DIRECTIVE, DISCREET, DISCRIMINATORY:
MODERN SIGNAGE AND THE DESIGN OF GENDER

The paper deals with the relationships between design, discourse and gender, and intends to reflect upon the way pictography, as used in modern signage, far from being (as it was said to be, during the modernist optimism of the 70’s) a sort of "universal", intuitive language, on the contrary seems to have some limitations as a communication form.

Not only signage pictography does not have an universal reach - once it is, as every other language, historically located in a particular cultural context (i.e. the West), but its own "universalistic" pretensions, demanding high degrees of redundancy in message transmission, tends to lead into a defective use of caricature and stereotype, as communication forms. Moreover, the characteristics of the medium and the graphic representative process, trapped in a traditional dialectic between emphasis and exclusion, equally dictate this reproduction of socio-cultural, e.g. gender, stereotypes. One also finds the systematic use of the generic male form, or false neuter: variety and frequency of occurrence of male figures are very superior to females ones, those being used to represent people in general.

Thus, this more and more important area information design, allegedly concerned only with the quest for a neutral, informative, as universal as possible, language has its ideological moment, ineluctable perhaps but one which is important to understand and to document. Our study is based on a contents analysis of 49 signage systems; 2 808 pictograms and signs on the whole, from which 767 showing one or more human figures were selected. The results lead mot only to the conclusion that the female gender is underrepresented, but also that it functions as a “marked form", in relation to the male gender.