A presentation at WhyDesign 2020 in in Dublin, Ireland by Jonathon Colman
What do we owe Jonathon Colman Senior Design Manager, Intercom to each other?
What do we @jcolman owe to each other?
What do we owe to each other? go.inter.com/whatweowe
owe
“ Men can use their position to ensure everyone gets opportunities to challenge themselves. — Design Consultant
“ Understand their own biases and limitations and make a conscious effort to rise above them. — Design Consultant
“ Champion the ideas and roles of women as much or more than they champion their own ideas or that of men. — Senior Designer
“ Stop saying HI GUYS! on Slack. — Design Manager
“ Keep in mind that your experience is not the only experience. — Designer
“ Get to know the struggles and barriers of the people you work with. — Design Manager
“ If you find yourself feeling uncomfortable, that means you need to listen more. — Senior Designer
“ Stop being hostile to my ideas and then telling me: You’re getting emotional. — Mid-Level Designer
“ In meetings, if you see women getting interrupted, say: Hey, what were you going to say? — Senior Designer
“ Don’t tell us to be more assertive, and then punish us for being abrasive. — Senior Designer
“ I don’t need special treatment. I just need men to look at me as an equal individual. — Mid-Level Designer
“ Fight for more inclusion and more equality in pay. — Senior Designer
“ Men should use their power to level the field and weed out all the old school conservative political A-holes. — Senior Designer
What should men be accountable for? Learning
Progress Perfection
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Curiosity Learning Progress
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What do we owe to each other? Progress
NEW: See the full text of this talk on UX Collective.
Men tend to sit out conversations about gender equality and equity. They often consider it to be a “women’s issue” or are afraid of making a mistake and saying the wrong thing.
But men are also in the majority of leadership roles—and not just in the design industry. They have the most power to create change and create equity across all genders. So this isn’t a conversation they can sit out.
When it comes to gender equity, what should we expect of men in the design industry? And what do they expect of themselves?
To find out, we’ll take a time-bending journey from West Africa to the roots of Irish revolution to Silicon Valley and back again. And I’ll show you real-world examples of big and small actions that have actually created more gender equity in design. And we’ll see why progress is better than perfection.
Originally presented at the WhyDesign 2020 “50/50” event on March 4, 2020, sponsored by the Institute of Designers in Ireland.
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
Men like me go through life on Easy Mode. But we can’t sit out the fight for gender equity.
Got ~40 minutes open? Watch the complete video of this talk—it’s free! And it’s a lot more fun than just looking at the slides.
The Institute of Designers in Ireland is the largest and oldest association of Irish design professionals, and longest established creative forum in Ireland. IDI is committed to advancing the value and impact of design - inspiring, supporting and learning from one another along the way.
WhyDesign is working to address the gender imbalance in the design industry across Ireland, by showcasing influential female Irish designers.
We empower designers and design business leaders to embrace the challenges and opportunities of the future.
Bradley Brand & Design are delighted to be a Studio Sponsor of the WhyDesign2020 event on 4th March; an ever evolving initiative that’s working to address the gender imbalance in the design industry across Ireland.
Mefloquine, often sold under the brand name Lariam, is a medication used to prevent or treat malaria. When used for prevention it is typically started before potential exposure and continued for several weeks after potential exposure. It can be used to treat mild or moderate malaria but is not recommended for severe malaria. It is taken by mouth.
There’s been a call for the British Army to stop using a controversial anti-malaria drug, mefloquine - best known under the tradename Lariam. The Ministry of Defence and the NHS insist it’s safe but some can suffer unnerving effects.
Memento is a 2000 American neo-noir psychological thriller film written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Guy Pearce stars as a man who, as a result of an injury, has anterograde amnesia (the inability to form new memories) and has short-term memory loss approximately every fifteen minutes. He is searching for the people who attacked him and killed his wife, using an intricate system of Polaroid photographs and tattoos to track information he cannot remember.
Dublin is full of gorgeous, brightly colored doors. And I love color —esp. fun color on doors!
I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon.
Due to an error, self-absorbed Eleanor Shellstrop arrives at the Good Place after her death. Determined to stay, she tries to become a better person. Starring: Kristen Bell, Ted Danson, William Jackson Harper. Creator: Michael Schur.
The Good Place is an American fantasy comedy television series created by Michael Schur. It focuses on Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell), who arrives in the afterlife and is welcomed by Michael (Ted Danson) to “the Good Place”, a highly selective Heaven-like utopia he designed, as a reward for her righteous life. However, she realizes that she was sent there by mistake and must hide her morally imperfect behavior while trying to become a better and more ethical person.
Irish history has traditionally not been kind in recognising the role that its heroic women played in the struggle for freedom during the revolutionary period. The women who were involved in the 1916 Easter Rising, and the wider independence era, were pioneers for equality of the sexes, and even more so for equality amongst all people in Ireland.
What we know of women’s participation in the Rising has been transformed by the material released from the Military Archives over the past decade.
Ella Mei Yon writes her family allegory, exploring how memory creates meaning beyond generation and culture.
While there’s a wide range of gender equity issues, this survey is focused on understanding what people expect from men and what they expect from themselves. This survey is open to people of all genders, including men.
Watchmen is an American comic book maxiseries by the British creative team of writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons and colorist John Higgins. It was published by DC Comics in 1986 and 1987. Moore used the story as a means to reflect contemporary anxieties and to deconstruct and satirize the superhero concept.
Want cognitively diverse teams? Want women engineers? Do what Etsy did: Change who you target, and change how you train them.
When it comes to overcoming mindsets that cause the leadership gender gap, one of the practices that we recommend is to require recruiters (internal and external) to deliver diverse slates of candidates for key positions. While companies often focus on senior positions, we recommend this practice be implemented for positions above the diverging point (the point at which the % of women begins to decline and that of men increases).
I think the hardest part of crying at work is that we’re not supposed to talk about it. No matter how open and aware you are, you likely still have biases that society’s drilled into you — I know I do. Most of us are socialized to think that women are always emotional and that men never cry. So work cultures created by men are likely to be cultures where crying isn’t accepted.
Jasmine Friedl knows how hard it can be to land that dream job. Sure, she’s the Director of Design at Intercom today and she’s led teams at Udacity, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Facebook, but her career in design has never come easy. Hard work, risks and a lucky break are what helped her really get a foot in the door. And now that she’s doing the hiring, Friedl can see the barriers to young talent more clearly than ever—from criteria-free recruiting to an overreliance on high-profile experience. But she’s not playing that tired old game. She’s changing it.
We’re Intercom’s product design team. Our tools help businesses and customers talk with each other. You know, like it’s actually the 21st century.
The Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI) feedback tool helps you to deliver more effective feedback. It focuses your comments on specific situations and behaviors, and then outlines the impact that these behaviors have on others.
Since 1974, the Clayman Institute for Gender Research has been committed to making the future feminist.
Kelly Sue DeConnick is an American comic book writer and editor.
Carol Susan Jane Danvers is a fictional superhero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics.
“Right Now” is a rock song written by the group Van Halen for their album For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. The song reflects on living for the moment and not being afraid of making a change.
Here’s what was said about this presentation on social media.
