Designing for Women’s Bodies with Mallory Feldman
Tell us a bit about your research:
Elevator pitch:
I study how people make meaning of sensations from their bodies -- and how this meaning-making process is informed by cultural context and social relationships.
The longer version:
My research can be cast into three bins.
First, I spend a lot of time thinking about brain representation of the body. All day, everyday, our brains are being bombarded by sensations. These sensations come from intuitive sources like our eyes and ears, but also from the various tissues of our bodies. I am interested in what the brain does with all this information. How does this information inform symptom-reporting, mood, and/or emotion?
Secondly, I study differences in how people perceive their bodies. Specifically, I’m interested in how people relate to their bodies given different socio-cultural contexts. Most recently, i’ve been exploring how body perception varies according to social identity factors (e.g., sex, gender, age, and socioeconomic status).
Finally, I’m interested in the body’s role in social cognition. For example, I am interested in how individuals use information from the senses (including information from the body) to construct a representation of themself and social others.
In your research, where is the opportunity to design for women?
Most innovations and interventions target EITHER individuals or institutions without much cross-talk. For example, many interventions today focus on tackling implicit biases. However if our institutions remain the same, gender diverse individuals will move through physical spaces and interact with systems that are inherently unequal. This inequality becomes embodied — our brains are designed to pick up on patterns — and discrimination is perpetuated. There has to be more research and implementation targeting how individual change and structural change are connected. There’s a real opportunity for innovation and design around human-system interactions. How do we build equity into our physical environments and policies and then encourage human participation in these spaces?
What does this mean in practice?
Product design is a really great way to start affecting system
Systemic inequality is really physical. Women are learning patterns just by navigating it. When you move through a world that isn’t designed for your body —that experience is really physical, and is impacting health and wellness whether or not people are aware of it. Systems are physical, not just abstract and so product designers have power to advance equity. When you’re inundated with a world full of products that don't fit you, when something DOES fit you, it begins to communicate that people like YOU matter in the market and in the world.
What advice do you have for product designers designing for women?
Female-centric research means open-ended research
There’s often a conversation about “placing women in leadership roles” and/or “doing user experience research with women.” In both instances, the aim is to ensure that women’s perspectives are being taken into account. In these situations — it’s best to create spaces for women to provide open-ended responses. The reason for this is twofold: firstly, if you’re coming from a dominant perspective, focus groups or surveys can be limited by your own knowledge of an image or what you expect to be pertinent topics of discussion or research. You may end up overlooking important concerns. In addition, when you’re trying to improve a product or service that has historically been exclusive, it can be easy to anchor on what exists instead of what could be. Give women safe spaces to imagine alternate realities.
Appreciating Intersectionality
Treating women as a monolithic block is a big problem, for example, when we talk about recruiting women for focus groups. If you're designing a product that is supposed to be accessible for women 18-65, it needs to have representation across that age bracket—because of biological and sociocultural changes across the lifespan. Likewise, considering racial differences in how women interact with systems is critical for ensuring your product serves the needs and circumstances of everyone. I think that the makeup of those focus groups is really important.
Women are disembodied in product design
A big problem in product design is that people forget that women have bodies. For example, the way public bathrooms are designed today shows us that one design choice can overlook the social roles that women play (i.e., women are more likely to escort childcare and elderly into the bathroom), it also failed to acknowledge the reality of women’s bodies (e.g., Women have to sit to use the restroom and often need to change out menstrual products). As another example — consider period tracking apps. I am a huge advocate for these apps and think physiological monitoring is an incredible opportunity for women to gain better insight into their bodies. However we can create all the period apps we want, but if women can’t hold their phones in their hands (e.g., because they are too big) then what are we doing?
Changing narratives is important
Gender inequity in healthcare tech is huge. It’s not just about knowing the proportions of a woman’s body (which can help in designing safer cars, iPhones, medical devices, etc.), but also understanding what’s going on inside her biologically across life stages. Right now, there’s a push-through mentality or a fix it later mentality. For example, why aren’t we teaching girls in high school how to better navigate their menstrual symptoms? As we’re starting to see more design for women, there’s a rise in support during and after pregnancy, but what about the months leading up to the pregnancy or menopause and what about miscarriage or postpartum depression — there is little to no infrastructure to support these moments of life. Even an acknowledgement that these are real things would change the narrative and support how women navigate the world.
About Mallory Feldman
Mallory Feldman is a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill earning her Doctoral degree in Psychology and Neuroscience with a formal concentration in Quantitative Psychology. Before coming to UNC, Mallory worked in psychology labs at Tufts University, Harvard University, and Northeastern University studying diverse topics ranging from discrimination to emotion. Presently, Mallory works in the Carolina Affective Science Lab with Dr. Kristen Lindquist where she researches how our bodies shape our mental states and social relationships. In addition to her scholarship, Mallory has spent several years consulting with nonprofits interested in promoting health and equity.