I feel I should tell you about the time I put a photo of an attractive young woman in her underwear on the cover of RIBA Journal, the official magazine of the Royal Institute of British Architects which I edit. In the context of this book, this may not cast me in a good light. I can explain, up to a point. It was 2007; it was an issue devoted to theatre design; it was an archive shot of a 1968 revival of John Osborne’s 1956 kitchen-sink drama Look Back in Anger. The idea was to show theatre as it was seen by audiences rather than just another boring photo of a building. It was all very tasteful, yadda yadda. But I’ll be honest: it was a photo of the young Jane Asher in a slip. Plus a hunky young Martin Shaw, to be fair – but he wasn’t in his pants, rather a Fair Isle jumper.

Looking back at that cover, I was in Fleet Street rather than professional journal mode. I’d not been editing the Journal long and was going through a bit of a pop phase. ‘Anything rather than buildings’ was my mantra at the time, and nobody goes to the theatre to look at the architecture. Make it look more like a consumer publication, I thought: having people rather than things on magazine covers is usually good, and we know which sex sells consumer publications the most. In retrospect, it was a miracle that – cranking back many years earlier to a Sunday Times piece of mine – the week the cover of the arts section came down to a choice between Madonna and James Stirling, it was Stirling who got the nod.

The other miracle was that, come 2007, my archive Jane Asher cover caused barely more than a ripple of good-humoured comment from the readers. One reader (male) wrote to congratulate us on featuring ‘the divine Miss Asher’. Another (female) approved of our theatres coverage but inquired, mildly, ‘Why the cover photo choice of a woman in her underclothes – albeit Jane Asher on stage at the Royal Court Theatre?’

So I got off lightly but this would not be the case today, a mere nine years later at the time of writing. I could not consider doing such a cover today, even if I wanted to. The weather has changed. Thinking about this led to my proposal for this chapter. It is one thing to consider a gendered profession from the point of view of its practitioners. But what about the critics and editors? How do we do, over time, pronounce on, and illustrate, the work of others? Though we tend to dismiss it as transient, the influence of critics in established media is real. We have the power to wound, to support, to expose for good or for bad. The trick is to balance critical judgment with the appropriate measure of showboating writing style. A review is a piece of writing which is read in its own terms as a made thing, separate from the thing it describes. When critics go bad, it is usually because the showboating has taken over from the analysis. Besides, your average newspaper or magazine review is a snap judgment on something that might have taken a decade, or a lifetime, to realise. It is sudden death, or life, in 800 to 2,000 words. It is an act of extraordinary compression. Gender issues are subject to the same level of compression.

Of course we reveal our attitudes, conscious or unconscious, through our writing and presentation. Perhaps we take some architects and designers more seriously than others because of their gender or sexual preferences or race. We need to consider whether these are valid subjects to mention when interviewing someone or assessing their work, or whether they are to be studiously avoided. An opportunity presents itself here for some self-analysis. I have recently completed a 30-year spell writing about architecture and design for the Sunday Times, am in my tenth year as editor of the RIBA Journal, and have always written for many other media. So if I examine my own writings and editorial decisions over this period, I might find out a bit about myself vis-a-vis this aspect of the profession.

I began my career during the time of late 1970s feminism – the middle of the so-called Second Wave, shortly after the three important UK parliamentary Acts took effect on equal pay, employment protection and sex discrimination. Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch was in all the bookshops alongside stacks of Spare Rib magazine. Apart from much else, the changed atmosphere had an observable impact on the trade of journalism at the broadsheet/magazine end of things. It seemed that there was real change afoot, but it did not happen overnight. In architectural journalism, it inevitably collided with the lad culture of the construction industry and, in particular, the advertisements then deemed acceptable, some of which raised my graduate eyebrows even then and look frankly incredible now, in a Life on Mars kind of way. Naked or near-naked women used to sell metal lintels, that kind of thing. However, by the time I was working in a large commercial architecture/design practice at the start of the 1980s, mainstream efforts were being made to correct some of this by design professionals (it took the advertising agencies and their clients a great deal longer). For instance, I recall a well-meant, if slightly trying-too-hard, memo from my then boss (male) suggesting ways in which we could all be genderneutral in our phraseology, both spoken and written.

If you were interviewing Zaha Hadid – the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize and, by the 21st century, the single most successful female architect ever – you could certainly decide not to raise the matter of her being a woman at the top of the male-dominated profession of architecture. And you might well choose not to mention her painstakingly designed personal appearance. You could ignore all that and treat her as just another leading architect, concentrating purely on the (frequently controversial) work. That was one response. Another was to acknowledge the gender issue, and the style, and how those things might play out with her as a role model. Both approaches were and are valid, both can be criticised. But, if interviewing Frank Gehry, say, would I bring his clothes into it? I’m pretty sure I never have. But then Gehry does not present himself particularly interestingly sartorially. He’s no dandified Frank Lloyd Wright with hat and cape and cane. What he does do is draw like lightning in front of you, so you write about that, and his moodiness.

Then there is the question of being an editor rather than the interviewer/writer. Had I written it, would I have felt comfortable, for instance, to introduce a profile of Sadie Morgan, a leading figure in UK architecture and design, with a bit of a girlie discussion about the dress she was planning to wear in the photograph? No, but my female colleague could, and did. Should she have? Was she reinforcing girlie clothes-talk stereotypes? As editor, and knowing both of them, I knew that she wasn’t: this was the scene-setting opener, a device to present the interview subject informally before getting down to the business in hand. Morgan had just been appointed as head of the design panel of a huge national railway infrastructure project, HS2. She has now gone further still, to the National Infrastructure Commission and the Thames Estuary Growth Commission. Her personal projection of design awareness, as much as her companionable, confiding manner, has a bearing on this. It is always the case that the interviewer wants to find something that brings the subject to life in words, and personal appearance can come into this. It is, however, always a judgment call.

Looking through the archives of the RIBA Journal, I came across such an account of an architect from 1910. It was written in memory of the great Gothic Revival church architect and RIBA Royal Gold Medallist G F Bodley by one of his former colleagues, Walter Tapper. Tapper recalled that Bodley, a dishevelled individual it seems, tended to get a takeaway for his lunch, which he would eat at the drawing board with inevitable consequences for the drawing. ‘Oftentimes there was a mixture of pencil, ink, mustard, salt, with splashes of gravy to give the right tone of colour.’ This is a surprisingly casual and irreverent yet affectionate description for an official journal of the time. It doesn’t even mention the work, beyond remarking that his soft-pencil drawing style was somewhat eccentric and that many people were under the impression that Bodley couldn’t draw at all. It immediately makes you like Bodley, to the extent that you can picture him. Writers and readers alike look for such things.

This can go wrong though. Here’s me interviewing architect Angela Brady as she took over as president of RIBA in 2011. Brady is a noted champion of increasing the representation of women and ethnic minorities in the profession, chaired Women in Architecture 2000–2005, and was part of the group who set up Architects for Change. So how did I introduce her?

Not my finest intro. Possibly my worst. Coming across it again, I shrivel slightly, not that either Angela or the readers made anything of it at the time. For this essay I contacted Angela to find out if she recalled it and, if so, what she thought. No, she said, she didn’t remember it. Being RIBA president, she said, was:

She concluded:

The piece did indeed improve, I feebly contend, after that lame start. More relevant (and thankfully mentioned) was the fact that we met not in the presidential office but at one of her projects, a Brady Mallalieu housing development in Islington. The message here was that she was a president who understood design and practice matters. Rather than, err, being bustlingly pink.

I did a bit better profiling designer Jane Priestman in the Sunday Times back in June 1989, when she led the architecture and design department of British Rail during the last pre-privatisation period of the nationalised network. She oversaw the design of excellent trains and stations still in use today. I wrote of her:

And then I said, ‘Priestman is 59 and looks a decade younger.’ Was this an attempt at gallantry? Speaking now from the age of 60 myself, I wouldn’t mind too much if someone a quarter century younger said that of me. The matter of giving people’s ages is a ticklish one in an ageism-conscious society, though I hope justified when one is describing architects doing good work long after most people have retired, as with the English high-tech pioneers – or achieving much while remarkably young, like the Turner Prize-winning Assemble collective.

What is certainly apparent in ransacking my own early newspaper archives is a distinct lack of positive discrimination. Not many women appear at all. In the 1980s I wrote about female architects if they happened to be involved in a project of the moment – Eldred Evans, say, or Eva Jiricna – but the vast bulk of my writing concerned stuff by men. The profession was then even more male-dominated than now. So could I have done more to help the cause by deliberately going out to find more examples of architecture by and for women? Yes, of course I could, and didn’t, really. I recall at one point putting forward to the Sunday Times the idea of a women-in-architecture piece only to be fobbed off: what they wanted was big photos of shiny buildings, not professional gender politics.

Then again, I was always (and still am) uneasy about tokenism. In early 2014 I was asked to compile a ‘people of influence’ list in architecture and the built environment, under the aegis of Debrett’s. I set myself the task of presenting exactly equal numbers of men and women, while not mentioning except to a few colleagues I enlisted that this was my aim. On reading the published result one or two people noticed and approved the exact balance (most didn’t spot my strategy, which was encouraging) but I was left feeling dissatisfied. This approach did mean fewer of the usual male suspects on the list – hurrah – but I had introduced an artificiality. It’s a familiar enough problem. What should (it could be argued) have been a selection made purely on merit irrespective of gender had become a self-imposed, politically correct gesture in what is after all a gender-imbalanced profession. Maybe it was condescending of me. Maybe I should just stop agonising. Nobody complained. Apropos of this, and the present-day discussion about the imbalance of women in the profession of architecture, a suggestion to three of the British architecture magazines (AJ, BD and RIBAJ) came via Twitter from architect and academic Ruth Lang saying:

This stealth approach has something to commend it. I found that, by chance rather than design, in 2015 the majority of the people we profiled in RIBAJ were women, either working solo or as equal partners. Nobody remarked on this but surely such coverage must, over time, have an effect. However, I’m not keen to have a secret quota system operating, on the grounds that it’s the most interesting and relevant person in architecture at any given moment one should be profiling, and that one’s editorial approach should be gender-blind. My female colleagues (usefully, exactly half of the editorial team) take this view. But I see merit in a measure of positive discrimination, too. I can’t pretend to be consistent on this.

In 1990 I wrote about the self-designed and-built home and studio of architects Joanna van Heyningen and Birkin Haward, in language befitting the Sunday Times style section:

And so on. This was a live-work arrangement with separate access to each part. It was of personal interest to me as I was one half of a couple with two very young children at the time (and no nanny). I was one of those self-employed writers who could juggle family with work. This meant that, later, I could usually get to the school gates for nine in the morning and back again at 3.30. But I knew all about the long hours culture of architecture and the travelling often involved, and the imbalance of the sexes in the profession partly caused by that. Back then there were not many architects using their professional skills to tackle that problem for themselves – or for anyone else for that matter – in the way that van Heyningen and Haward did. The celebrated open-plan Hopkins house in Hampstead, for instance, which doubled in the early years as the Hopkins studio, and still seems fresh today, could not function in this way: another interview has Patty Hopkins relating how noisy kids had to be removed when clients called.

Is Nigel Coates gay? Is David Adjaye black? Is Alan Stanton of Stanton Williams disabled? I could point you to a number of articles of mine where – I may be over-sensitive – I might seem to be trying a bit too hard not to mention such potentially relevant aspects of these people and others. Sometimes it might enhance the discussion, sometimes not. But something can certainly be lost by taking this the-work-is-all-that-matters approach: a discussion of Bodley’s churches without the gravy, you might say. Striving to avoid any possible offence that anyone might conceivably take leads inevitably to bloodless writing.

To return to the late and much lamented Zaha Hadid, I certainly quizzed her about the difficulties of practising as a woman at the top level of architecture. One of her responses was that, had she remained in Iraq as an architect, the support networks would have made it easier for her to combine work with family. Another was that she had to make her way without all that ridiculous male-bonding stuff like golf and whitewater rafting. And the sheer prejudice she encountered, on various levels, in trying to get her Cardiff Bay Opera House project built in the 1990s is something that I tend to mention because it was so disgraceful and pointless. But maybe it’s not helpful to rake over the ashes of that now, after so long. Perhaps I should drop it.

I started with one archive photo and I’ll finish with another. Looking for an image that would somehow illustrate the concept of architects working ‘for the common good’, I found an excellent one from 1953 in the RIBA archives. It was of members of Hertfordshire architects’ department clustered around a model of one of their famous postwar schools. What with the tweedy clothes and the hairstyles, it was wonderfully evocative. We duly published it to illustrate our theme. It was widely liked but it ran into a bit of flak on social media along the lines of: there was only one female architect in the picture – what were we thinking?

I was thinking that this was 1953, and that’s how things often were then, and that I wasn’t trying to illustrate gender balance but rather the social endeavour of postwar reconstruction. But this is a characteristic of certain responses at the moment which it would doubtless be deeply unfair of me to describe as ‘virtue signalling’. When, due to a set of circumstances it would be tedious to relate, we recently found ourselves fielding a white, all-male panel for a round-table discussion published in the RIBAJ complete with photo, there was a bit of social media outrage. I’m not surprised – it did look bad, and it angered me that it had happened. It was, however interesting, and maybe encouraging to note that the outrage was led by men. The make-up of these forums, such a key part of architecture, is something you can and should do something about through constant exhortation of those who organise such events. But an editor can’t control or defend everything, and a part of me is glad of this. Some things you just have to walk away from, the eggshells crunching beneath your feet, and let others continue the debate you have deliberately or unwittingly started.