest long-term in product lines dedicated to women and female-led businesses. For readers who aren’t inventors, Reuther said this change could occur in subtler ways by being “unapologetically demanding” about the products they buy, and by asking companies: “Is this the best you can do?”
“I say you should bank on women,” Reuther said. “There are so many examples in the book where brands who have had confidence in the women’s market have been very, very successful.”
“I quote Shirley Chisholm,” she continued, “because she said, 'If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.’ And I think we need to bring, like, five folding chairs.”
Guests
- Karen Korellis Reuther, industrial designer, lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, former Vice President of Creative Direction and Innovation at Reebok and Global Creative Director at Nike, author of “Man-Made: How We Designed A World That Leaves Women Out, And How We Can Make It Right.”
- Laura Youngson, co-founder of the athletic gear company IDA Sports, maker of the first-ever soccer cleat made for a woman’s foot.
