Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Drawing from Feminist Practice to Make Inclusive Design Operational

Gold
Friday, September 9, 2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Share the love for this talk
Drawing from Feminist Practice to Make Inclusive Design Operational
Speakers: Mansi Gupta
Link:

Summary

DesignOps practitioners have helped advocate for inclusive design practices over the past several years. Still, key women-centric barriers persist such as safe access, time poverty, and female biological differences. To meet women’s needs, our design methodologies must ensure an inclusive lens from the start. In her talk, Mansi will share how DesignOps can engage their teams in embedding applicable insights, drawn from feminist practice, into their existing processes and toolkits. Attendees will leave with tools to: Learn from non-design disciplines Identify how our current methodologies overlook women Apply key design principles to create using a women-centric lens

Key Insights

  • Design methodologies claiming to be gender-neutral often produce one-size-fits-men products, ignoring women’s unique needs.

  • Women-centric design can be classified into four modes: offensive, impartial, informed, and holistic, each reflecting increasing levels of inclusivity.

  • The ‘offensive’ mode includes solutions that are patronizing or fail basic usability, like Pinky, a plastic glove for tampon disposal that was too large for women’s hands.

  • Most products fall into the ‘impartial’ category, lacking awareness of biological and societal differences, such as fitness apps ignoring menstruation or snow-clearing policies neglecting women’s caregiving roles.

  • Community and relationality are key non-negotiables in women-centric design; women often prefer learning and problem-solving together rather than top-down approaches.

  • The trust gap women face in systems often stems from systemic failures, not individual deficits like imposter syndrome or risk aversion.

  • Men and boys, while part of the problem, must also be part of the solution in women-centric design to share the responsibility for systemic change.

  • Safety is a fundamental, often overlooked theme; designing for emotional, mental, and physical safety is critical, exemplified by trauma-informed community designs.

  • Non-linearity in women’s lives, such as intermittent workforce participation and time poverty, should inform design in finance, healthcare, and customer service to create better experiences.

  • Ethical concerns around data privacy are acute in women’s health tech, especially in sensitive contexts like ovulation tracking—balancing free services and data security remains unresolved.

Notable Quotes

"In that moment, I looked down at my chest and failed to find a breast pocket of my own."

"Our methodologies today are prone to producing one-size-fits-men outcomes under the guise of being gender-neutral."

"Pink the pink plastic glove was too big for the average woman’s hands."

"Snow clearing policies choose to clear roads before pavements, deeply ignoring responsibilities that are likely to fall on women."

"Women’s empowerment is often glorified but doesn’t necessarily meet their needs beneath the surface."

"Safety is a fundamental human need which is often taken for granted and maybe that’s why it’s forgotten about."

"The trust gap stems from being repeatedly failed by a system, not innate risk aversion or imposter syndrome."

"Men and boys are part of the problem, therefore they must be part of the solution."

"Many ride sharing apps didn’t launch SOS features until after widespread reports of harassment, even though the problem was longstanding."

"I’m dreaming of a world where women-centricity is so ingrained that frameworks like this don’t need to exist anymore."

Ask the Rosenbot
Jack Moffett
UX Metrics That Matter and The Future of our Design at Scale Conference: A Community Conversation
2022 • Enterprise Community
Rebecca Topps
Planning and conducting remote usability studies for accessibility
2020 • Advancing Research Community
Samuel Proulx
From Standards to Innovation: Why Inclusive Design Wins
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Jayne Engle
Civic Design for the Next Seven Generations—A Discussion on Sacred Civics
2022 • Civic Design Community
Chris Geison
What is Research Strategy?: A Panel of Research Leaders Discuss this Emergent Question
2021 • Advancing Research Community
Christian Madsbjerg
Influencing Strategy
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Adam Thomas
Survival Metrics – Making Change in a Fast, Data-Informed, and Politically Safe Way
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Billy Carlson
Tips to Utilize Wireframes to Tell an Effective Product Story
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Jason Mesut
Shaping design, designers and teams
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
John Donmoyer
Shipping your code generation experiments to production
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Cennydd Bowles
Day 1 Panel
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Onur Kocan
Understanding the Strategy for Civic Design in a Complex City: Istanbul
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Ned Dwyer
Right horses for the right courses – how and when to democratize research
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Chui Chui Tan
Global insights: Embracing international and intercultural research for innovation
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Briana Thomas
When Design Ops Comes in H.O.T. : A Tale of a Transformed Design Org
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Gretchen Anderson
Scaling the Human Center
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold

More Videos

Taylor Jennings

"Seeing product managers and designers’ aha moments when they realize how impactful the tool is was great."

Taylor Jennings Joe Nelson Alex Knoll

Repository Retrospective: Learnings from Introducing a Central Place for UX Research

March 9, 2022

Nicole Aleong

"Potential refers to not yet actualized possibilities that may or may not come to fruition."

Nicole Aleong

Future Orientations to Everyday Life: Futures Anthropology as a Methodology

March 26, 2024

Jeff Gothelf

"Disruptive innovation doesn’t happen overnight; you have to practice, fail, learn, and have patience."

Jeff Gothelf

Innovation Studios: the Engines of Enterprise Experimentation

May 14, 2015

Saara Kamppari-Miller

"Tools are great, but they do not solve all problems; training and understanding the why behind accessibility is essential."

Saara Kamppari-Miller

DesignOps for Inclusive Design and Accessibility

May 26, 2022

Tess Dixon

"Taking care of the basics and creating opportunities lets us get out of the way and let the team thrive however they see fit."

Tess Dixon

C'mon Get Happy

September 29, 2021

Liam Thurston

"Mastery is achievable, whether you have 10,000 hours or not—it’s about building that portfolio and case studies."

Liam Thurston

Why Your Design Team Is Quitting, And How To Fix It

June 10, 2022

Ian Swinson

"Why don’t we do what we do for users but apply it to our own careers? Absolutely nutty, right? So we did."

Ian Swinson

Designing and Driving UX Careers

June 8, 2016

Leisa Reichelt

"At Atlassian, many confident non-researchers were already doing lots of research, which was an opportunity and a challenge."

Leisa Reichelt

Opening Keynote: Operating in Context

November 7, 2018

Rachael Greene

"A product designer said I can now see glaring inconsistencies before I got my head around design system patterns."

Rachael Greene Alison Davis

Building a Design Ops Practice that Really Works (Most of the Time)

October 2, 2025