What a night, we squeezed over 120 creatives into Iconic Offices Stephens Green to celebrate international women’s day and launch whydesign.ie. The opening address given by founder Kim Mackenzie-Doyle set the tone giving a real life example of how our language, expectations and interactions can contribute to the gender imbalance in the creative sector. Chris Do received a very warm welcome from the Irish audience on his first visit to our island. Recounting an experience on social media that almost stopped him from taking part he recounted that he learned more about the issues that women faced in the industry in a couple of weeks than he did in his career. He talked about what we can do as an industry and what male creatives can do to take on some responsibility. Next up was Oscar winning Annie Atkins an industry favourite, Annie shared her own experiences in the industry. Her story of her career challenges and successes and then being asked to speak at Irelands largest creative conference Offset and finding out she was asked to address the gender imbalance in the line-up. She also shared her own unconscious bias’s mentioning that she assumed a historical journalist she was researching for a film was a man when in fact, she was a woman. We continued the conversations with a panel discussion MC’d by comedian and Illustrator Aoife Dooley included the speakers with highly charged input from the audience. The launch night was a resending success and was covered by international press with articles appearing in New York, London and more.