The workshop Activity for Gender Equity Simulation is a board game that was created by two professors/researchers from the university of Missouri.

The board game is meant to demonstrate how gender biases accumulate over time to negatively impact women in the workplace. The goal of WAGES-Classroom is to introduce students to core constructs regarding unconscious bias, social disparities, and intersectionality in a non-threatening way and to motivate action to address gender bias in everyday interactions and workplaces.

I took the board game concept and decided to embrace the idea of climbing the corporate ladder – but with the rungs of the ladder being different office floors. The game “winner” works their way through the challenges to eventually end up with the coveted corner office at the top of the building. Each office contains illustrations that I drew to represent the achievement that was featured on each level.

Importation considerations that influenced this project included accessibility and editing functionality. The text had to have enough contrast to ensure legibility, and the backs of the cards had to be distinguishable from each other if a user was colour-blind, and the card content had to be able to be edited by the clients. This game is meant to reflect current research in the area of gender in the workplace and as such, when the information changes, the content needs to change to reflect that new understanding.

An instruction manual was commissioned to go along with the game itself. Like the team cards, the manual had to be fully editable by the clients. This need presented a unique challenge! Usually a document like this would be laid out in a program like Indesign, this one however had to be made in Microsoft Word and still maintain the visual standard that had been set by the game design. Additionally, when the manual was eventually updated with new footnotes and research, I had to be sure that the formatting wouldn’t break. I managed to rise to the challenge, and learned an awful lot about Word’s formatting quirks during the process!