AIGA's Design Conference Gender Representation Survey 2019: the results are in

17 Jan / 2020 / Scanner /

"In January 2019, we released our first annual report investigating the gender breakdown of 30 major design conferences that took place between winter 2017 and winter 2018, in order to see how an editorial platform like ours might be able to spark momentum around this topic and encourage conferences to take a look at their own practices. Today, we’re releasing a second report that examines the gender representation at 33 design conferences that took place during 2019" writes AIGA Eye On Design of its updated state of the industry as presented in various design gatherings worldwide.

This year, AIGA gathered data on the gender breakdown of 33 visual communication and graphic design conferences that took place in 2019, "choosing events with a graphic design focus that are established and recognized by the design community."

Unfortunately, things haven't changed, in fact they remain substantially similar.

In their latest report Lea Sievertsen, Silva Baum, and Claudia Scheer of notamuse -a German platform that profiles womxn in contemporary graphic design- and AIGA's senior editor Madeleine Morley found that on average, 42.1% womxn and 0.5% nonbinary folk spoke at these design conferences, and 69.7% of events had more men on their lineup than other genders.

"By comparing the results from 2018 and 2019, we were able to see which conferences improved and which remained consistent when it comes to their gender breakdown" note the editors.

"For the past two years, OFFF Barcelona and Bitscon have had more than 75% men on their lineup. Us By Night, while having a higher percentage of womxn speakers in 2019 than 2018 still features around 64.8% men on its lineup. AGI Open increased its numbers of womxn by a small degree. Both are consistently not inclusive of historically marginalized genders. Brand New Conference, Creative Works, Adobe Max, and Design Indaba all consistently tend to invite more men than other genders."

"On the other side of things, Weltformat has consistently invited an equal number of womxn and men, and Redo, AIGA, and 99U consistently invite more womxn to their stages than men."

Last year, together with notamuse, we released our first annual report on the gender breakdown of design conferences.

Today, we’re launching our second report—an investigation into speaker lineups of 33 major design conferences that took place in 2019 > https://t.co/mIqPnttlIr pic.twitter.com/kr560XN7Pf
— AIGA Eye on Design (@AIGAeyeondesign) January 16, 2020