Integrating Gender Inclusion in Web Design Courses through Design Workshops

Web design courses are too often focused on developing programming competences but do not take into account that the final product has to be designed to promote inclusiveness, accessibility, and usability issues. Detaching these topics from the course and relegating them to seminars or lectures where students adopt a passive attitude might not help to highlight enough the importance, they have in the design process. In this paper, we present a series of workshops organized as part of a teaching innovation project to make students aware of gender bias in web design through their own analysis. Participants are enrolled in different degrees to ensure a variety both in the demographics and in the points of view. They worked in groups to identify the user personas of three websites about kitchen robots, beers, and toys. The results have shown a growing concern in finding stereotypes and gender bias in the images and texts used. The discussion within groups has helped them in building a common critical conscience and awareness about this problem. Students found the activity interesting not only for the topic and the content but also for the format since cooperating with others and practicing with real examples was beneficial for promoting critical thinking, decision-making, and problem-solving.