What it is

Rooted in extensive research and dialogue with gender practitioners, these are a set of recurring themes most useful for research and ideation phases. Where the Women-Centric Eye helps identify opportunity areas, the non-negotiables help design solutions for them.

How it works

Each non-negotiable comes with a set of insights, questions, examples and a design consideration to enrich your research materials and ideation sessions.

• Safety: caring for a fundamental need
• Non-Linearity: reducing invisible penalties
• Trust: addressing systemic inequities 
• Community: fostering support for collective struggles
• Ecosystem: weaving a comprehensive solution
• Positive Masculinity: challenging stereotypes and sharing burdens

Safety

Although safety is fundamental need, it is often an afterthought in design, compromising women’s sense of security. Unsafe spaces increase anxiety and discomfort, thereby limiting women's engagement and access to resources. Conversely, safe spaces foster trust, generosity, reciprocity and well-being. Yet, safety is so often considered reactively.

💡 Design Consideration: Build physical and psychological safety proactively rather than reactively.

Non-Linearity

Non-linearity in women's lives, created by biological differences and gendered responsibilities, leads them to shoulder more invisible costs. Maternity leave, for example, or additional caregiving responsibilities throughout the day makes women's workplace experience less linear. Design that assumes a linear path leads to time poverty, additional labour, and monetary as well as other costs for women, thereby exacerbating invisible penalties.

💡 Design Consideration: Build for non-linear lives that frequently experience costs and penalties resulting from biological and gendered differences.

Trust

Neuroscientist Mallory Feldman says that "when you move through a world that isn't designed for you, you learn that you do not matter." This leads to what are often seen as 'innate' characteristics of women such as a 'lack of confidence.' In reality, this is an outcome of women having to navigate a systemically unequal world—leading them to internalise failure as personal fault, attributing success to external factors and experiencing a breach of trust both with themselves and the systems around them.

💡 Design Consideration: Build trust by reframing internal and external confidence gaps as areas to improve the product, service and system.

Community

Women have come together over common purpose and collective struggle for a long time. Although community and relationality has also been used to take advantage of women, when used to increase women’s success, community plays a huge role in building safety and trust for women.

💡 Design Consideration: Build learning opportunities by harnessing the power of trusted relationships and community.

Ecosystem

Women are disproportionately affected by social norms, information asymmetry and limited access to resources. When design overlooks the broader ecosystem, it only partially serves women and exacerbates inequities. For instance, an agricultural program in Africa had to expand its offerings to include free seedlings for women's families and purchase their first harvest to increase participation and access to capital. This highlights the shortcomings of "moment-driven" approaches that do not consider the entire ecosystem, resulting in incomplete solutions that may further reinforce gendered norms and gaps or be unable to reach women at all.

💡 Design Consideration: Build comprehensive experiences by including adjacent opportunity areas in the ecosystem.

Positive Masculinity

Poor design for women affects everyone: it perpetuates negative masculinity while shrinking women. To shift stereotypical gendered narratives, we must proactively design a role for men.

💡 Design Consideration: Build ways to de-burden women by carving out roles for men and shift stereotypical masculinity (& femininity) narratives.

Applying the non-negotiables

When to use them

The Non-Negotiables are best used during the research and ideation phases of a project. Use them to enrich your research design and create ideation levers and prompts that can truly work towards that specific non-negotiable. Use the table below to guide you.

How to use them

• 🔍 During research:
  1. Read through the description of the non-negotiable, including the associated examples.
  2. On a few post-it notes, brainstorm how you believe the non-negotiable connects with your project and the surrounding ecosystem within which your project exists
  3. Ask yourself the research question for the non-negotiable (in the table below). Using your post-it notes and the research question, identify knowledge gaps about the particular non-negotiable.
  4. Incorporate interview questions and prompts that will help you fill the knowledge gaps into your discussion guide or other research materials.
• 💡During ideation:
  1. Read through the description of the non-negotiable, paying close attention to the design consideration and the listed relevant examples (”ways to design for…”)
  2. Collect other examples that design well for a non-negotiable.
  3. Using the examples as inspiration and insights from your research, design ideation prompts by borrowing levers from the collected examples.