Gender-Roles and Leadership - The Effects of Gender Roles on Mixed-Gender Design Projects Amongst Industrial Design Students in South Korea -

This paper details the results of a research undertaken on the hypothesis that South Korea’s history with Confucianism and a Patriarch-driven society would affect Industrial Design students at a Korean university when put in a mixed-gender design project. The research is conducted over the course of an academic semester with 88 first year Industrial Design students as they undertake 3 different design related team projects. 3 methods are used to measure students’ responses to each task; Observation, Survey and Interviews, resulting in a comprehensive report on student actions, opinions and feedback respectively. The first and last team projects are recorded by use of observation and post-project interviews, with the second team project including an additional variable (pre-project survey) in order to spur greater awareness of the role of a team leader and encourage a more un-biased and methodical selection process. The results of each project are compared with the other. The findings of the research supported the initial hypothesis as students had a clear preference for male students to undertake group responsibility and leadership over their female peers. While actions taken prior to the second team project did prove to aid in balancing out the gender inequality, these benefits sadly proved short-term as the third team project recorded a relapse into what was observed in the first team project; a male dominated group environment.