At this point, it’s hard to tell if this will be a trend or a phenomenon, but the trends are clear.
A study from the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found that, across industries, women are still far less likely to get hired for a job as a designer than they were 20 years ago.
“The gender gap in the field of fashion design is the biggest in design,” McKinsey analyst Jennifer Reiss said in a report published in the February edition of the McKinsey Business Intelligence.
Women are still underrepresented at design-focused roles, like designing clothing, but they are getting better at it.
In addition, McKinsey found that only a fraction of designers are women.
And that’s not just a McKinsey study, but a number of others.
“This is the first time I’ve ever seen an analysis of the gender gap for a profession,” said Jennifer Pascual, a former McKinsey research associate who now leads her own company, Pascua Associates, which focuses on women in design.
“I’ve never seen it so large.”
This year, McKinseys surveyed more than 2,500 people at 500 major brands, including brands like Dolce &Gabbana, Givenchy, and Calvin Klein.
The survey found that for the most part, people are still just as likely to have a job in fashion as they were in the past.
But for people with more experience, they’re far more likely to be in design-related positions.
“There’s definitely a trend for designers to work in the fashion industry,” said Pascuel.
And, in general, women aren’t getting hired more often.
“We have a number that are not getting hired,” Pascuas director of research, Julie Mazzucato, told The Verge.
“And there are women who are not working in fashion at all.”
While this is still the case, Pasquil says that the trend is starting to fade.
“That trend is beginning to shift,” she said.
“It’s not really the case that the majority of people who are in fashion are women.”
And that trend isn’t just because of the diversity of the industry.
In her research, Pasazzi found that the average designer is a 25-year-old who has had a career in the industry for less than five years.
“In the industry itself, people tend to have more education,” she told The Washington Post.
“People are more likely than in the tech industry to have had a job at a startup before they were 25.”
For many women, the first step in getting a career that they love involves getting a degree.
And when they do, it often comes with a lot of extra debt.
That’s because most students who get a degree have to pay off student loans for three to five years in order to graduate.
Pascus, however, believes that having a degree doesn’t mean that women aren, in fact, getting a job.
“What is happening is, the barriers that we have to getting a foot in the door are falling, and it’s not necessarily the case,” she added.
Pasazzi said that there’s a clear distinction between a career and a career of art.
“One can have a career with an artist, and that artist may be making money, but I can be making a living making a fashion line for a company,” she explained.
“For me, it just feels like a different experience.”
In addition to the higher wages and higher compensation, women can also benefit from their education in the way that a male-dominated industry can: by having more friends, and being able to network with other designers, who might also have a different background.
In a 2015 survey, more than 90 percent of designers surveyed said that they were more likely or somewhat likely to become friends with a designer once they started their career, and more than one-third of the designers said that their network would have helped them find a new job.
Pasque’s study shows that even when a person is hired for the first job they have, they still tend to feel like a minority in the business.
“When I started out, it was a really small industry, and I wasn’t really part of the mix, and so that made me feel like I was a minority, even though I was part of a really strong community,” Pasazzo said.
When I started working in the Fashion Industry, I was an outsider in a community where everyone is on the same page.
I thought I had to make friends and find out who I was.
