The Fight For Equality Carmela Dagnello, UK Ambassador for Women in Lighting and Senior Lighting Designer at WSP, recently carried out a survey examining gender equality in the lighting industry. Here, she tells us more about the findings.
W
hen the Women in Lighting initiative was
first formed in 2019, its primary aims were to
provide a platform for women to network and share stories, to raise the profile of female
designers and encourage women to achieve more in the industry.
In a relatively short space of time, the project
has taken the lighting world by storm and has done incredible
things to showcase the amazing work of women in the industry. However, while it has helped to create more equality in terms of
female representation on awards panels, conference line-ups, and
so on, some issues remain surrounding implicit inequalities within the workplace.
To that end, Carmela Dagnello, UK ambassador for Women in Lighting and Senior Lighting Designer at WSP, has undertaken a research
project looking into gender equality in the lighting industry in terms
of the pay gap, diversity in leadership roles, sexism and harassment.
Since entering the world of lighting design seven years ago, Dagnello
has been an active member within the lighting community, although it wasn’t until she applied for her Master’s at Hochschule Wismar in 2014 that she realised that lighting design was a career she wanted to pursue.
“In Italy, I studied industrial design, my aim in a previous life was to be a product designer,” she said. “When I was at university
[Politecnico di Bari], I got a job in a lighting showroom, mainly selling pieces from Italian and international decorative lighting brands.
“When I was working in the showroom, I always really liked how
the light was coming out of the products. But I never thought about
architectural lighting, because I was not aware of what architectural
lighting was until I decided to move out of the country, and I applied for a DAAD scholarship to complete a Master’s in Germany.”
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