Who and how often someone speaks influences the direction of things, a design’s evolution, a client’s project, an employee’s potential satisfaction. Although the architectural profession is an image-based discipline, in order to present our ideas we are asked to verbally present our work a majority of the time. We speak to convey our ideas, our drawings, and our representations of our spatialised world. Speech awes design professors. Speech wins commissions. Speech is power. Sophisticated speech matters far more than we realise.
I am a feminist, architect, activist, and academic, and my positionality directly informs and influences the types of projects I pursue. The older I become, the more compelled I am to speak about inequities within the discipline of architecture and to take action through architectural and spatial inquiry to address these problems out in the world. Through my actions I work to evolve and expand the discipline to become more equitable, more diverse, and more politically engaged.
Feminist Theory
As feminist theorists argue, power dynamics structure our lives in myriad ways, some quite visibly but most often invisibly and unconsciously. Many aspects of feminist theory have worked assiduously to reveal these structures at work and provide examples of their destabilisation and change. Yet architecture has been egregiously slow in addressing and altering gendered relationships. Feminism, as bell hooks defines, is:
Elizabeth Grosz discusses the relationships between bodies and cities as mutually constructing: cities organise, orient, divide, connect, socialise and regulate bodies and, in turn, bodies influence a city’s evolution and spatialisation.2 Linda McDowell writes about space being constituted through relations of power structures that define our lives through rules, boundaries, and laws. These determine who has access to and who is excluded from certain spaces.3
Influenced by a larger body of research in disciplines such as politics, business, and political science, my interest in this area focuses on studies that reveal influences of gender on deliberative bodies, and how society’s broader socialisation often greatly predetermines power relations. In this chapter I discuss some of the key findings by several researchers and apply these ideas to the discipline of architecture, proposing possibilities for moving toward a more representative and equitable discipline. This is combined with ongoing research examining data of invited guest lecturers in schools of architecture in the United States. This data, literally tracking how many women per school per semester are invited for the past three years, is a study to disrupt ongoing gendered practices in architectural education and by extension, practice.4
Feminist Theory Into Practice
Gerda Lerner, the historian responsible for creating the first graduate programme in women’s history in the United States, told the Chicago Tribune in 1993:
Lerner’s experiences remain familiar for women architects as one can recall the designers and architects introduced in architectural history, theory and design classes – all men, lauded as masters of design.6 This is perpetuated today in who is published, who wins awards, and who students are taught to emulate. When so few diverse examples are presented, how can students and practitioners visualise and become what they cannot see? There are now many female students, yet there are not enough women at the upper levels of leadership in practice and the academy returning their gaze. This lack reflects larger structural and institutional biases, explored by feminist theory, calling into question underlying assumptions of social and power relations.
Gender is integral to issues of representation, speech and power. A person identifies as a particular gender with particular social and cultural associations. Judith Butler describes how one’s actions and gestures produce certain outward effects. As she states,
In other words, gender works within the heterosexual binary of male and female. Within this rigid structure, there are explicit gendered expectations – what the psychologist Virginia Valian refers to as gender schemas – influencing how people engage one another and their work. These conscious and, more often, unconscious biases affect how advantage and disadvantage is created, impacting all aspects of life’s power and social relations. In particular, I am interested in how women’s professional work is evaluated and how Valian’s research, while revealing implicit biases, posits approaches for change.8
Sociologist Cecilia Ridgeway discusses gender as ‘an institutionalised system of social practices’.9 She highlights the complex and interconnected relations gender has with social hierarchy and, by extension, leadership systems that result in women having less competent and worthy social status than men:
These dynamics are paramount to architecture’s gender and equity problems. Nancy Fraser writes about the complexities of one’s social identity: that they are embedded within interconnected cultural associations and located within specific historic timeframes of gendered social practices.11 Although second wave feminism created revolution, feminism has not structurally produced systemic change:12
Neoliberalism, as Fraser argues, has exploited second wave feminism to the result that women’s liberation has become directly connected to ‘the engine of capitalist accumulation’.14 For her, it is time for feminism to reassert itself. She advocates for feminism to ‘reclaim the mantel of participatory democracy’ and to think in radical ways: new systems of political power that are based in citizen empowerment, where public engagement politics is used to ‘tame markets and to steer society in the interest of justice’.15 I am interested in the potential Fraser sees for feminism to return to its emancipatory promise within this current neoliberal crisis and how we, the spatial producers, must engage more fervently in these potentials.
Architectural Education
Researchers in political science and psychology have proven real world implications for experiments that test the influence of gender on group interaction, deliberation, and value systems. Their work shows numbers do matter. Extrapolating from these disciplines into architecture’s academic and professional demographics, one must ask: how will female students and students of colour realise they can be successful architects and designers if they do not see role models like themselves? How can the complicated gendered and social relations become a greater positive and transformative influence within architectural education and practice?
Look Who’s Teaching: Us Architectural Academic Data – 2014–2015
Because the US has the third largest population in the world, it provides a useful case study to examine how gendered relations affect architecture’s educational system. The National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB), the sole agency authorised to accredit architecture programmes in the US, collects annual demographic data from all accredited programmes. According to their 2014–2015 report:
US faculty / student race distribution:
UK staff distribution:
UK student ethnic distribution:
The Royal Institute of British Architects, RIBA, 2014–2015 report provides the following:
MEN
WOMEN
FACULTY GENDER DISTRIBUTION
70%
30%
FULL-TIME STUDENTS
(PART 1 AND PART 2)54.6%
45.4%
PART-TIME STUDENTS
(PART 1 AND PART 2)64.2%
35.8%
The Australian Institute of Architects Architecture Schools of Australasia Handbook data is:
The professoriate of all three countries remains fairly male. Student demographics are closer to gender parity, yet, in the US, remain predominately white. Due to the lack of ethnicity data for the UK and Australia, there is no way to ascertain the racial diversity of their student populations.
Who’s Talking in the US?
A school’s public events roster is telling. Invited speakers for lectures and symposia remain predominately male, with students hearing less about the work of women.16 The research I have conducted over the past three years tracks the number of women invited to lecture at architecture programmes across the United States. The data sample size has varied from year to year due to difficulties in accessing schools’ information.17
These statistics demonstrate another way that gender bias occurs within architectural education. These practices do not benefit students or faculty, and perpetuate the idea that white men are who all should aspire to.
In response to the historically low presence of women in public programming, Jeremy Till, head of Central Saint Martins and pro-vice chancellor of the University of the Arts London, instigates the ‘30% pledge’. He agrees to speak only if there is a minimum 30% female lecturer representation. As he states, his pledge is an effort to break with the male domination of discourse. It is interesting to note that the United Nations Economic and Social Council supported the United Nations’ announcement that women should comprise a minimum of 30% of all political bodies of all member states by 1995.18 This was 21 years ago.
Who’s Leading?
Karen Burns cites a UK government-commissioned report on women on corporate boards that concluded there is a correlation between a company’s positive performance and gender diverse boards. When more women are part of top management, the company performs better.19 In March 2015 Germany joined these ranks by requiring women to hold 30% of supervisory seats on corporate boards beginning in 2016.20 However, this is not a new practice. In 2008, Norway became the first country to meet mandated boardroom quotas of 40% women.21 Several other European countries have created minimum 40% quotas, including Spain, France and Iceland; Italy has one-third and Belgium has 30% as well as the non-binding 30 percent target of the Netherlands.22
Examining administrative positions within US architecture schools reveals another ongoing gender bias in leadership: only 30 deans are women, representing a mere 19.4% of the 154 NAAB accredited programmes.23 Combined, there are a total of 72 women deans, directors, heads, and chairs. Currently, the west and west central regions have the most women in positions of leadership out of all regions in the United States.
Professional Numbers
Women’s representation in practice is much lower than in the academy. This is an ongoing subject of research and data collection for organisations in all three countries, including Equity By Design and the American Institute of Architects in the United States, Architectural Review and Architects’ Journal in the UK, and Parlour in Australia. In the US, women make up about 19% of licensed architects.24 In the UK, women are 25% and in Australia nearly 25% of registered architects.25
Political Deliberative Bodies
I provide all of these statistics to illustrate a greater point. Gender representation in and of a group matters. In research exploring the impacts of gender parity in decision making, Tali Mendelberg and Christopher Karpowitz found that:
In their focus groups, they found when women comprise 20% of a decision-making body:
Their research had real-world confirmation when, after examining more than 14,000 local school board minutes, they found that participation based on gender was greatly reduced when women’s numbers reached parity with men.29 If more women are part of governance, more concerns women have, that may or may not be similar to men’s, will be put forward and heard.
As Karpowitz and Menderberg’s research demonstrates, what appear as unbiased rules on the surface can create significant social inequalities that compound over time. Yet, they discovered that rules and different discussion structures can reduce and even eliminate inequality. Women become more influential the more they speak.30 These inequalities, also discussed by Valian, result in part from the lack of advantage accumulation that accrues over time. Women earn far less advantage over time than men.31 Generally people ignore and even dismiss bias, from both directions of experience. Everyone believes they treat people fairly outside of preconceived or unconscious social relations and that they are treated similarly. This research proves otherwise. We all act with unintentional biases. However, we can become aware of how bias affects our actions and change our behaviour over time.32
Looking Elsewhere: Who are the Change Makers?
Top Down Change
The business school at Harvard University is known to be a difficult environment for both female students and female faculty. When the first female president of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust, hired a new business school dean, this all changed. Through a variety of efforts over a two-year test period, the extremely gendered dynamics of the business school’s academic and social structures significantly transformed.
Although female students were equal to their male peers on exams, they fell far short in class participation, a critically important component providing 50% of each course grade. These disparities would emerge early and persist year after year. A two-year pilot was created to drastically upend acknowledged ongoing problems. Students received advice on their class participation skills, including hand-raising coaching. Faculty were provided private consultation and were instructed on less biased grading strategies. Stenographers were included in every class so faculty no longer relied on biased memories of who spoke. More specific focus was provided for untenured female professors.
By the end of the pilot, remarkable improvement for female students was evident. There was greater class participation, record numbers of academic awards, and an overall better academic and social environment. The programme was not without push back from students, but overall it was deemed a success. One critique by some faculty was that the more gender aware the school became, the less it reflected the actual business world. Deans agreed to continue but did not state to what extent the pilot would be practised.33
Bottom up Change
Yale Law Women (YLW), a law student-run organisation at Yale University, is an example of gendered change driven entirely by students. Through resource development, programming, and mentorship, YLW is changing the gendered assumptions and biases experienced by women:
YLW produce their annual ‘Top Ten Family Friendly Firms’ to raise awareness, promote innovation, track progress, and create incentives for the profession to change. YLW promote firms that are ‘deconstructing gender stereotypes of “breadwinner” and “care-giver” by creating “family friendly” options to attorneys of both genders on equal terms’. They highlight part-time/flexi-time and family care policies as well as leadership and promotion rates as a way to promote those firms who have fairer practices. These more equitable practices are quite attractive for all law students, regardless of gender.35
In YLW’s ‘Speak Up About Gender’ data analysis, gender dynamics were examined through classroom observations, faculty interviews, and student surveys. An ‘action kit’ was created to promote more gender inclusive learning environments and behaviour.36 A few of their suggestions include: for students, speak early, seek out a few faculty members for mentoring and writing support; for faculty, use a five-second rule before calling on student volunteers, use positive reinforcement in the classroom; for the administration, reward excellent teaching and address problematic teaching, credit faculty for mentoring, and work more diligently to diversify the faculty.37
Transformation Tactics: Taking Action
How does architecture change? How can institutional structures be responsive and responsible for creating change within the discipline? What can we do to change social and cultural relations? From the examples discussed, there are several actions that create demonstrable differences.
Increase the Number of Women and Adopt Unanimous Rule38
Karpowitz and Mendelberg advocate for these two actions in order to most significantly affect participatory discussion and influence diverse participation. Unanimous rule is a far more inclusive deliberative system for all numerical minority groups.39
- Hire and promote more women in design practices. Be aware of overall gender representation and distribution across experience levels. Valian strongly urges to have more women in candidate pools to neutralise gender influence. She cites data suggesting that if at least 25% of the group is women, perceptions of the job are altered and there are less gendered associations.40
- Run firm and client meetings to facilitate more inclusive discussions. Translated for the academy, increase the number of female faculty and run faculty discussions to create inclusion of all voices.
- Require each person to speak a minimum number of times; enforce turn taking; do not use random or self-selection in discussion groups; do not allow monopolisation of speaking time.41
- Through leadership positions, women can help reduce the gender gap when there are not a statistically significant number of women participating.
- Create more female role models to more fully support women.42
Educate and Train our Students and Train our Students and Faculty Differently
- Academia must prepare students for differences in the professional world.
- Model inclusive and equitable behaviours that students will promote out in the world.
The SWAN Athena programme in the UK works to broadly address gender equity concerns, focusing within the humanities, social sciences, arts, business and law, creating support for more women to succeed within the academy. Recognising that the academy cannot fulfill its entire mission unless all are included, this programme works with institutions to promote better equity policies at all levels; for example, increase number of senior women in academy, support women in their research support applications, and address gender pay gap.43
Educate and Train Firm Leadership about the Positive Impacts that Work Equity Creates for All
The UN 30% decree creates institutional change through incentives and structural redirection. The Beverly Willis Architectural Foundation in New York works with industry leaders through their industry roundtable programme. BWAF is training business leaders about the benefits of more women being a part of upper level design team leadership. Many companies are now beginning to demand this.44 As Valian notes, data demonstrates companies that have more progressive and fair policies create more productive and loyal employees.45
Speak up and Speak Out
As Babcock and Laschever argue, women must learn to ask for what they deserve and value their work.46 If women do not ask, that raise or that promotion may not happen.
And Don’t Forget the Men
Men are critical partners to create gender equality and must be a part of the systemic change. As Karpowitz and Mendelberg have noted, men still far outnumber women in deliberative bodies and leadership positions. Men need to become more conscious of gender biases and their detrimental influence. They can help create more egalitarian conditions that better support women and positively affect social exchanges.47
As Valian, Karpowitz, Menderberg, YLW and Harvard’s Business School tell us, conditions matter a great deal and institutional policies are critical in establishing and promoting gender equality. We must not be caught up in placing the onus on women to ‘lean in’ and work harder. They remind us that it is:
The institutions themselves must be pressured to change gender inequalities. As their research illustrates, within the right institutional conditions, gender inequalities can be ‘completely erased’.49 The more we talk about these issues publicly and the more institutions commit to engage, the more things will change. We must all become accountable for our internal biases and work for reducing their influence. Only then will true equity be possible.