Women in UX: Barriers & Portals
Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash
A detailed report on this study is available here.
This research was also featured in the User Weekly Newsletter (published on June 9, 2022).
A generative, qualitative study on the pain points, needs, trajectory and barriers to getting a job in UX, as faced by women, with recommendations on how job portals can do better in fulfilling the needs of their users.
Project overview
Problem Statement:
This research wanted to better understand how women jobseekers navigate their job search process, what barriers they face, what they want, what are their needs, and how do they strategize in the process of getting a job in UX.
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What I did:
I did end-to-end generative research on the barriers faced by women jobseekers in UX. I interviewed 15 women from different backgrounds, explored their needs, challenges, and their strategies of dealing with the challenges/barriers.
Outcome:
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Based on such research I came up with recommendations that any job portal could use, to address unmet needs of women jobseekers, as well as jobseekers from any other gender and build on their products.
Timeline: 7 weeks
Time-period: April - May 2022
Tools Used: Zoom, Otter, Ms-Office, Laptop, Pen & Paper
Role: Sole Researcher
research process
Find Pain points
Generate Insights
Distil Results
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Develop Personas
Recommendations
to fulfill needs & address pain points
all about the problem
Why/Context & Goals
Background: Existing research suggests that proportion of women in tech continues to be low [4, 5], and that there are significant barriers to recruitment and retention of women in tech [1,2,3]. However, there is little research on the challenges faced by women job seekers in UX - a core domain in tech.
Goals:
This research project wanted to know:
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The challenges faced by women job-seekers in UX?
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What are their needs?
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How do they navigate challenges and strategize?
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What works and what doesn’t work in the job search process?
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What barriers do women face?
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What are some helpful digital platforms in the process?
What/Research Questions
1. What are the challenges faced by women job seekers among the UX designers and UX researchers’ group?
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2. How far do those challenges match (or do not match) with their expectations regarding the job search process?
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3. What are some support mechanisms they find useful in this journey of job search?
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4. Which digital products/platforms they find particularly crucial to their job search process? Why?
How/Methodology:
Sample:
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N= 15
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Maximum Variability Sample.
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Ages of women: 20 years - 50 + years
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12 out of 15: US Residents.
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Out of 15, 4 had found jobs in UX by the time interviews were held, 2 were in unsatisfied jobs somewhere in UX (i.e. not core UX jobs), and 9 were still looking for jobs.
Analysis:
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In-depth Interviews were conducted till themes saturated.
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Interviews were transcribed by Otter.
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Thematic Analysis was used to analyze the interviews.
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why care about this?
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Address the issue of "quality standards": The labor market in UX growing. A growing domain needs the right people, to maintain standards. In case of UX - if industry standards are to be maintained, then the alleged problem that one encounters a lot in the UX community nowadays – of diluting standards - need to be addressed.
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Avoid Normlessness: Influx of disgruntled people with unmet needs and deep pain points → situation of normlessness (Theory of Anomie). We can avoid this by going to the root of the problem - listening to the challenges, needs and pain points of the users, i.e. jobseekers in UX.
Picture Courtesy: Markus Spiske in Unsplash.com
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Opportunities for Job Portals: Uncovering opportunities to provide stronger support for women in UX could lead to development of requisite products, e.g. job search platforms could be enhanced/developed, based on:
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addressing the needs and use-case scenarios of jobseekers, i.e. where they are at in their journey, and
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the kind of help they would appreciate.
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why the influx?
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As an effect of Pandemic:
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The question of “Why the influx” is tied up with the question of whether it’s a simple case of demand and supply — whether people are minimizing their own chances by flocking into a domain and THAT is creating this problem of having barriers to entry. Now, as to why there is an influx, what came up in this study, without me asking a question about it — was that it is the effect of pandemic.
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The pandemic has hit a reset button for many. Many people lost jobs, quit their jobs, had breakups, revisited what they were doing with their lives, and revisited existential questions of who they were. People felt a bit lost. And they wanted to maximize their chances of survival. They wanted to grow.
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Being told that it’s possible to do:
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Someone, somewhere — be it friends, families, acquaintances, random strangers on Reddit or TikTok or other social media platform — told these people:
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“It’s a good time to get into UX.”
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“You will be a great match”.
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To work collaboratively in problem solving and putting their experience to impactful use.
Hence started the journey into the Promised Land, the promises being made largely by bootcamps, online certification courses, and a general euphoria regarding UX.
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Is the influx creating a situation that’s making things difficult for everyone?
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We won’t know that for certain, through small-scale qualitative studies like these. Based on the reports we see of the hundreds of applications placed for a single job opportunity, we can safely say that — With growth in UX, there have also been a growth in frustration among jobseekers.
And all of these people, were really striking in their passion of wanting to work collaboratively in solving problems, and putting their experience to impactful use in UX. None of them came to UX because they had heard about this easy field to get into. They came to UX because they believed, with their skills and experience, they can build something better.
Picture Courtesy: Önder Örtel on Unsplash
Picture Courtesy: Hari Panicker in Unsplash.com
Insights
The big picture: barriers
To give a bird’s eye view of the big picture, there are
2 kind or barriers of women trying to get a job in UX:
1. Generic to Hiring Practices in Tech.
2. Specific to UX, owing to UX being a growing field.
Picture Courtesy: Nick Fewings on Unsplash
Generic Barriers
​A. Being a woman - Competence and experience getting nullified when a woman has resume gaps owing to child-rearing and other caregiving roles.
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Participant # 10 describes it succinctly in how gender and ageism does an interweaving dance together when it comes to being a woman, as she recounted her struggles of getting a job owing to resume gaps:
I do have gaps in my resume…so as a woman, I was rearing children. I had three kids and for five years there’s this gap — looked like kind of a big break. I was working, you know, freelancing. So …um, most men don’t have to explain that away.
My age probably also factored in. I’m 41 years old. And there’s a certain expectation that if you’re a man or woman or whatever, you’re supposed to reach a certain level, at a certain time in your life. So, it’s not necessarily that I had to explain the gap, but also “Why don’t you have experience doing this yet? Why don’t you have experience doing that yet?” And it’s because my career slowed down for five years while I was having kids.
--Participant # 10
B. Being ghosted, which impedes opportunities for growth & learning.
As Participant # 2 said, which was also echoed by a lot of other participants:
I don’t know what I’m missing. So I don’t know how to fix it. There’s no feedback.
Barriers Specific to UX
The second kind of barriers are specific to UX, it being a growing field:
C. Gatekeeping - the hinges of which however differ, based on who these women are, and how they perceive things.
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D. Not having industry experience, or rather, I’d call it as industry-agreed-upon experience + education. Gaining industry experience is also said to be difficult.
For example, Participant#6, a person with a PhD and looked upon as “from the academia”, who is currently in a UX-y kinda job (Technically it’s User Research, but she says it’s not really UX research where she wants to get in), said:
It’s really difficult to get that experience. And I don’t know if it is because when you’re an academic, or you come from an academic background, people understand that you will be very good at the very wide explorative research. And so they put you there. So you’re building up all of that experience and expertise at that part of the process. But you’re never getting the chance to do the… sort of stuff that really makes an impact on should we launch this product or not. Should we do this? Should we do that? How can we make this better for users? You’re always just really far, far beyond UI… before you even sort of talk to users. I want to ask “Do you understand what this is? How would you go about doing this task, etc?” But I don’t get to do that.”
E. Recruiting & Hiring practices: Jobseekers reported Hiring Managers not knowing what they want, not being aligned with their company policies, and using interviews as a process to arrive at an understanding of what they want. Although experiences were seen to vary, overall, recruiters were also not thought to be a helpful resource in getting a job or a foot in the door, but are said to be lacking in domain knowledge, contributing to conflicting information and consequent ghosting.
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F. Temporal: The growth in UX job market does not correspond to hiring people in junior levels or the influx of newcomers, as all participants were seen to be aware of. Participant #13 describes:
So market is hot, but for mid -to-senior level. For junior level, demand is really low, because people just don’t want to waste time with training, like Amazon doesn’t even hire anyone less than 3 years of experience. You can’t even get your foot in the door. Startups don’t have that much money to train you, and then hire somebody who’s like unicorns in general — someone who can do everything. So, there isn’t really a place or rather there’s limited place for junior level designers with patience to be nurtured and supported.
G. Preference to hire a “fitted persona”: All participants talked about a “persona” that they would have to put in, while doing interviews so as to get people interested in them. They wondered whether introverts have a place in these jobs. Non-native speakers of English wondered whether their accents were responsible for not going beyond the final interview round. They saw the rejection letters that talked about “team-fit” and wondered how their personality assessments were made by hiring managers, in about 45 minutes.
Picture Courtesy: Engin Akyurt on Unsplash.com
Participants wondered about a lot of things, but all of them agreed in how a mask needs to be put on in order to signify “fit” — as told by both groups of people - who got into jobs through walking through miles of rejections, as well as those who are still walking their rejection miles.
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This situation only encourages development of automatons and negates diversity in personality, thought and experience, as well as authenticity.
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Let’s delve deeper into the stories of women jobseekers, through Personas, which were developed based on at which point do they start their journey of getting a foot in the door in UX jobs.
Personas
Persona 1: Alone Allison
Persona 2: Resilient Rihanna
Persona 3: PhD Paizley
Helpful Digital Platforms
Helpful Digital Platforms in these stories could be grouped into three, in terms of their use-cases:
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Job Board + Networking: Those used to look at job listings and networking, and know about companies, e.g. LinkedIn, Slack, Glassdoor etc.
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Forums + Networking + Learning Resources: Those used for online forum discussion and support, and learning resources, e.g. LinkedIn, Slack, Reddit, Facebook, TikTok, etc. As Participant # 10, (a woman in her 40s with a Masters degree and extensive experience, got a job after 3 months of strenuous job search) mentioned, job networking sites, like LinkedIn was particularly helpful to learn the lingo and finding clues from people who made it:
I’d also research on LinkedIn — I’d look at people that were in the position that I wanted to be in, I would look at their LinkedIn bio, because there’s a lot of clues as to how you should frame yourself how you should define yourself. And they give the jargon…the key words that you really need to start incorporating into your own spiel. So that was part of it, too, is how do I talk about myself?
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Also, I felt LinkedIn was giving me more quality information — as far as who was hiring.
3. Track & Stalk Applications: Those used to stalk and track job applications, that is, whether it was looked at by a human. e.g. Excel, Smartr, etc. A lot of participants were particularly frustrated by the fact that they wouldn’t know whether their application was even looked at by a human. So, sometimes participants would find a way to do that.
So What's the Moral of the Story?
Moral of the Story: The experience of getting a job in UX particularly, is extremely demoralizing, because:
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The process lacks “Information Scent”: Jobseekers are shooting in the dark, due to confusing and conflicting information as to what is required, and having no feedback, and no clue about where to go next.
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The experience is described as as dehumanizing. Jobseekers consistently called for a humanized experience.
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The system to find a good job in UX, is lacking in the bedrocks of good UX, such as: Clarity, Feedback, & Empathy. Even for people who have landed with a foot in the door, there is no set formula to cracking this.
Recommendations/ What Can We Do About It
Picture Courtesy: Brett Jordan on unsplash.com
1. Offer affordable, accessible, authentic and industry-approved training programs/certifications that can reliably train entry-level candidates. As Participant #13 said: “Somebody should take the responsibility to teach the right content to people instead of overcharging. Somebody should call them (bootcamps) out.”
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2. Have clear guidelines as to what is required in the job candidate in various stages of hiring, instead of shooting out conflicting information.
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3. Develop better domain knowledge as to job roles & requirements, among hiring teams & recruiters and train them in DEI to enhance communication with jobseekers coming from various backgrounds.
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4. Develop features in, or build job portals that would tell the job applicant whether their application was looked at by a human.
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5. Provide access to free, and paid resources for mental health support and build resilience in job portals. Humans do tend to lean on to sad music on bad days, as well as happy music to feel better on bad days. Job portals could really leverage this particular need of users and provide tools to manoeuvre into this terrain accordingly.
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6. Have more internships/apprenticeships/ shadowing opportunities, that could compensate for the lack of training/onboarding for entry-level/junior roles.
what next?
Any phenomenon always has multiple viewpoints.
It’s the job of research to see things from multiple viewpoints, deploying triangulation of data and methods, which always attributes better validity and reliability of data. For a cinephile researcher like me, engaging into finding the Rashomon Effect is always a delicious idea.
So next up, I wish to correct for the limitation in this research study by seeing things from several other perspectives:
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I want to do In-depth Interviews with men jobseekers, which would lend a comparative analysis into the situation.
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Interview Hiring Managers — the other key player in the game — and see what are their needs, challenges and viewpoints with regards to the same situation.
References:
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Ashcraft, Catherine, Brad McLain, and Elizabeth Eger. (2016) “Women in Tech: The Facts”. NCWIT.
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Corneliussen, H. G. (2014) ‘Making the Invisible Become Visible: Recognizing Women’s Relationship with Technology’, International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology, 6, (2), p.209–222.
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Dray et al (2013). “Exploring the representation of women perspectives in technology”. Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. p. 2447–2454. https://doi.org/10.1145/2468356.2468799
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Etzkowitz, Henry, Carol Kemelgor, Michael Neuschatz, Brian Uzzi. (1992). “Athena Unbound: Barriers to women in academic science and engineering”. Science and Public Policy, Volume 19, Issue 3, June 1992, Pages 157–179, https://doi.org/10.1093/spp/19.3.157
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Hardey, M. (2019). “The culture of women in tech : an unsuitable job for a woman.” Emerald Publishing Limited