As one of a few female CEOs in the design industry, Jessica Walsh, founder of creative agency &Walsh, has faced criticism from women as well as men. In this interview, she tells Dezeen how she has tackled it.
Walsh has led design projects for Beats by Dre, New York's Jewish Museum and WeWork's events platform Meetup over the past seven years. She recently split from fellow designer Stefan Sagmeister at New York design studio Sagmeister & Walsh to establish her own agency &Walsh.
To achieve this success she told Dezeen that she works to overcome sexism in an industry where just five per cent of CEOs are female.
This has led Walsh to take steps to tackle the lack of representation in the industry, by setting up a female networking organisation that has grown globally to instigating projects such as 12 Kinds of Kindness, a 12-step programme that promotes empathy. "Being in a boardroom with much older male CEOs, sometimes people would talk over me or ignore me altogether," she told Dezeen. "There were definitely a lot of times where I faced sexism."
"Hate" from women startled Walsh
For Walsh, it was the "surprising" amount of women who criticised her on social media that took its toll, at a time when her career began to skyrocket.
"I started to notice that a lot of the hate I was getting in the design world was actually not from men, but from other women," she said.
"Earlier in my career when I started reach...