Feminism is online. The power of protest has relocated in the social-media age. The conversation is happening on our phone screens. But if we’re all busy scrolling through the comments, then who’s driving this bus? Has the generational shift in feminism prioritised conversation at the expense of action?

The empowerment of online community is undeniable, and its accessibility and reach is unmatched compared with history. However, unless we pair our discourse with aligned action and practical tools that serve women, we will continue to face the same (and new) barriers to gender equity. 

Digital design is one of the most powerful levers for equity in our chronically online world — making it woman-centred has the potential to be truly game-changing for feminist progress. At Your Creative, we have been working with feminist organisations for ten years, and have seen the power of digital and communication design. We recently received a flurry of awards for self-funded feminist projects that are moving the needle. 

So, how do you design for women and gender-diverse people? These are the four principles that we follow:

Enrage and engage

Enragement only becomes engagement when the tools we build are shaped around women’s real needs.

How will products, services, and designs serve women in 10 years, if they’re all designed by men? More than half of articles online now are authored by AI, and I bet you can guess whose voices dominate the datasets AI is learning from, despite the literal voices used for AI assistants always being female. The healthcare system still treats women as “other”; it only became mandatory to include us in medical research in the US from 1994. Facial recognition, threat detection, and reporting tools all have higher error rates for women — especially women of colour. 

Anger sparks movement, but usable, functional tools create change. That’s where women-centred digital design steps in. You can’t rely on anger alone; you must give users a reason to stay. 

Reframe your anger into actionable digital empowerment. Tools like Rosie, a harm-prevention initiative for teenage girls and non-binary people. Caroline Sinders’ Feminist Data Set interrogates every step of the AI process with diverse community involvement. Or Madam Speaker, Australia’s first digital archive of over 250 speeches which reclaims space for women in our national narrative. 

You are not every woman

Cue “I’m Every Woman”. Now take that sentiment, and flip it on its axis (sorry Whitney). Assumptions are the biggest risk in feminist design and intersectionality is non-negotiable. Get in a room and learn from your audience, your whole audience; real personas based on real women. 

This step was crucial to the design of Rosie, a harm-prevention initiative responding to a key post-pandemic challenge: meeting the evolving needs of young people. Designed as a safe digital space for young women and gender-diverse people, the process began with listening, not assumptions.

During the discovery phase, we worked directly with the audience through co-design workshops with teenagers aged 14–18. Participants shared their needs, language and aesthetics. These insights shaped the platform’s look, feel and tone, ensuring Rosie reflected the lived realities of the people it was built for, rather than the perspectives of those creating it.

Avoid top-down activism

The best results come when women and gender-diverse people lead their own design. This is not to say that all teams must only include women; the strengths of diverse teams can become diluted when you include only one perspective. No matter how much theory and knowledge one person applies, they cannot escape unconscious bias. 

The real power lies in bringing women and gender-diverse people into leadership positions for your projects. Elevate your staff, including those who are new to leadership, and give them the opportunity to contribute their lived experiences. 

When we worked with Thorne Harbour Health on building QUIN, we made up an all-women team with queer leadership, aiming to represent the audience we endeavoured to connect to. QUIN provides accessible, judgment-free health resources for queer women and gender-diverse people, and the best way to model that safe space was to include people who themselves had felt the need for such a tool. The outcome was a visual identity rooted in queer history, paired with intentional, accessible UX to fit a broad audience’s needs, and a cohesive, inclusive design system.

Create what you wish existed

If the solution doesn’t exist yet, don’t wait for someone else to build it. Many ideas never leave the notes app because organisations wait for perfect timing: more funding, more research, more sign-off. But digital equity rarely appears from the top down. The tools that move feminism forward are usually built by the people who need them most, long before the system is ready to prioritise them.

Feminist design thrives in the space between “this is broken” and “surely someone has fixed this already.” The brief is simple: if you can see the gap, start closing it. Build the first version, the scrappy version, the version that proves the need. Innovation in feminist tech doesn’t come from waiting for approval; it comes from making the thing you wish was already in the world.

Feminist progress won’t come from comments or campaigns alone; it will come from the tools we choose to build, fund, and prioritise. When women and gender-diverse people lead digital design, equity stops being a hopeful idea and becomes a functional reality. The next decade of feminism is already underway, the question is simply who’s going to build it.