Designing Healthcare for Women with Rebecca Hope
Tell me a bit about YLabs and the women’s lens in your work:
YLabs is a women-led, women-majority organisation; predominantly women of colour, and we focus on women and girls in our work. Beyond our design work, we contribute to capacity building in design + tech careers in the regions that we work in by training young designers and youth interns especially where female designers are underrepresented. Creating pathways for women where they are underrepresented is a key internal goal for us.
In the digital space, we’re asking: how do you design digital health products to meet the needs of young women? We focus on equity in digital access – looking at illiteracy, folks who may not own a phone, designing for women in the rural context.
In the design for social innovation field, there is a lot of rapidly executed human-centered-design — manifesting in going out into the field and talking with folks. It’s easy and cheap to do that, but there are groups and identities that are left out. We actively reach out to women who aren’t well-represented and we are very rigorous in our sampling methodology – we’re inclusive of women in rural areas, differently-abled women and more. It’s on us to make the effort to be inclusive on who we are talking to and we take that seriously.
What have you learned about women and girls over the years?
Healthcare runs on women’s paid and unpaid labour everywhere; but men are decision makers
A key difference with female-identifying bodies is that they have to interact with the healthcare system much more frequently and often earlier in their lives. The burden of care is on women – they’re the ones waiting in line with their babies; and they are burdened with the entire family unit’s care and physically taxing labour. Then, you have the health sector relying on volunteers, which are usually women. The decision makers in health are men – doctors are men, but nurses are women – that’s still how most people see it, and there’s a huge mismatch in what the services and programming offer and what women need.
Health education is too heavy
Even though women are more likely to be responsible for the family’s health needs, they are also more likely to be illiterate – most health services design for literacy, so they are never able to reach large parts of the population. Even in designing for literacy, health education can be so heavy-handed – women are time poor, simplifying text and jargon is key.
What advice would you have for someone creating a product, service, or community for women?
Combine data and stories to push change
We found that elevating youth voices and having them speak truth to power alongside robust data can change decision-maker minds. The combination can evoke emotional reactions to move the needle. For example, to influence donors to invest in funding to address HIV, we brought together young people to co-present with funders. We found that having these conversations virtually was safer but still as powerful– there wasn’t a panel up on stage and the youth were in the comfort of their own home to tell their very personal stories.
What are some examples you’re seeing that are truly designing for women?
I’m really excited about the Cocoon Project, which is exploring what a safe space looks like for menstruators to manage their periods in refugee camps. Sanitation is such a male-dominated space that even when people attempt to co-design with the community, it’s likely that they’re speaking to village elders or chiefs – women are not present. We are intentionally making the effort to seek women’s input and are crafting protected spaces to have conversations on stigmatized topics.
About Dr. Rebecca Hope
Dr. Rebecca Hope is a doctor and design thinker catalyzing change for young people, with young people. Trained as an adolescent physician, she has fifteen years of experience designing and evaluating programs for young people around the globe. As the CEO and a co-founder of YLabs, she supports our design teams to develop global solutions that bring measurable improvement to young people’s lives. Rebecca holds degrees in medicine, international health, pediatrics, and public health from Harvard, University College London, and the University of Leeds.