00:00:02
Speaker 1: Welcome to Get Connected with Nina Del Rio, a weekly conversation about fitness, health, and happenings in our community on 106.7 Light FM.
00:00:13
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to Get Connected and listen to these stunning facts. Women are 73% more likely to be injured in a car crash than men. In the military, women suffer pelvic fractures at a significantly higher rate than their male counterparts. And across the trades, 90% of women cannot find properly fitting safety gear. These are not statistical anomalies. They are the predictable consequences of a world designed almost entirely around the male body. Karen Karelis Reuter is a former global creative director at Nike and vice president of creative direction and innovation at Reebok and is the author of Man Made, How We Designed a World That Leaves Women Out and How We Can Make It Right. Karen Karelis Reuter, thank you for being on the show.
00:00:58
Speaker 3: Thank you, Nina. It's so good to be here.
00:01:00
Speaker 2: Karen Karelis Reuter has been a designer for over 40 years and today is a practicing activist committed to inclusion by design and ending gender bias in the built world. She is on the faculty at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, where she teaches in the Master in Design Engineering program. And Karen, beyond the uniforms and safety gear, until I read the introduction of your book, I never really realized the extent to which our physical world is not fit for women, literally. Can you explain design bias and a bit of how we got here?
00:01:31
Speaker 3: Yes. Design bias is that we have been designing to what we consider a standard or what is normal. But it turns out that that standard and what is normal is male. From the mid-1800s, we were measuring bodies and documenting those bodies to define what is a normal person. All those measurements were taken from men, specifically men. young white men. And we have been using those standards for many, many years since then. In fact, those measurements are still being used in the measurements of our BMI, which we all get when we go to the doctor.
00:02:17
Speaker 2: Let's talk about a couple of glaring examples and the consequences. So we mentioned the crash test dummies. How have they been designed and what has been the result for women?
00:02:27
Speaker 3: So they've, again, been designed off of a male body. So the crash test dummy that is used in the safety tests here in the U.S. is an accurate male dummy, and that has been used and then shrunk, scaled down, something we call shrink it and pink it in less tragic terms than the crash test dummies. But it's been scaled down, and the bio... mechanics of that crash test dummy is still mimicking the male body. And that crash test dummy is being used to test our cars. But even that one isn't being used to test behind the wheel. So we're not testing anything female behind the wheel in the U.S. And that's resulted in this statistic that you quoted up front.
00:03:19
Speaker 2: Speaking of shrink it and pink it, so you worked at Reebok and Nike. Let's talk about something you're very familiar with, which is athletic shoes, which is what they would do, according to the book, is they would just say make a smaller size for women and make it in pink. In particular, what would a shoe designed for a woman's biomechanics take into account, and how would that be better for women physically?
00:03:39
Speaker 3: Well, our feet are different, right? So if you look at it in really broad terms, a male foot is a rectangle, right? And a female foot is a triangle, right? We have a wider forefoot, a narrower heel. And that's just sort of the basics, right? So our geometry is quite different. And our arches are higher. There are so many differences between our feet. So to simply take a male sneaker and scale it down and sell it in a female size is why oftentimes things just become uncomfortable sometimes.
00:04:12
Speaker 1: Right.
00:04:12
Speaker 3: Even a sneaker that's supposed to be the most comfiest shoe.
00:04:15
Speaker 2: Right.
00:04:15
Speaker 3: We say the comfiest ride. I want to kick off when I get at home. And that's because it wasn't designed for my foot.
00:04:23
Speaker 2: Over the years, we've actually had more than a few guests on this show talk about how women aren't just tinier men. And you cite an author I spoke with, Christine Yu. Her book is Up to Speed, The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes. And listeners, you can find the conversation I had with Christine Yu in our iHeartLibrary.com. And one of the things I remember from that conversation, also because of the facts you cite in your book, is that 45 percent of girls drop sports by the age of 14 because of body image and discomfort. Sports should make people feel better and more confident. But what if we're talking about how it affects girls mentally? What are they dealing with that boys aren't besides the shoes?
00:05:04
Speaker 3: Nina, I love Christine's book too. And I met with Christine and used a lot of the research that she has done also in my book. You know, this 45% dropping out of sport is real, right? And a lot of it has to do with body confidence, right? Most girls drop out before they're 14 due to body confidence issues. And that oftentimes is the design of their equipment, their uniforms, not a properly fitting sport bra, which a student of mine At Harvard, Sarah Foxen has created a company called Robin Athletic, and she's starting to design, you know, equipment, sports bras, shorts for these young girls to keep them in the game and to keep their body confidence high. The design of our locker rooms, you know, I'm a product designer. I work on those things that we use and touch and wear. But the spaces around us can also be really challenging. And the locker room is specifically a tough design. for girls, right? It was designed, I think, from the original Olympic sports in Athens. So it was designed for all male athletes, large open spaces, and girls are very uncomfortable. And I think when we can start to say we want to keep girls in sports, we have to look at the physical environment that's surrounding them.
00:06:23
Speaker 2: My guest is Karen Karelis Reuter. She was vice president of creative direction and innovation at Reebok and served as the global creative director at Nike for 12 years. She is chairperson for the IF Design Awards and on the advisory board of the IF Design Academy. Her book is Man Made, How We Designed a World That Leaves Women Out and How We Can Make It Right. You're listening to Get Connected on 106.7 Light FM. I'm Nina Del Rio. What interested you, Karen, in industrial design in the first place?
00:06:53
Speaker 3: Well, I always loved cars, Nina, and I was fascinated by cars. by the design of cars, the shape of cars. And I knew I wanted to do something in the creative field. I started to study architecture. I thought that was the closest thing that represented that design world. And a professor of mine, Peter Miller, said to me during my sophomore year at Purdue, he said, have you ever heard of product industrial design? And I said, no, what is it? He said, it's like an architect for product. And that's what I loved. So I went over to the industrial design school, started studying, thinking that I wanted to become a car designer, but really wanting to design product. I always looked at products, hair dryers, toasters, you name it, consumer products, electronics, and thought, how could we make this better? How can we make it more beautiful? You know, we can mass produce products millions and millions at a time, but they shouldn't add.
00:07:56
Speaker 3: To waste in the world, they should add to beauty in the world. And that's why I became an industrial designer.
00:08:02
Speaker 2: You were the first woman awarded a design patent at your first job at Wang Laboratories. You had a career that went well, as far as I can see, in the beginning. But what was it like coming up as the only woman designer on a team in the 70s and 80s?
00:08:17
Speaker 3: Yeah, there were times where, you know, I think the first eight years of my career, I was the only female industrial designer. So you know, I didn't know anything else. It was just the nature of the profession. But now we're graduating at the same rate, female to male industrial designers and architects. So the statistic that bubbled up now is that only 18% of us practicing industrial design are women, and only 25% are practicing licensed architects are women. So I realized that we don't have still there are not enough of us at those tables. There are not enough of us in those conversations. And so I found myself being a first and only at the beginning of my career. And oftentimes towards the end of my career also, as I made it through that corporate labyrinth, that you were often still an only.
00:09:17
Speaker 2: And you had a big seat at the table, Karen. I You write about running into roadblocks still when trying to steer companies you worked for towards more women-specific design. You know, we're always going to do things this way. There's always going to be beige or black or this weight or this shape or this size. What would you have done differently to make changes when they didn't happen or to make changes stick?
00:09:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I think that what I would have done differently is to have used my voice a little differently. And I think it's important for us as women, especially as you move into leadership roles, that we are protected here in the U.S., right? We are protected as women. We are protected at a certain age, and we should be able to use our voices and speak up a bit more when we see these inequities or question certain decisions that are being made. I also bumped up against something that I've since learned we need to address as well. And that's the status quo, that most business decisions are made looking at the rearview mirror, right? And if we look at the rearview mirror, what we see is going to be a male standard. And so in order to change, we have to create other things to look at, other opportunities for success. And that's what I wanted to do when I set out to Write Man Made, is really talk about, it's not just about what we've done in the past and measuring future success based on past success. It's doing things differently.
00:10:51
Speaker 2: Let's give an example that might fit what you're talking about. So firefighters, only 9% of firefighters in the U.S. are women. In the FDNY, actually, it's 1.5%. And for the second time, as we're having this conversation, New York has a female fire commissioner, so women can do the job, even with ill-fitting gear.
00:11:11
Speaker 3: Absolutely, women can do the job with ill-fitting gear, but they shouldn't have to do the job with ill-fitting gear, right? Women are injured four times more often in the field of firefighting than their men's counterparts. When the equipment doesn't fit, they're putting their lives at risk when they're setting out to save our lives. I think the biggest argument here is one of procurement. So, When you have only 1% in New York or 9% nationally, the volume of women's equipment will never reach that of men's, at least not in the foreseeable future. So it may cost a few cents more. It may cost a few pennies more to buy the equipment that's going to fit the women. That, for me, is an argument we shouldn't have anymore, right? So we have to be able to fight against these standards, this status quo, that we've always accepted. Somebody in the procurement department who is responsible for ordering the supplies has probably also never had to deal with a piece of gear that doesn't fit them or having to tape on their gloves on the way to a fire so that they stay on. I think we need to raise awareness and be unapologetically demanding for things that keep us safe. I also think the definition of profit, we could look at that a little bit differently. It may not look the same as it did when we were outfitting 100% of a male workforce, but it can still be profitable. You can bank on women. Women firefighters are amazing firefighters. We need that kind of brain on the ground.
00:12:56
Speaker 2: This book isn't just for designers. So what else can non-designing consumers do to kind of push the ball forward and get supply ahead of demand?
00:13:06
Speaker 3: Well, I say as people that are navigating this built world and live in it every day is to insist on better. If you find something that's not fitting, if you find something that doesn't work, you know, take a picture, write to the company, ask for better. Also, if you find those places where things are being done better, and there are quite a few mentioned in the book, there are businesses bubbling up that understand that designing for women is the right thing to do call attention to that as well so we are half the population we are half the population there are four billion women on the planet and a safe hospitable inclusive built world should be something we can just learn to accept and not something that we have to work around.
00:13:56
Speaker 2: The book is Man Made, How We Designed a World That Leaves Women Out and How We Can Make It Right by Karen Karelis Reuter. Karen, thank you for joining me on Get Connected. Fascinating book.
00:14:07
Speaker 3: Thank you, Nina.
00:14:09
Speaker 1: This has been Get Connected with Nina Del Rio on 106.7 Light FM. The views and opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views of the station. If you missed any part of our show or want to share it, visit our website for downloads and podcasts at 106.7lightfm.com. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Get Connected with Nina Del Rio, a weekly conversation about fitness, health, and happenings in our community on 106.7 Light FM.
00:00:13
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to Get Connected and listen to these stunning facts. Women are 73% more likely to be injured in a car crash than men. In the military, women suffer pelvic fractures at a significantly higher rate than their male counterparts. And across the trades, 90% of women cannot find properly fitting safety gear. These are not statistical anomalies. They are the predictable consequences of a world designed almost entirely around the male body. Karen Karelis Reuter is a former global creative director at Nike and vice president of creative direction and innovation at Reebok and is the author of Man Made, How We Designed a World That Leaves Women Out and How We Can Make It Right. Karen Karelis Reuter, thank you for being on the show.
00:00:58
Speaker 3: Thank you, Nina. It's so good to be here.
00:01:00
Speaker 2: Karen Karelis Reuter has been a designer for over 40 years and today is a practicing activist committed to inclusion by design and ending gender bias in the built world. She is on the faculty at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, where she teaches in the Master in Design Engineering program. And Karen, beyond the uniforms and safety gear, until I read the introduction of your book, I never really realized the extent to which our physical world is not fit for women, literally. Can you explain design bias and a bit of how we got here?
00:01:31
Speaker 3: Yes. Design bias is that we have been designing to what we consider a standard or what is normal. But it turns out that that standard and what is normal is male. From the mid-1800s, we were measuring bodies and documenting those bodies to define what is a normal person. All those measurements were taken from men, specifically men. young white men. And we have been using those standards for many, many years since then. In fact, those measurements are still being used in the measurements of our BMI, which we all get when we go to the doctor.
00:02:17
Speaker 2: Let's talk about a couple of glaring examples and the consequences. So we mentioned the crash test dummies. How have they been designed and what has been the result for women?
00:02:27
Speaker 3: So they've, again, been designed off of a male body. So the crash test dummy that is used in the safety tests here in the U.S. is an accurate male dummy, and that has been used and then shrunk, scaled down, something we call shrink it and pink it in less tragic terms than the crash test dummies. But it's been scaled down, and the bio... mechanics of that crash test dummy is still mimicking the male body. And that crash test dummy is being used to test our cars. But even that one isn't being used to test behind the wheel. So we're not testing anything female behind the wheel in the U.S. And that's resulted in this statistic that you quoted up front.
00:03:19
Speaker 2: Speaking of shrink it and pink it, so you worked at Reebok and Nike. Let's talk about something you're very familiar with, which is athletic shoes, which is what they would do, according to the book, is they would just say make a smaller size for women and make it in pink. In particular, what would a shoe designed for a woman's biomechanics take into account, and how would that be better for women physically?
00:03:39
Speaker 3: Well, our feet are different, right? So if you look at it in really broad terms, a male foot is a rectangle, right? And a female foot is a triangle, right? We have a wider forefoot, a narrower heel. And that's just sort of the basics, right? So our geometry is quite different. And our arches are higher. There are so many differences between our feet. So to simply take a male sneaker and scale it down and sell it in a female size is why oftentimes things just become uncomfortable sometimes.
00:04:12
Speaker 1: Right.
00:04:12
Speaker 3: Even a sneaker that's supposed to be the most comfiest shoe.
00:04:15
Speaker 2: Right.
00:04:15
Speaker 3: We say the comfiest ride. I want to kick off when I get at home. And that's because it wasn't designed for my foot.
00:04:23
Speaker 2: Over the years, we've actually had more than a few guests on this show talk about how women aren't just tinier men. And you cite an author I spoke with, Christine Yu. Her book is Up to Speed, The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes. And listeners, you can find the conversation I had with Christine Yu in our iHeartLibrary.com. And one of the things I remember from that conversation, also because of the facts you cite in your book, is that 45 percent of girls drop sports by the age of 14 because of body image and discomfort. Sports should make people feel better and more confident. But what if we're talking about how it affects girls mentally? What are they dealing with that boys aren't besides the shoes?
00:05:04
Speaker 3: Nina, I love Christine's book too. And I met with Christine and used a lot of the research that she has done also in my book. You know, this 45% dropping out of sport is real, right? And a lot of it has to do with body confidence, right? Most girls drop out before they're 14 due to body confidence issues. And that oftentimes is the design of their equipment, their uniforms, not a properly fitting sport bra, which a student of mine At Harvard, Sarah Foxen has created a company called Robin Athletic, and she's starting to design, you know, equipment, sports bras, shorts for these young girls to keep them in the game and to keep their body confidence high. The design of our locker rooms, you know, I'm a product designer. I work on those things that we use and touch and wear. But the spaces around us can also be really challenging. And the locker room is specifically a tough design. for girls, right? It was designed, I think, from the original Olympic sports in Athens. So it was designed for all male athletes, large open spaces, and girls are very uncomfortable. And I think when we can start to say we want to keep girls in sports, we have to look at the physical environment that's surrounding them.
00:06:23
Speaker 2: My guest is Karen Karelis Reuter. She was vice president of creative direction and innovation at Reebok and served as the global creative director at Nike for 12 years. She is chairperson for the IF Design Awards and on the advisory board of the IF Design Academy. Her book is Man Made, How We Designed a World That Leaves Women Out and How We Can Make It Right. You're listening to Get Connected on 106.7 Light FM. I'm Nina Del Rio. What interested you, Karen, in industrial design in the first place?
00:06:53
Speaker 3: Well, I always loved cars, Nina, and I was fascinated by cars. by the design of cars, the shape of cars. And I knew I wanted to do something in the creative field. I started to study architecture. I thought that was the closest thing that represented that design world. And a professor of mine, Peter Miller, said to me during my sophomore year at Purdue, he said, have you ever heard of product industrial design? And I said, no, what is it? He said, it's like an architect for product. And that's what I loved. So I went over to the industrial design school, started studying, thinking that I wanted to become a car designer, but really wanting to design product. I always looked at products, hair dryers, toasters, you name it, consumer products, electronics, and thought, how could we make this better? How can we make it more beautiful? You know, we can mass produce products millions and millions at a time, but they shouldn't add.
00:07:56
Speaker 3: To waste in the world, they should add to beauty in the world. And that's why I became an industrial designer.
00:08:02
Speaker 2: You were the first woman awarded a design patent at your first job at Wang Laboratories. You had a career that went well, as far as I can see, in the beginning. But what was it like coming up as the only woman designer on a team in the 70s and 80s?
00:08:17
Speaker 3: Yeah, there were times where, you know, I think the first eight years of my career, I was the only female industrial designer. So you know, I didn't know anything else. It was just the nature of the profession. But now we're graduating at the same rate, female to male industrial designers and architects. So the statistic that bubbled up now is that only 18% of us practicing industrial design are women, and only 25% are practicing licensed architects are women. So I realized that we don't have still there are not enough of us at those tables. There are not enough of us in those conversations. And so I found myself being a first and only at the beginning of my career. And oftentimes towards the end of my career also, as I made it through that corporate labyrinth, that you were often still an only.
00:09:17
Speaker 2: And you had a big seat at the table, Karen. I You write about running into roadblocks still when trying to steer companies you worked for towards more women-specific design. You know, we're always going to do things this way. There's always going to be beige or black or this weight or this shape or this size. What would you have done differently to make changes when they didn't happen or to make changes stick?
00:09:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I think that what I would have done differently is to have used my voice a little differently. And I think it's important for us as women, especially as you move into leadership roles, that we are protected here in the U.S., right? We are protected as women. We are protected at a certain age, and we should be able to use our voices and speak up a bit more when we see these inequities or question certain decisions that are being made. I also bumped up against something that I've since learned we need to address as well. And that's the status quo, that most business decisions are made looking at the rearview mirror, right? And if we look at the rearview mirror, what we see is going to be a male standard. And so in order to change, we have to create other things to look at, other opportunities for success. And that's what I wanted to do when I set out to Write Man Made, is really talk about, it's not just about what we've done in the past and measuring future success based on past success. It's doing things differently.
00:10:51
Speaker 2: Let's give an example that might fit what you're talking about. So firefighters, only 9% of firefighters in the U.S. are women. In the FDNY, actually, it's 1.5%. And for the second time, as we're having this conversation, New York has a female fire commissioner, so women can do the job, even with ill-fitting gear.
00:11:11
Speaker 3: Absolutely, women can do the job with ill-fitting gear, but they shouldn't have to do the job with ill-fitting gear, right? Women are injured four times more often in the field of firefighting than their men's counterparts. When the equipment doesn't fit, they're putting their lives at risk when they're setting out to save our lives. I think the biggest argument here is one of procurement. So, When you have only 1% in New York or 9% nationally, the volume of women's equipment will never reach that of men's, at least not in the foreseeable future. So it may cost a few cents more. It may cost a few pennies more to buy the equipment that's going to fit the women. That, for me, is an argument we shouldn't have anymore, right? So we have to be able to fight against these standards, this status quo, that we've always accepted. Somebody in the procurement department who is responsible for ordering the supplies has probably also never had to deal with a piece of gear that doesn't fit them or having to tape on their gloves on the way to a fire so that they stay on. I think we need to raise awareness and be unapologetically demanding for things that keep us safe. I also think the definition of profit, we could look at that a little bit differently. It may not look the same as it did when we were outfitting 100% of a male workforce, but it can still be profitable. You can bank on women. Women firefighters are amazing firefighters. We need that kind of brain on the ground.
00:12:56
Speaker 2: This book isn't just for designers. So what else can non-designing consumers do to kind of push the ball forward and get supply ahead of demand?
00:13:06
Speaker 3: Well, I say as people that are navigating this built world and live in it every day is to insist on better. If you find something that's not fitting, if you find something that doesn't work, you know, take a picture, write to the company, ask for better. Also, if you find those places where things are being done better, and there are quite a few mentioned in the book, there are businesses bubbling up that understand that designing for women is the right thing to do call attention to that as well so we are half the population we are half the population there are four billion women on the planet and a safe hospitable inclusive built world should be something we can just learn to accept and not something that we have to work around.
00:13:56
Speaker 2: The book is Man Made, How We Designed a World That Leaves Women Out and How We Can Make It Right by Karen Karelis Reuter. Karen, thank you for joining me on Get Connected. Fascinating book.
00:14:07
Speaker 3: Thank you, Nina.
00:14:09
Speaker 1: This has been Get Connected with Nina Del Rio on 106.7 Light FM. The views and opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views of the station. If you missed any part of our show or want to share it, visit our website for downloads and podcasts at 106.7lightfm.com. Thanks for listening.
