As noted in previous posts, our world has been predominantly designed with the male user in mind. Hence, it makes sense that males and females have different design preferences.
In Gender, Design and Marketing: How Gender Drives our Perception of Design, the author Gloria Moss conducts a series of interviews with 40 people in and around the areas of design and marketing. In terms of quality of surfaces, people tended to associate hard surfaces with males and soft surfaces with females. Seven people associated greater concern with functionality with male design, with a Product Design teacher at a UK university expressing that males were interested in task-based objects—objects that had an objective or a machine quality such as a motor car.
Another designer thought that males tended to be more interested in function and technology rather than styling. Four people also mentioned differences in the way men and women use size with most considering male designs to be more bulky than female designs. Regarding color, women were viewed to be more interested in and hence more adventurous with colour than men. Women were also more likely to use rounded shapes than men, who tended to use more lines.
There were also major differences in the way that men and women used detail. One designer thought that female work was more sensitive to details and materials than male work. Interestingly, men’s lack of interest in detail was thought to have far-reaching effects. According to a design historian, the Modernist tradition underpinning design teaching rejected everything identifiable with the feminine such as decoration and display, while a student commented that 'girls are more concerned with neatness and detail than males'. The difference between men's and women's relative interests in detail could have implications for the way designs are viewed.