For as long as most of us have been practising and teaching architecture the fundamental question remains constant. Why do so many women choose to study architecture yet so few stay working in mainstream practice in the UK? This exclusion and marginalisation of women from the architectural profession is a long and ignoble record, and frankly it’s getting very scratched through constant repetition. The very fact that we have been asking this simple question without significant variation, decade after decade, implies either that the profession still doesn’t know what the answer is, or at least can’t agree on it. Most likely, it’s a combination of the two. To overcome this problem, we require a brave and unapologetic strategy for change, and it is the contention of this essay that there are smaller institutional and professional steps that could be taken right now to address gender inequality within the practice of architecture.

So is the architectural profession unwilling to implement potential but unpalatable solutions to a problem that it has historically barely acknowledged? If the answer is an unequivocal yes, then the unprofessional exclusion of women from mainstream practice is particularly perplexing. Particularly when architecture is compared to other professions such as law or even teaching, where women are generally far better represented at all levels. For instance, in 2014, 65% of new students and 60% of newly registered solicitors in the UK were women,¹ and they represented 45% of all academic staff in higher education in 2014–15.² Sadly, but not surprisingly, there is still a significant drop-off when it comes to representation of women at the higher levels of management, directorships, etc.³ However, many professions are at least thinking about boosting the numbers of women represented at senior level. Thus, a recent government-sponsored review into the financial services industry recommended linking remuneration packages to gender targets and suggested companies set internal targets for gender representation at senior levels.⁴ It would be easy to see such initiatives as pretty modest endeavours, but currently the architectural profession falls far short of even these basic steps.

So far, so familiar, and thereby hangs another potential problem. For it may well be that, through constant repetition without any apparent progress, this most troubling of issues has lost the critical attention that it deserves: i.e. the most obvious explanations for this shameful situation, and thus the most plausible solutions to it, have, through over-familiarity, lost their impact and their ability to engage and inspire us to action. This presents us with a daunting challenge, and a formidable responsibility, for we surely can’t allow this endless Groundhog Day⁵ to persist unchallenged. We have to cease merely debating and interpreting this issue; the point must now be to change it.

Brave and hubristic words perhaps, for we know that this is an ingrained and intractable issue; clearly a single chapter or indeed a whole book cannot hope to resolve an injustice that is as old as the architectural profession itself. But the scale of the problem must not lessen our appetite for change. The one thing to be certain of is that we cannot leave this to the traditional institutions and structures that have dominated architecture for so long. Thus when a recent survey suggested that the overall number of women practising architecture has risen appreciably (although crucially, the proportion of women to men within practice has not), Angela Brady, past president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA),⁶ claimed that the figures reflected better work environments for women: ‘Practices are more family friendly and women have less obstacles now that ten years ago’.⁷ It is hard to justify this rather smug proposition against the available evidence, but anyway, the organisation that has presided over the exclusion of women for nearly 200 years is unlikely to be the source of significant change for the better. While Brady may have been perceived as symbolically significant as only the second woman ever to become PRIBA, she didn’t use that office to promote more radical or effective strategies for promoting gender diversity. And indeed, why would she? As the head of a supremely patriarchal institution, she merely represents the ease with which the patriarchy can accommodate and appropriate individuals and causes in order to maintain the status quo. RIBA represents those old-fashioned architectural values of form, order, and stability, and will not provide answers any time soon to a question that it has effectively ignored for so long. To put it more bluntly, RIBA is a major part of the problem, and does not come close to representing a potential solution.

In a similar vein, Sadie Morgan, a highly regarded architect and co-founder of a universally respected British architectural practice, responded to a recent survey that suggested the gender pay gap in architecture is actually rising by saying that, ‘As an industry we need to work harder to ensure that women are properly rewarded for their contribution’.⁸ While it is clearly correct to support the principle she articulates, I cannot help but dispute the rationale, since what she describes as the architecture ‘industry’ has clearly failed to do anything effective to tackle this problem despite it being common knowledge for so long. As successful woman architect Julia Barfield observed, with more than a hint of sarcasm: ‘From 13% to 38% in 100 years – assuming this kind of change is exponential it should only be about another 40 years to 50:50.’⁹ Women working in practice simply cannot rely on their ‘industry’ to improve their lot; in reality they actually need to take action against their industry, which has held them back for so long. If that principle is accepted, then it is a comparatively short route to the prospect of trade union organisation and trade union action as the only plausible path to proper and permanent change.

Unfortunately, the creation of a trade union is not the solution that is routinely proposed when yet another set of statistics is published to show that women architects are still lagging far behind their male counterparts. So it’s reasonable to ask what other tactics are conventionally articulated to enhance the status of women in architecture, and whether they offer a more effective or persuasive strategy than unionisation. A reasonably recent example involved the editor of the Architects’ Journal, Christine Murray, who investigated the thorny issue of what she vividly described as ‘the spectre of the missing 25 per cent’ of women who enrolled as architecture students but then failed to remain in practice. ‘What I found was that many women who had earned the title of architect were not afforded the respect, or the pay, of their male colleagues’.¹⁰ In what she described as an ‘imperfect response’ she founded the Women in Architecture Awards, hoping to ‘raise the profile of talented architects who happen to be women’.

Within those limited ambitions there is no doubt a laudable sentiment, and one that has probably aided the careers of a number of women architects. But as a response to the intractable problem of gender inequality within architecture, to merely adopt the conventional, hierarchical, and patriarchal strategies of mainstream practice is to hope to do little more than enlarge the long established canons of what is judged as ‘good’ architecture and, in the process, appropriate just a few more successful women architects into the male establishment. Thus it is unarguably a good thing that a number of the great national and international architectural prizes have in recent years finally been awarded outright to a woman for the first time, including the Pritzker Prize (2004), the RIBA Stirling Prize (2010, 2011), and the RIBA Gold Medal just this year. But it is equally unfortunate that all three have gone first to the late Zaha Hadid, suggesting that architecture has indeed become more inclusive, but only to the sum total of a single person. With her untimely death, we are back to the situation where very few women architects have been awarded these professional accolades in their own name during their lifetime.¹¹ And we must not forget that it is only a couple of years ago that campaigners failed in their attempt to add Denise Scott Brown’s name to the Pritzker awarded to Robert Venturi back in 1991. At least now the AIA has done the decent thing and awarded their Gold Medal jointly to Venturi and Scott Brown. However, it seems evident that handing out gongs will do little or nothing for that missing 25% of potential women architects who have been lost along the way.

All of the above provides compelling evidence that we can no longer look or hope for answers and solutions from the traditional structures and practices of architecture, whose principal purpose is to maintain a patriarchal establishment that serves the interests of capital while paying mere lip service to the majority of those employed as architects. This is why we issue an unequivocal call to the rank and file of the architectural profession to organise themselves into their own structures that represent and campaign for their own issues and interests, rather than submit to the existing institutions that have perpetuated the intolerable inequalities endemic within the profession.

What do architects lack that other professionals – doctors, academics, civil servants, for instance – enjoy, and which helps to militate against workplace inequality? (To use just one recent example in the UK, think of the actions taken by the British Medical Association on behalf of junior doctors.) The answer seems – in the humble opinion of this author – to be so blindingly obvious that it’s almost unbelievable that it has still not been attempted, let alone enacted, to date. In short, if architects are to learn the lessons of those other professions then they need their own trade union, as distinct from the professional associations that purport to represent them. While it does not represent a universal panacea for all of the poor working practices that afflict architectural employees, if there had been such a union fighting for architects for as long as they have in those other professions, it would at least have ensured the necessary and fundamental rights that all workers should enjoy. In the case of architecture in particular, that would mean that regular working hours be guaranteed, without the automatic assumption that unpaid, unlimited, and compulsory overtime can be imposed at will; and also that other discriminatory practices that have consistently prevented so many women from building successful and sustained careers as architects could be resisted and even eliminated from architectural practice.

National Union of Architects

It is evident that this is not a single problem with a single answer, and that if we were to sit around waiting for anyone to suggest an overarching, all-encompassing solution, then nothing would change. So the simple proposition of establishing a trade union as a vehicle for change is offered as merely a single solution to a single component of the larger problem, in the hope that an incremental approach that embraces all of the different analyses and tactics contained within this set of essays might just add up to a sufficiently sustained assault on inequality to make a real difference. We can all agree that trade unions are themselves imperfect institutions. They were founded to combat the excesses and injustices of capitalism and yet are still products of the same system, with their own internal histories of inequality and of adherence to patriarchal values. However, they are still the best models available for engaging in the struggles against discriminatory employment practices, poor working conditions, and low pay. In a political climate that is openly hostile to the demands and desires of organised labour, they have become a vital defence against worsening abuses. Indeed, the union that represents this author as an academic¹² recently pledged its support to the International Women’s Day campaign #PledgeforParity that calls for ‘Everyone – men and women – … to take a concrete step to help achieve gender parity more quickly; whether to help women and girls achieve their ambitions, call for gender-balanced leadership, respect and value difference, develop more inclusive and flexible cultures or root out workplace bias’.¹³ These ambitions are of particular pertinence to architecture, but where and how has the profession pledged its support to campaigns such as this?

So the particular aspect of the larger problem that this solution addresses is the unregulated environment in which the majority of architects work, which routinely requires individuals to make both greater and more irregular commitments to working hours than would be expected in a properly regulated professional workplace. Furthermore, there seems to be a universal lack of recognition among architects that the absence of any formal workplace protection can routinely lead to abuse and discrimination, ranging from unequal promotion and preferment to harassment and bullying. Of course, these are problems that potentially affect all architects, and they should all be protected against them, but women are particularly vulnerable to these twin issues of unregulated employment and abuses of power. It should be without dispute that sexist practices and patriarchal power structures are still the reality for women in the architectural workplace, but it’s also true that addressing this specific issue for one particular group within the workforce would also improve conditions for the majority of employees.

It is safe to assume that the architecture ‘industry’ would not welcome the prospect of its workforce organising themselves outside of the existing, restrictive structures that purport to represent them. At present, architecture could all too easily present itself as the model neoliberal profession, given that the bulk of its commercial success depends upon wedding itself to the unsustainable ambitions of unfettered capital. Indeed, it depends on an institutional structure so unregulated that it’s actually surprising that it is not more frequently held up as a mirror to those other, better organised professions that are so out of kilter with the ideological drift of current employment policies. Is a profession that has become so wedded to neoliberalism and its consequences in the past four decades, and has so emphatically abandoned the wholehearted support it once gave to progressive values in the Welfare State era, really and genuinely what the majority of architects want? And does an industry that is so in thrall to the ideological and economic status quo properly represent the values and aspirations of the next generation of architects who are about to enter employment?

Emphatically not – at least, if the anecdotal evidence of the concerns of so many of our students is used as a measure. These are students who, year after year, choose to conduct personal research for their dissertations into the abuses of the physical environment that they observe being enacted all around them. The commonest research topics over recent years have included the wholesale destruction of social housing and the myth of affordable housing; the consequences of an unfettered planning system; and the possibilities of alternative forms of practice outside of the conventional model espoused by mainstream practice. Subsequently, we might further speculate that many of the talented young architecture graduates who then choose to seek unconventional modes of work and organisational structures that fall outside of conventional practice – whom thus may well become part of the ‘spectre of the missing 25 per cent’ – are not only addressing inequalities and injustices in the world around them, but also those that they perceive within architecture itself.

It is surely a real concern for us all as educators and designers that young people who are energised with righteous indignation about housing policy, environmental abuses, and the plight of the homeless and the stateless, are faced with the prospect of entering a profession that has little space for those concerns, and indeed often occupies a prominent role in the forces ranged against them. Thus a call to arms for an Architects’ Union is not issued solely in answer to the specific problems raised by this publication but is also proposed as a potential route of resistance to all of those other abuses committed in the name of architecture. And it should be emphasised that this is not merely a theoretical or idle proposal that someone else might choose to act on or not. We need radical action and we cannot wait another generation vaguely hoping that progress is somehow inevitable, predicated on recent statistics that suggest there has been modest change for the better. So to anyone who reads this and agrees more or less with the proposition, we need to meet and we need to act, in response to our despair at the current direction of the architecture profession, and to our frustration at the continued failure of those institutions that purport to represent us. The fact that architecture has ingrained within it a deep and enduring culture of institutional sexism and misogyny is a given, and this can only be addressed by a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign on an unimaginable scale – although imagine it we must!