Our group consists of members from different countries (precisely from Portugal, Norway, the Czech Republic and Russia) and different parts of Europe. We believe that it is essential to understand that the approach to the representation of female designers and diversity in design differs from country to region. What is highly discussed in one part of the world is still being ignored in the other. This is why we decided to compare the development of this topic in different parts of Europe by collecting texts about female designers and artists from our countries. 

Grafill is a Norwegian design magazine, in 2016, published a collection of stories about Norwegian women that have been important in the Norwegian history of design. One of these stories was about the designer Sissel Boinge, who met a lot of challenges in her way to become one of the biggest Norwegian designers in the late 60s. 

We can find similarities in the life stories of Clara Istlerová and Varvara Fedrorovna Stepanova. The text about Stepanova follows the exhibition “Amazons of the Avant-Garde” which took place in 1999 and describes the most important works of one of the first significant women in Russian history of design who worked at the beginning of the 20th century. Clara  Istlerová was faced with not only fighting her way up in the male-dominated field of typography but also with struggles of socialism which ruled in the Czech Republic in the 70s. 

In her text, Anežka Bartlová reviews the web encyclopedia Secondary Archive which is an attempt to capture three generations of female artists and designers born from the 1930s to the 1990s from Central Europe who are connected by their socialist and post-socialist past. 

For the Portuguese context of this topic we decided to talk about the starting point of this work, Errata exhibition – a compilation of overlooked women design work in Portugal – and as well a text from the chapter “Identidades” from the book “O design que o design não vê” by Mário Moura, where he talks about the issues of race, gender and class struggle in the world of design.

 Female designers have been overlooked in the course of (not only design) history. We believe the main reason behind this is that design values and history is taught through a canon. We are educated about the accepted collection of work by predominantly European and American male designers that set the basis for what is “good” or “bad”. Historian Martha Scoford is in her text defining this problem by studying different design history books and comparing them together. 

There are many conversations about canon in contemporary design education. Educators are trying to include a more diverse syllabus for their students and make them more aware of this problem. A few examples of how we can achieve this are described in the article about the western graphic design curriculum.

Throughout history, women have faced difficulties and challenges to become successful. We proved that the whole 20th century was not simple for them to navigate their careers in the male-dominated industry. The research we provided for this book is a compilation of texts that show various perspectives of this issue. We are still left with one enormous question: “Will one day women designers be able to succeed in the same way like men without any obstacles in their way?”