69% of interior designers are women. So why do men still take so much of the credit?

According to Interior Design magazine, of the 87,000 interior designers in the USA, 69% are women. Data USA, meanwhile, demonstrates that 89.9% of people in America with an Interior Design degree are female. What we can comfortably conclude, then, is that interior design is very much a woman’s world. So why do men still take pretty much all the credit?*

Look at the list of winners of major interior design awards over the past few years:

The Interior Design Hall of Fame – operated by the very publication that points out the majority female contribution to the profession – Interior Design magazine – has nevertheless inducted a 75% majority of males over its 35-year history.

The Australian Interior Design Awards in 2020 gave its Premier Award for Australian Interior Design to Hassell – the firm run by Adam Scott and an all-male team of Principal Designers. They gave the Award for Interior Design Impact to Studio Five – a studio run by, you guessed it, five men. Its Sustainability Award went to Jackson Clements Burrows – three more humans with dangly parts. This apparent male bias continued across the awards portfolio.

Of the seven judges on the panel of the 2019 Porcelanosa Architecture and Interior Design Awards in Spain, six of them were men. No great surprise that its Design of the Year Award, then, went to a man: Ángel Fito López.

The 2020 Muse Design Awards, meanwhile, showed us that, coronavirus or no coronavirus, it’s been another great year for the male gender, giving its Interior Design Award to Chinese firm Prid International Design, headed up by Tu Po Chun.

Unfortunately, that global list does go on a bit, but you get the general gist: in the world of interior design – contrary to what is, surely, popular opinion – men rule the roost, women make up the numbers.

Gender balanced interior design isn’t an issue of visibility – it’s an issue of power

Don’t get us wrong, it’s not that there aren’t extremely high-profile and celebrated female interior designers working at the forefront of the field – there are – hundreds! Elle Décor’s 2020 A-List of the 125 Best Interior Designers in the World is a great testament to that (though it’s worth noting that three of the top five are men).

No, on the whole, you’d be right to think that it’s actually a very balanced industry, at least in terms of visibility.

Yet, as lauded Design Principle at Perkins & Will, Joan Blumenfeld, takes care to point out in Contract magazine, a shockingly off-balance 67% of large interior design firms’ partners or principles are, nevertheless, still men, which tells us in no uncertain terms that visibility has not yet translated into wide-scale control for female interior designers.

Blumenfeld proposes a gathering of ‘hard data’ with which to explore the barriers to career advancement for female interior design professionals. In the meantime, however, it feels that it’s very much a case of women continuing to fight for positions that, as in so many other industries, seem so much more easily accessible to men. Or simply not bothering…

Defying the interior design establishment

One of the most heartening responses to the glass ceiling preventing women rising through the establishment ranks has been to simply transcend it altogether.

Whilst the males of the profession are kept busy battling it out for glory in the champagne glitz of the ceremonial halls of the world’s interior design awards, many of its career women appear to be embedded in a much more fundamental part of making the insides of buildings look amazing: sharing ideas.

The interior design blogging cottage industry has exploded over the past 20 years and now forms a major part of pretty much every conscientious homeowner’s life, providing inspiration, tips, links and product reviews that have brought the establishment lifestyle magazines almost to their knees.

Decorilla’s list of the ’25 Best Interior Design Blogs’ presents an almost exclusively female cast of self-made interior design experts whose taste-making ideas are driving the interior design industry from the bottom up. The secret to their success isn’t just that they ooze expertise and authority but, crucially, it’s the level of trust they also offer to readers, thanks to their virtual tangibility – they are real, their experiences are relatable.

This global plethora of online ideas forums suggests that women have taken the gender-related shortcomings of the interior design industry into their own hands – when the system fails to give something back (in terms of mainstream financial acknowledgment), just operate outside of it!

And it’s proven to be incredibly lucrative for those who really know what they’re doing. House Beautiful (somewhat ironically for an establishment publication) now even offers tips on how to get rich as an interior design influencer, pointing out that Instagram influencers with a million followers are earning as much as £5,000 per post!

So, the attraction to simply operate beyond the competitive realm of interior design companies is plain to see.

Avoiding the side-lines of interior design

Whilst blogging and social media influencing are understandable reactions to an industry that often side-lines would-be female leaders, it’s perhaps time that mainstream media also began to take a look at the way it represents women in the interior design industry – yes, even as it attempts to bolster their visibility.

Interior Design magazine may well have listed, back in 2018, ’20 Inspiring Female Designers to Know’. Glamour might have just listed their ’11 Female Interior Designers to Know (and Follow on Instagram)’. And back in 2017, Architectural Digest may have told us all about the ‘Women Designers We Love’…

And these are just three among a myriad of other publications that also regularly attempt to empower women with similar showcases of the vast depth of feminine design prowess (try Googling ‘best female designers’ and see what comes up). Yet, it could be argued that all puff pieces like this do is to further subjugate women by making them a subcategory of the larger, male-dominated interior design profession.

You know… like, there’s regular interior design (the type that’s allowed a deep voice and hair on its chest) – and its practitioners are categorised within ‘the world’s best interior designers’ and so on. Then there are the various subdivisions – ‘the best [insert title of marginalised group here] interior designers’ – of which women are one. Sure, these lists celebrate womanhood, but maybe, just maybe, they also serve to keep men at the top. Maybe that’s secretly the point(?)

Mainstream interior design journalism written by women for women leads the way in terms of balanced representation. The great Elle Décor, sets a fine example by removing gender limitations from their lists, which are the definition of a meritocracy for the industry – no race, gender or other personally identifying factor is discounted – it’s all about the great eye for design! If other publications were to do the same, we might well begin to see a redressing of the power balance in the interior design industry.

In the meantime, women will continue either jockeying for position at the top of the establishment or simply take control of their careers outside of it, on their own terms. Either way, change is afoot.

*For the purposes of simplicity, this article does not consider deeper issues experienced by women of colour in interior design or nonbinary interior designers. These issues, of course, demand their own sets of explorations.

Want to read more? Check out our article on inspirational Interior Designer and business leader Janey Butler.