Where are all the Women Furniture Designers?
Off the top of your head, can you name a living female furniture designer other than Patricia Urquiola?
I can name only one other – Ayse Birsel.
I’m embarrassed that I can’t bring more to mind. Is my memory failing? Or, are there so few female furniture designers – particularly office furniture designers – that naming more than a handful is a challenge?
Seeking answers, I sifted through labor statistics, posed questions to Google Search and ChatGPT, contacted professional associations and some of the top design schools in the country, and talked with several designers, including Birsel. The diversity of responses underscores the complexity of the issue.
Join me as we explore if anecdotal impressions are accurate – and, if so, to answer the question — In 2024, why does it seem that there are so few women furniture designers?
By the numbers
Data doesn’t lie, right? So, I contacted the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), where there is no dearth. But “furniture designer” is a highly specialized vocation. Among the hundreds of BLS job categories and descriptions, the closest I could get to “furniture designer” was “commercial and industrial designer,” a broader description.
In 2022 – the year for which the most recent data was available when writing this article – approximately 1,640 people in the U.S. worked as commercial and industrial designers within the BLS “furniture and related product manufacturing” category.
Just 1,640 people. That’s a wee number when you consider our country’s total workforce in 2022 was more than 158 million. Also, unlike many other occupations listed on the BLS website, there was no data breakdown for men vs. women. Instead, dashes were present. A dash indicates “no data or data that do not meet publication criteria (values not shown where base is less than 50,000),” according to the BLS website.
I felt like I was deep-sea diving for a glimpse of elusive mermaids in an ocean of minnows.
Turning to professional associations, I encountered challenges in obtaining gender-specific data. I started with WithIt, a networking organization for those in the home and furnishings industry whose 600 members across North America are predominantly women. I asked if the organization had data on the number of female vs. male furniture designers.
WithIt didn’t have this kind of data but referred me to the International Society of Furniture Designers (ISFD). I spoke with Executive Director David Blair, who told me that ISFD currently has 194 members. The organization doesn’t require members to provide their gender, but of those who volunteered the information, 61 were women and 88 were men. I also contacted the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA). As of publication time, I haven’t heard back from from them.
I continued my research with Wikipedia – a helpful although not always perfect resource – and found a list of notable furniture designers, both living and deceased. Office furniture enthusiasts would recognize luminaries such as Niels Diffrient, Ray and Charles Eames, Florence Knoll, George Nelson, Charles Pollock, and Patricia Urquiola.
Analysis aided by artificial intelligence resource ChatGPT revealed that of the 147 designers on the Wikipedia list, a staggering 90% were male, leaving only 10% representing their female counterparts. Acknowledging the limitations – including potential inaccuracies in gender classification – the picture was nonetheless stark.
Further refinement, focusing on living designers, presented a more optimistic scenario. Of 42 living designers from the Wikipedia list, ChatGPT identified 25% as female – a notable shift from historical data. However, the fact-finding was not without twists, with discrepancies arising, and ChatGPT even mistakenly omitting Urquiola from the female category (yet another example, in my experience and opinion, of why AI, although helpful, is not the be-all-end-all).
Asking AI, searching Google
Since ChatGPT was open on my computer, I asked, “Chat, why are there so few women furniture designers?” In two seconds flat, my AI assistant had written my article. Since it would be dull or worse just to copy/paste the text and call it a day, I’ll just give the highlights:
Historical Gender Roles: Traditionally, certain professions, including design and craftsmanship, were often associated with men. This has influenced societal expectations and perceptions regarding who can pursue a career in furniture design.
Educational Opportunities: Access to education and training in design fields might have been limited for women in the past.
Industry Perception and Bias: There might be lingering biases or perceptions within the industry that favor male designers, consciously or subconsciously.
Visibility and Recognition: Historically, the work of women in design may not have received the same level of visibility, networking opportunities, and recognition as their male counterparts.
Work-Life Balance: Challenges related to work-life balance, especially for women who might take on caregiving responsibilities, could affect their ability to pursue a demanding career in furniture design.
Workplace Culture: Some women may face challenges in the workplace related to gender bias, unequal opportunities, and a lack of support networks.
After reviewing this list, I wondered if I’d hear the same sentiments from the sources I planned to contact. I had a feeling I would.
Next, I Googled, “Why are there so few women furniture designers?” The results were slim pickings, in my opinion. Some articles were outdated, and others were topically too broad. But one article six results down was a goldmine: “A New Book Finally Gives Great Female Furniture Designers Their Due,” said the Vogue.com headline.
“Yes, please!” I said, clicking through.
According to Vogue: “Woman Made: Great Women Designers, published [Oct. 13, 2021] … shines a spotlight on the pioneering – and oft-overlooked – female makers of the 20th and early 21st centuries.”
According to the book’s website, the tome is “an immersive, timely celebration of more than 200 women product designers from the early twentieth century to the present day. … [A] glorious visual celebration of the most incredible and impactful design ever produced by women designers flips the script on what is historically considered a man’s world. Featuring more than 200 designers from more than 50 countries, it records and illuminates the fascinating and overlooked history of women preeminent in the field – shining a vital spotlight on the most extraordinary objects made by women designers but, more importantly, offering a compelling primer on the best in the field of design.”
The website also lists these icons from A to Z, if you’d like to check it out yourself: https://www.thewomanmade.com/all-designers-a-z/.
Author Jane Hall said in a Vogue interview, “I hope that readers are encouraged to think more expansively about both gender and design, questioning a received history that is shaped by a patriarchal culture, particularly in the West. I also hope that the book effectively draws attention to young designers who are fostering a contemporary approach to craft and materiality in parts of the world traditionally overlooked by design culture but where exciting things are happening.”
As a side note, Hall also wrote Breaking Ground: Architecture by Women, published by Phaidon in 2019.
My quantitative (if it can be called that) deduction from all the above? Well, what most of us already know – that there are indeed fewer women than men in the tiny field of furniture design. But their numbers are growing.
It was time to get some qualitative points of view.
A conversation with Ayse Birsel
My first call was to Birsel – and yes, she is one of the designers listed on the Woman Made website. From now on, I’ll refer to Ayse by her first name, pronounced “Eye-Shay,” because I’ve known her for a decade, and it feels strange to refer to her using only her last name. (The last name only after the first reference is a journalistic convention. For consistency, I’ll use the first names of all my sources that follow in this article).
I met Ayse when she keynoted a conference in Las Vegas and again when I participated in one of her Design the Life You Love workshops in New York. Since then, Ayse has expanded Design the Life You Love into a creative platform and community based on the principles and processes that she’s cultivated in her years as a designer. She’s also authored two related books.
Ayse hails from Turkey, where she studied industrial design at the Middle Eastern Technical University. In the late 1980s, she earned a Fulbright Scholarship to pursue a master’s degree at the Pratt Institute in New York, where her thesis triumphed in the Design of the Future competition in Japan. Post-graduation, Ayse collaborated with Bruce Hannah on a collection of office accessories. Her exceptional work then caught the attention of Herman Miller; the company hired her in 1997 to create the award-winning Resolve office system.
In 2003, Ayse and her husband, Bibi Seck, founded Birsel+Seck. The New York City-based studio has counted among its clients Herman Miller, Amazon, Colgate-Palmolive, GE, IKEA, The Scan Foundation, Staples, and Toyota. The team’s designs for Herman Miller’s Teneo Storage Furniture System achieved widespread acclaim. In 2018, Ayse and Bibi designed Overlay for Herman Miller, a freestanding, movable wall system that has also received significant industry recognition.
Ayse has been recognized as one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business and was listed on the Thinkers50 Radar, a select group of individuals projected to shape the future of organizations.
I share her incredible résumé to make the point: Ayse is an authority regarding insights on women in design. So, let’s dive into a conversation I had with this titan in the profession. The italicized, bolded text are my questions to Ayse and below are her answers.
Are women still scarce in furniture design, and if so, why?
“When you look at furniture company websites, it’s surprising to me that we see all these men and then one or two women, with Patricia Urquiola one of the great exceptions. She’s done a lot of work in the states for Haworth.
“The history of design is very male, so there’s an accumulation of [male] experience and visibility that is hard for women to break into simply because men have had more years in the profession, and so I think it takes innovative and nontraditional companies and approaches to say we’re going to work with more women just like with more non-white designers.
“Design leadership in companies, meanwhile, is new in itself, and then when you have traditional [hiring] standards, like, ‘let’s get someone with many years of experience, a big portfolio, and important clients,’ you’re already eliminating a lot of women, especially young women who might have incredible talent and are working toward these opportunities. So it’s not an equal kind of field.”
What are the specific qualities or perspectives women might bring to furniture design?
“It’s hard to say, ‘a woman would do this or a man would do that,’ but some of the differences are historically based on men designing for men, perhaps without realizing it,” Ayse said.
Here, Ayse pointed me to a book on the subject, “Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men,” by Caroline Criado Perez.
By way of example, Ayse shared with me that in the 1990s, she designed a new kind of toilet for TOTO and one of the criteria was to make it easier to clean, something the all-male engineering team hadn’t considered.
How can companies help increase the number of female designers?
“There are several ways,” Asye shared with me. Together, we explored them:
Think innovatively.
“It takes innovative thinking for companies to commit to working with more women designers. Often we talk about innovation, but then we don’t think of innovation holistically. We look for more of the same, and it takes years to say, ‘No, I want something different.’ Being innovative means thinking differently and rethinking our biases and prejudices at every level. I was lucky to work with companies and people that were ahead of their time in pursuing diversity as a way to innovate.”
She was in her 20s when Bruce Hannah asked her to work on the Orchestra Office Accessories Collection for Knoll.
“That took courage on Bruce’s part. The collection is still on the market, and I was given credit on it. That is the kind of opportunity that propels you onto the playing field. And then came an opportunity with Herman Miller in the 1990s, when I was in my early 30s. Like Bruce, Herman Miller embraced that I was different – and not only different because I was a woman but also younger and from another country. They told me, ‘We want you because you’re not from here, you’re not like us.’”
When Herman Miller hired her to design what would become the Resolve system, she had not created any office systems.
“And even that, they thought, was to their benefit, for they wanted a completely fresh concept. So, I think we need more of this same kind of thinking – to embrace what’s different and new,” Ayse said. “Coming from outside of an industry [or with a different point of view] could be, as I like to say, ‘positive ignorance’ – you don’t know, and therefore you ask interesting questions.”
Give talent as much consideration as experience.
“Someone was telling me they were looking for a chief design officer and couldn’t find enough female candidates because they wanted someone with 25 years of design experience. And I thought that didn’t make sense because 25 years ago, there weren’t many women in the profession, so how could you find more than maybe a handful of names now?
“So it’s making some changes to the qualifications in terms of time and looking at qualitative, not just quantitative, experience. These are the things that I think would make a difference to fast-track women into leadership positions in design.”
Build trust and provide mentorship.
“It’s also about trust – about companies and leadership not only trusting women to lead in design roles but also helping to foster that trust throughout the organization’s culture. Trust is built through relationships, and relationships usually happen organically. So it’s about creating a culture and environment that doesn’t ‘force’ relationships but does allow them to form, grow, and thrive.
“Another idea is for women already in leadership to say, ‘You’re trusting me as a CEO or chief marketing officer [or whatever the leadership role may be], and we’re going to trust a woman designer with our next collection.’ I’ll add that trust from male leaders with daughters played a role in my opportunities – they were much more open to hiring me. I’ll never forget when one executive told me that he had three girls and that he took my CV home and told his daughters they had hired me for a major project. It gave his daughters encouragement for their own futures. Also, in my career, many mentors wanted to teach me and give me opportunities. They were visible in their support. I’m really grateful to these people.”
What’s your advice for women entering the field?
“The main thing that comes to my mind is just be yourself,” Ayse said. “And I would like to say that this [lack of women designers] will change because of them. Change is coming.”
Design schools are producing designing women
The ground floor for change is at the schools, colleges, and universities that offer design as a field of study. Although there are only a handful of such places, the professors I talked with say change is here.
“For a number of years, there have been slightly more women than men in our design program,” Gayle DeBruyn told me.
She chairs Kendall College of Art and Design of Ferris State University (KCAD)’s undergraduate Collaborative Design program and master’s degree in design program in Grand Rapids. The programs prepare designers for careers in all aspects of design, including for designing office furniture but particularly for home furnishings.
“The industry is excited about this shift as women design and market to women, who are the primary-purchase decision-makers for the home,” Gayle said.
I asked Gayle what a KCAD graduate’s career path typically is. She told me most begin work for an established design firm, likely owned or staffed by KCAD alums who look to the school for new employees and interns. Gayle said some students choose to work directly for manufacturers. At some point, some may establish independent studios.
I also spoke with Patricia “Patty” Johnson, graduate program director of furniture design at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She concurs that more women than men are entering RISD programs, which has been the case for about five years.
I asked what she attributes this to, and she told me, “More people, in general, are aware of design as a profession versus years ago when I was starting out and looking at what to do after high school – back then, I didn’t even know that design was an option.”
During her undergraduate years, Patty was in the minority as a woman studying design, she said, but when she pursued her master’s degree a decade later, the students were all women.
Today, Patty’s work goes beyond RISD to help people in developing countries such as Botswana, Guyana, Mexico, Barbados, and Haiti get started in design. She collaborates with local governments, craft production factories, and emerging artisans. She said most of the people in the various government-sponsored programs are women.
I wondered about the coursework and training to become a designer. Gayle and Patty shared with me the rigor of their respective programs – a blend of studying art and design history, consumer trends, concepting, drawing, drafting, manufacturing methods, materials, modeling, and software programs such as CAD.
It sounded to me that becoming a designer requires a true blend of right- and left-brain thinking. This got me wondering: Are designers the ultimate geniuses? After all, they embody art and craft and combine form and function to produce beautiful, useful products. Hello, Michaelangelo? Maybe that’s why the number of designers – male and female – is so small.
One of the up-and-coming female designers I talked with, Annina Fremgen, told me she had been interested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) but realized she had a passion for the arts during her first semester at Missouri State University. She took a year of studio courses there, like still-life drawing, metals and jewelry, and film photography.
But her path was to take another turn.
“I couldn’t reconcile with the risk of potentially being a ‘starving artist,’ so I pivoted away from fine arts and narrowed my focus on design,” Annina said.
A web search introduced her to furniture design, and visiting KCAD in Grand Rapids solidified her decision. She graduated with a bachelor’s of fine arts degree in furniture design in 2019.
Today, Annina is the lead designer for Caracole, and her portfolio includes creations for the Anthology Bedroom Collection, Mirror Image Dining Table, and the First Chair, all of which earned the prestigious Pinnacle award, she said.
When I asked Annina her thoughts on the seemingly small number of women in furniture design, she told me the field can be geographically constraining – most residential furniture design work occurs in North Carolina – but she doesn’t think that geography is a significant factor as the same constraint would apply to men, and freelance and remote work is now possible for many people.
Gayle told me that many furniture designers must travel internationally, often to Asia and Mexico, where she said most home-furnishings manufacturing is happening.
Because of the rigors of the job and its required travel – and the desire of many women to have children at some point – taking a break from work may also be a factor in the number of women in the profession.
Annina also speculated that gender norms associated with specific career paths are a factor. “It wasn’t until the 1940s that women really entered the workforce – and industrial design, architecture, even furniture design, tend to be male-dominated to this day, in my experience,” she said. “However, the landscape is evolving, and I’m hopeful for increased diversity and fresh perspectives.”
Another Kendall graduate I interviewed, Angela Johnson, said the construction and engineering aspects of the field may be more attractive to men than women and may intimidate some. Angela was not one to be daunted. She originally went to KCAD with thoughts of becoming an interior designer (where women dominate the profession), but then she turned to furniture design.
“After taking a few furniture classes, I fell in love with not only the creative process but also the challenge of figuring out how to make and construct new designs,” she said.
When she was fresh out of college, she worked for several renowned designers, including Marty Pratt, Tom Keller, and Sid Lenger. She also had her own design firm and created products for Whitewood Industries. Johnson has now been designing furniture for 25 years and works for Samson Marketing. She splits her time as a project manager, ensuring hotel furniture is built to specifications, and as a designer for Costco’s bedroom, dining, office, and accent furniture.
What a difference a few decades make
For Yuka Hiyoshi, the disparity between male and female is of an earlier time. Throughout her career, the Pratt-educated industrial designer has been surrounded by both men and women, starting with an internship and then a job with Birsel+Seck in the mid-2000s.
At the New York-based studio, she saw two very different design styles at work, but she doesn’t attribute the differences to Ayse Birsel’s and Bibi Seck’s genders. Rather, she said it’s because they’re unique individuals, as we all are. Yuka observed that Bibi – whose background is automotive design – thinks in fine detail, as manifested in his drawings, while Ayse thinks in broad, big-picture strokes – her Design the Life You Love series is an example.
“So combining these two talents and seeing them right next to each other was a nice experience. It was also where I learned that designers with different strengths can work together to create something amazing,” Yuka said.
Her own venture into industrial design at Pratt was happenstance, as at first, she had been studying art.
“I honestly didn’t know about industrial design as a major. The funny thing is, I took one of the classes because there was a cute boy I wanted to spend time with – but by the end of my first year, I had won a three-dimensional design award. Then, one of the professors gave me a tour of the department, and I saw the possibilities. It blew my mind. I was hooked,” she said.
Her career eventually took her to Michigan, first to Steelcase for seven years and then to MillerKnoll, where she’s been since 2022. At Steelcase, she worked on a variety of projects in different categories, including education and seating, and served as lead designer for Steelcase’s Turnstone brand. She designed Steelcase’s Umami Lounge System, Bassline Occasional Tables, and Simple Chair Collection. When with Steelcase, she also collaborated with Skylar Tibbits, founder and co-director of the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT, and award-winning product designer Christophe Guberan, to create a new 3D printing process by using a rapid liquid printing technique.
At MillerKnoll, she’s the lead designer at Tailored Studio, where custom solutions are developed to meet clients’ specific workplace needs. She recently completed a multiple-floor project for Umoja Biopharma in Seattle, among a number of clients for whom she designs. Years ago, when still at Birsel+Seck, she indirectly worked for Herman Miller on the Teneo Storage Furniture System. “After all these years, working at MillerKnoll makes me feel like I’m making a full circle as a designer,” Yuka said.
The people she works with at MillerKnoll – a project team of designers, engineers, and marketers – are a good balance in terms of diversity of skill sets, backgrounds, and genders.
She told me she doesn’t think about gender when she designs, save for those products that may impact women more or are specific to women.
Yuka became a mother several years ago. She told me that her Japanese heritage is traditionally “the mother stays home,” but, in her case, her husband stays home with their daughter. Mothers’ rooms built into the work environment, where she could pump and store breast milk for her little one, helped with the transition from maternity leave to going back to work.
Yuka’s story got me thinking about my days as a young working mother years ago, before I started my at-home writing business, in part to stay home with my children. Back then, mothers’ rooms and other family-friendly amenities and benefits were slim to non-existent. Like Yuka’s heritage, my own is more traditional, and I’m grateful for all the ways that moms (and dads) can now weave their work lives around their children.
I wondered who had designed the first nursing rooms for the workplace. Hmmm. If I had to place money on this one, I’d bet it was … a whole bunch of women. Maybe it’s the subject for a future article: From the Factories of the Industrial Age to the Family-Friendly Spaces of the Information Age – Exploring Working Conditions for Women. Yikes! Sounds like a lengthy tome to me! And … are we still in the Information Age, or is this the Influencer Age?
To fill your mind with more information
So you don’t have a mea culpa like me should you find yourself in a discussion about living female furniture designers, here are some of today’s notables to get to know, shared with me by some of the lovely sources I interviewed for this article.
Annina’s favorites: “Barbara Barry, who has a timeless aesthetic with elegant proportions; Christina Zantonio, whose work feels genuine and is often accompanied by a personal anecdote or deeper meaning; and Maylis Queyrat of MAY Maylis et Charles Tassin, who is a visual artist working in tandem with her husband to create sophisticated, contemporary designs that incorporate traditional craftsmanship with a fresh edge,” she said.
Gayle’s favorites: “I’m a fan of Monty Simpson (also a past professor at KCAD), recent alumni Heather Seto, Annina Fremgen (the same Annina in this article), Laura Neice, and Liz Moore (a third-generation designer in her family),” she said.
