A Personal Perspective

The Shard, Great Northern Hotel, Harley Place, Duck and Rice: Archer Humphryes Architects

For me, this disparity is personal. As a woman architect in my 40s I have worked as design director of a property company and as co-owner and director of Archer Humphryes Architects, which has designed a number of high-profile projects in London, namely the Chiltern Firehouse. Yet, despite these successes, I’ve also had first hand experience of gender discrimination, too, recently winning a long-running legal case concerning multiple claims of unlawful sexual discrimination. As is so often the way with discrimination across many sectors, my difficulties at work began when I returned from maternity leave. My personal story reflects the wider inequalities still prevalent in the profession.

Education

The author

When I matriculated at Peterhouse, Cambridge University, I was one of two women to study architecture in a college that had been educating men for almost 800 years. On the face of it, a huge amount has changed in the two decades since I completed my studies. More recently in the UK system, almost half of all Part 1 architecture students are women and 43% of Part 2 are women, dropping to 38.6% of passes at Part 3 stage.⁶ This roughly equates with percentages of women architects in the US⁷ and is slightly higher than in Australia, where women represent around 40% of graduates.⁸

There are also signs that women are, albeit slowly, becoming better represented in academia. Pedagogical pioneers include Christine Hawley, who became the first woman to head a British architectural school in 1987, and Denise Scott Brown, who became a faculty head in the US in the 1960s but had to battle for the same recognition afforded to her professional partner – and husband – Robert Venturi. In the last 15 years a wave of women have risen to lead Ivy League schools in the US, and Cambridge in the UK, among them Deborah Berke, who recently became the first woman to lead Yale School of Architecture, and Sadie Morgan of dRMM, who is president of the prestigious Architectural Association in London. Nevertheless, women are still underrepresented in architectural education.

Career Fall-Out

While the number of women entering the profession is healthy, problems arise as they seek to progress in practice. The picture is far from bright, as the Architects’ Journal (AJ) discussed in its ‘Women in Architecture’ awards, and as the corresponding survey demonstrates.⁹ While student representation may be healthy, women continue to disproportionately drop out of the profession after their studies as they attempt to progress in practice. This is an international issue: the American Institute of Architects report recently found that women are still being driven out from or held back in careers in architecture by long hours, concern over work-life balance, lower pay, and less likelihood of being promoted than men. Lack of female role models was also cited as a factor leading to underrepresentation of women in architecture.¹⁰ In Australia, despite a longstanding high female intake to study architecture, 40% of women graduates are not entering or being retained long-term by the profession.¹¹

Perhaps most significantly, there is a dramatic drop in representation as seniority rises. Research by the Architectural Association found that only 20% of partners in architectural practices were women, dropping to 5% for large practices.¹² Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners only appointed its first woman director last year.¹³

Sexism

The ‘Women in Architecture’ survey¹⁴ gives some valuable insight into why women are not staying in the profession. 61% of respondents said they had experienced sexism at their work, and 40% reported discrimination at client meetings. While 39% cited discrimination on construction sites, this was nonetheless an improvement on 50% the previous year. To put the UK findings in context, international respondents in the same survey reported even higher levels of discrimination, rising to 88% of respondents in the Middle East and Asia.

Unlike in the 1970s, it is very rare today for anyone to overtly say, ‘Women aren’t as good as men’, or to be open about not hiring the best candidate on the grounds that ‘she would quit when she has children’. Nevertheless, anecdotal evidence and the drop-off of women remaining in architecture suggest that sexism is still present in the profession. With many large leading architectural practices being overwhelmingly male, it may be a while before change occurs.

Evidence suggests that discrimination against women is not purely linked to the culture of previous generations. Sexism on the whole is driven by subconscious or unconscious judgments and bias based on preconceived notions. Despite the introduction of many laws to protect women, discrimination in mainstream culture remains a roadblock to success.

Even Zaha Hadid’s pioneering achievement in winning the 2016 RIBA Royal Gold Medal for Architecture was soured after she cut short a combative BBC Radio 4 interview on the day she was named recipient of the award. Rather than celebrating her remarkable career, this incident gave some listeners an opportunity to describe her behaviour as ‘headstrong’, or ‘what happens when a woman is scorned’. Zaha had already heard such sentiments before. In a 2014 interview she is quoted as saying, ‘It remains a challenge in the professional world. If a man has an opinion, people describe him as “opinionated” or “powerful”. However, if a woman in business voices her opinion, she is considered to be “difficult” or a “diva!”’¹⁵

In an earlier CNN article entitled ‘Would they still call me a diva if I was a man?’ Zaha was quoted as saying, ‘When you are young you just want to bang on ahead. But it is very tiring, this constant fighting… I think it’s a boys’ club everywhere – they go fishing, they go golfing, they go out and have a drink. And as a woman you’re excluded from that bonding. It’s a big difference.’¹⁶

Maternity Factor

A study conducted in 2015 by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) in association with the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills¹⁷ found that women returning from maternity leave were more likely to face discrimination than a decade ago. The report found businesses were losing female talent by default, amid worrying levels of discrimination and disadvantage at work. The EHRC recorded that some mothers were put under pressure to hand in their notice and were treated adversely when returning to work.

I certainly experienced discrimination for myself first hand while I was on maternity leave from a leadership position at a property design company. Projects that I had tirelessly been involved in were solely attributed to a male colleague in company publicity. In correcting my exclusion, the chief executive officer claimed I was exhibiting ‘maternity paranoia’, while the chairman suggested I was a ‘supermum’ for attempting to continue the role I had held before pregnancy.

It’s hard to imagine that men would be asked to perform fewer duties or be asked to be subordinate after becoming fathers. Indeed, in my court case, the QC remarked on conditioned gender stereotyping: ‘If you were a dad coming back to work after the birth of your child, it would be inconceivable to suggest that he was a “superdad” if he expressed a wish to continue the role he held before the birth’. In my own experience, women architects who feel their position has been eroded after returning from maternity leave often have little recourse to assistance within the profession when they are most vulnerable. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that architecture is not a unionised profession.

Aside from cases of overt discrimination, an important factor in the flow of women from the architecture profession is the family-hostile, long hours working culture that still prevails, added to the reality of childcare responsibilities falling disproportionately to women rather than men. In the EHRC report, a significant finding is that mothers who worked for smaller businesses in general experienced fewer negative consequences when requesting flexible working. This was certainly a major factor in why I chose to concentrate solely on the creation of Archer Humphryes Architects business. Looking forward, the recently introduced laws on shared parenting leave might go some way towards directing the maternity focus away from women and towards a more shared parental responsibility.

The Gender Pay Gap

While Britain may be pioneering in the fields of architecture and design, it lags dramatically behind other developed countries such as Sweden in equality, and the reasons why need to be unpicked.

In the UK in 2016, professional women working full-time could expect to earn 22% less than their male colleagues in exactly the same job.¹⁸ I believe this is down to a combination of fewer women being in a hiring position at the top of practices coupled with a general boys’ club mentality where women are perceived as having less value to the business.

There are still many outstanding issues to be addressed before inequality is righted not just in architecture but in the workplace in general. These include greater transparency in gender pay, tackling workplace discrimination, guidelines for gender equality in education, workplace flexibility, and childcare provision. There are many think tanks, international laws, and codes of practice for particular sectors – such as the stringent Athena Swan Charter, which sets out principles for equality standards in UK higher education.¹⁹ Yet women generally aren’t sufficiently safeguarded against inequality or discrimination in action, as is clear from the EHRC report. Without tackling these points repeatedly through political debate and addressing the pervasive glass ceiling in the workplace, how can we as a society advocate for our values in a modern world?

The gender pay gap still remains, and is especially marked at more senior levels. Lord Davies’s government-backed report in 2015 recommended that at least a third of boardroom positions at Britain’s largest companies should be held by women by the end of the decade.²⁰ But it is anticipated that it will take decades for such a change to have any widespread effect across the business community. Whereas Britain is tackling the matter slowly, in 2010 the board of Deutsche Telekom in Germany pledged to introduce a 30% quota for women in executive positions by 2015.²¹ Norway had already enacted similar quotas of 40% back in 2006²² and in France there was an expectation for companies of more than 250 employees to have a minimum of 30% female representation on supervisory and management boards by 2016.²³

A Practice of One’s Own

Over the past couple of decades that I’ve been immersed in architecture and design, I’ve witnessed a significant increase in the number of practices established by women, which I suspect is the best way forward for women architects wanting some semblance of work-life balance.

According to the AJ survey, some 16% of women architects set up their own practices after having children, presumably in order to find a more family-friendly way of working as well as for all the usual reasons that any architect may have for seeking autonomy in their own practice.²⁴ Just 23% of female architects went back to the same job after having children. The ability to control both work and working environment by working for themselves is bound to be highly tempting for new mothers, however drastic and daunting such a move might be.

But not everyone wants to run their own practice, and this should not be the only viable option in order to continue working as an architect with family responsibilities. Many may still want to retain the opportunity to work on the large-scale projects found at larger practices, so it’s a huge shame that many feel that there is no alternative but to work for themselves.

To stem this exodus of talent, large practices need to provide a working culture with family-friendly hours – one that supports everyone, whether man or woman, parent or not. This is surely more possible now than ever before since mobile technology drives a growing acceptance of out-of-office working.

Many businesses try to say how much money they lose through maternity, which is a well disputed and documented topic. Recently, a former Google employee Susan Wojcicki, now chief executive officer of YouTube, told the Wall Street Journal: ‘When we increased paid leave at Google to 18 weeks, the rate at which new mothers left fell by 50%.’ Clearly, ‘paid maternity leave is good for business’²⁵

The Need for Role Models

A recent walk around a number of prestigious girls’ grammar schools in the UK’s Home Counties gave me an enlightening snapshot of education. In the corridors outside the art room of one school, pupils had pinned a homage to architects on the wall. There were only men: Santiago Calatrava, Rafael Moneo, Norman Foster, and Richard Rogers. At another school, there was a whole suite of creative product spaces with each door to the classroom portraying a famous designer: Philippe Starck, Jonathan Ive, Alexander McQueen and James Dyson. There was no Zaha Hadid, no Eileen Gray, no women architects or designers at all.

We need to nurture strong women role models as a daily reminder at the elementary, informative stage of teaching. If you suggest to pupils each day as they enter their place of study that there are only male role models, it is no surprise that there is still an exodus of women from creative professions once their study has completed.

Yet too often women architects have suffered a raw deal in terms of recognition. As recently as 2014, the BBC television series The Brits Who Built the Modern World was criticised for paying little attention to the significant contributions of Patty Hopkins, Wendy Cheeseman, and Su Rogers and focusing instead on their better known husbands, Sir Michael Hopkins, Lord Norman Foster, and Lord Richard Rogers.²⁶

When Zaha Hahid formed her practice in 1979, this was a rare instance of a woman setting up alone. But her subsequent success has challenged this barrier for future aspiring students. Many women nowadays practise under their own name, not shielded by a male partner, husband or lover as previous generations did. The name change of Michael Hopkins and Partners to Hopkins Architects, and more recently Ian Simpson Architects’ rebranding to Simpson Haugh & Partners to recognise the vital role of founding co-partner Rachel Haugh, suggests that such sexist misnomers are no longer acceptable.

Surely real life success stories are the way forward to encourage the younger generation. Anything to break down stereotypes about architecture, and the view of the broader construction world as being male-dominated, can only be a good thing.

Looking Forward

What does the future hold? In the Architecture Foundation’s 2016 publication New Architects, three of the 94 promising practices featured were near parity in the number of male and female principals.²⁷ Of those established for 2–5 years and 5–10 years, 47% and 43% of principals respectively were women, suggesting a much more equitable proportion than at more established, larger practices. Notwithstanding the relatively small sample of practices within the book, this is highly encouraging. The test will be whether, in a few decades’ time, these women are at the helm of major practices, or whether they too will have dropped out of the profession or faded from view like so many women architects before them.