Michael Bierut over at Design Observer has an interesting post up on a question posed to a panel consisting of himself, Milton Glaser, and Dave Eggers: why are there so few female “superstars” in graphic design?

As the article describes, Glaser is taking some flak for his answer. I’ll recap the highlights for you (as quoted by Bierut, but originally from Gothamist):

[Glaser said] that the reason there are so few female rock star graphic designers is that “women get pregnant, have children, go home and take care of their children. And those essential years that men are building their careers and becoming visible are basically denied to women who choose to be at home.” He continued: “Unless something very dramatic happens to the nature of the human experience then it’s never going to change.” About day care and nannies, he said, “None of them are good solutions.”

Let’s unpack this just a bit.

Google the words “Larry Summers moment” today, and that Gothamist post will come up first. I don’t think that’s quite fair to Glaser, though. When faced with an analogous question about why there aren’t more women at the top of their fields in science, Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, said that we should explore the possibility that men simply have more of an inherent aptitude for such work. (“Science people” tell me that this very possibility has been explored by psychologists and is pretty much bunk.) Milton Glaser – a longtime proponent for ethics among designers, for what it’s worth – answered the question by suggesting that the issue was one of choices people make and prevailing cultural norms.

Bierut defends Glaser’s answer, stating, “In many ways, Milton Glaser’s observations were shocking only in their obviousness.” In other words, celebrity is a time-consuming business, perhaps even more so than design itself, so who has time to cultivate that and pop out some kids? Bierut’s main point, however, is that this gender imbalance is just one of a larger set of issues that we must confront, including broader equality concerns and the nature of celebrity itself: “There is no good answer for this,” he writes, concluding:

Celebrity is good for certain things. It puts the butts in the seats at the 92nd Street Y, for instance. But it’s not the only thing, and based on the reactions of those people in the audience last week, it might be time for something more.

Perhaps Bierut’s right: the bigger issue here might not be “why aren’t there more female design superstars,” but rather, “why should celebrity matter to us so much at all?”

That’s a fair point. But the original question just gets a nod here, and I think it might more be useful to consider how to best address that one than the “bigger” issue. Rectifying gender imbalance is probably a more immediately achievable goal than shifting an entire cultural paradigm of hero-worship.

So, picking up where Bierut left off: is Glaser’s answer shockingly obvious? The basic statement being made here is that women, more frequently than men, divert time and attention from work to parenting. Statistically speaking, the numbers may still back up this statement. That could, I suppose, potentially lead to a disproportionate number of female design superstars. In this scenario, the women who do make it would presumably be the ones who didn’t divert their attention in that way.

Except, no, that’s not the case. As Ellen Lupton points out in one essay, she and other female design luminaries happen to be working moms (including Design Observer’s Jessica Helfand, though she does qualify that they’re not all quite Stefan Sagmeister-level of famous). Lupton offers an interesting view of what it means to be a working parent, problematizing what we typically assume to be “these two essentially incompatible activities.” She refers to the working mother’s ability to “do it all” as a myth, suggesting that whatever a woman’s choice, something is traded. I suppose I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that most creative superstars start to make a name for themselves before they start making new people from scratch, but it’s interesting to note that the female design superstars themselves don’t seem to be overwhelmingly those women who gave up on starting families.

Don’t get me wrong: while I like the idea of populating the world with little Jasons some day, I currently find the concept of being responsible for a whole other human life (and the self-sacrifice that comes with this) deeply unnerving. I imagine that many ambitious people must either refocus their personal goals or turn out to be mediocre parents. So, personally, I don’t fault Glaser for his answer. It seems to make sense, it may yet have some truth to it for many people, and it was offered on the spot in front of a large audience, alongside two other people who were apparently unwilling to really address the issue with him.

I’m not sure I totally buy Glaser’s answer, though. Sure, parenting does typically redirect priorities, and mothers are probably still more likely than fathers to be the ones doing this redirecting, whether by choice or by cultural inertia (or some combination thereof). Still, it’s the 21st century – where are all the ladies who are putting off families in the name of career advancement? My guess is that they’re in other fields that may seem more broadly relevant to the world at large than graphic design, but the only ones I can think of are the particularly star-rich fields of movies and music (where, incidentally, personal beauty counts for far more than in graphic design, so maybe those don’t even count). Still, if we’re going to point to some cultural norms that hold women back from being superstars in any medium, it may make sense to bring up the broader expectations about who we’re “supposed” to worship as heroes, and who’s supposed to want to be worshiped. The Sleater-Kinney song “I wanna be your Joey Ramone” (lyrics here) is just one thoughtful (and rocking) example of how sometimes male heroes and stereotypical masculine roles are just what fans see available to aspire to.

Which is not to say, of course, that I actually answered anything today. After all, this post isn’t really about design, but a question that smarter people than I have been grappling with for quite some time. But it was on my mind and I wrote it all down, so now I’ll put it to you: I know there are some smart and vocal feminists reading this blog, and I do hope that you’ve stuck with me long enough to chime in.