Gender norms surround our everyday life. While this might be difficult to notice at first, the intention behind any space created is affected by it.
Creating a living space requires teamwork from a few different interior design sectors. Interior designers, architects, interior decorators, and all other professionals work on a project to present the best living space for society. Although the design industry continues to resist male dominance it still has a lot of gender norms that are hard to overcome. While the natural image of a professional designer might sound genderless, adding an industry description might change that.
Female representation in interior design does not vary far from traditional social norms. Females as being soft, kind, pleasant, and patient can use these skills in their profession. This may lead them to the interior design industry as someone working with customers, bouncing ideas, understanding customer needs, and making a great sale. This is the opposite of the traditional architect image.
Being in University and being thought different disciplines can bring up a crisis of which working field to choose. Seeing how easily some people slip into the description of an interior designer may make them less curious about exploring architecture or vice versa.
Interior designers, interior architects, and architect-designer all sound very professional but can skew the view of society. The choice of wording your profession can immensely affect you.
At first glance, the interior design industry is quite diverse, which brings females in the industry some confidence. By statistics 69% of USA interior designers are women. While 89.9% of people with interior design degrees are female. “Women ... are almost all timid by nature, soft, slow, and therefore more useful when they sit still and watch over things. It is as though nature thus provided for our well-being, arranging for men to bring things home and for women to guard them. ...” These words describe existing gender norms still surrounding females in the interior design industry. This describes the law of the father, the law of marriage, and the law of order. This is how patriarchy is embedded in our subconscious.
Dolores Hayden and Gwendolyn Wright worked on changing the male architectural norm. “In these authors’ work, women feature as active agents of spatial production rather than passive recipients of buildings designed by (mostly) male architects. Turning their attention to hitherto unexplored areas of domesticity”
Being a male designer also brings different stereotypes with the title. Being interested in sports or speaking complex structural language might be expected of a male in the industry.
Designing for males should include being creative and expressing yourself without the pressure of presenting yourself as the alfa.
While the patriarchy may divert male designers into traditional manly identities this should not make your other personal qualities left unexplored.
The classic architect may look like a more introverted, confident, down-to-earth decision-maker. The person that is sitting in an office working on a project for long periods looks quite puzzled with complex ideas brewing.
In a University environment, the statistics of the interior design industry can be confusing. While the admission rate to architecture school is higher for females, successful business leaders are seen as men. This may be because the architecture industry includes more males on-site while accepting more females in technological work.
By males taking the traditional architect image they also take the respective amount as a salary. The salary plays into the traditional patriarchal society. Gender in modern architecture can sound like this: “The man should guard the woman, the house, and his family and country, but not by sitting still.” A description like this might sound appealing as it holds a powerful image.
The image of the traditional architect may fit this description: “As critical studies have abundantly exemplified, the straight white male, “strong, silent, cool, handsome, unemotional, successful, master of women, leader of men, wealthy, brilliant, athletic and ‘heavy’,” is the privileged figure of masculinity which represses others.” These descriptions lack diversity and sound intimidating to industry newcomers. How can you make the label fit you might include behaving against your instincts. It does not mention how other personal qualities can be of benefit. The statistics in the industry are not the numbers we want to see in a diverse society.
While the number of architecture students may be 50:50, licensed male architects consist of 26% while females make up only 18%. Architecture has a close relationship with interior design while being viewed as a different field with different rules.
The environment around us includes a lot of different interior spaces. This may vary from a cozy personal home to a modern shopping mall. Sectioning areas by gender can be challenging, what can we say about all the other places around us. Changing our perception might look like this: „Once sexuality is explicitly and critically addressed, disciplinary boundaries are threatened, established categories fail, and new terms emerge, which productively disable the status quo.”
Spaces that can serve a crowd of different people will need a crowd of different designers. In creating interior design for a space, understanding the client is a necessity. This shows how diversity in the interior design industry is a necessity as well. Diversity in commercial space design is increasingly gathering attention.
Saving space and increase in diversity have moved the interior design industry into taking a step forward. The use of genderless bathrooms is becoming the new normal in Western cultures. This requires the diversity of the interior design community to understand their needs.
Personal spaces also have different requirements: “Bachelors, gay men, adult sons, aged fathers, and servants are other male figures whose agency remains largely absent from” gender neutrality in spaces. This does show how the interior design industry still may diversity.
The interior design creates personal spaces for different people with different needs. Family homes require male and female input. “The notion of domesticity effortlessly resonates with family life consisting of mother, father, and children.” explains the need for balanced diversity. In this discourse, the woman is living in a house that is based on masculine control instead of sexuality and desire.
Are we affected by what around us is created by women and men? The words “home is the very place where the intricate relations between architecture, gender, and domesticity become visible.” can describe the relationship between gender norms and design.
Image 10.1
Image 9.1
Two images can prove how different views of different spaces look. Two different artists photographed their bedrooms. Domestic personalized bedrooms can show us a lot about a person. Image 10 shows the artists Joanne Leonard in 1977. The name of the piece connects this image to the artists: “Daytime TV and Babies Sleeping, Bedroom, Berkeley, CA”
This can easily be seen how the artist’s priorities are having a warm, relaxing environment for her babies to sleep in. The image shows her bedroom but she is not even shown in the picture.
Image 9 shows the artists Bill Owens’s bedroom image in 1972. In the captioning about why his bedroom was full of mirrors, he said: “It's a great pleasure to watch yourself make love in the six dozen mirrors that line the ceilings and walls. I've spent a tremendous amount of thought and planning to get the total effect of the bedroom., It's fascinating to watch our friends' reactions to seeing the luxury and sensuousness of the room. Our bedroom is the most enjoyable room in the house.”
The picture shows the bedroom and the artists in bed enjoying the mirrors. He put a lot of thought into this and this represents the artist’s interest in a fun social lifestyle.
Men sexualizing their everyday life has been analyzed before. This bedroom comparison confidently shows how both genders view their personal spaces in relation to their life.
How can spaces be more inclusive moving forward may be hard to predict. But the future starts by raising these issues so we can understand society better. The gender and interior design industry are forever tangled in gender norms. But the future is to notice them and take accountability to strive for change.
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