Architecture is yet another industry where the ‘pipeline’ has long been expected to supply enough women to see it shift from being heavily male-dominated to offering a more equitable gender mix.
Alas, like so many other male-dominated professions, the promised pipeline has failed to deliver.
As Dr Karen Burns writes on Women’s Agenda today, women have been making up 40% of architecture school entrants for decades now, but still only account for 20% of registered architects.
Now, a number of leading women in the profession — including Dr Burns herself — have decided to do something about it, and tackle the real issues they believe are preventing women from participating in architecture. It started a number of years ago with an Australian Research Council Linkage grant offered to researchers at the Universities of Melbourne and Queensland to investigate some such barriers — as well as ideas and programs for retaining and promoting women in the profession.
While architecture presents some specific barriers for women — such as the project-based nature of work — it also throws up the usual suspects affecting women in male-dominated industries: a gender pay gap, backwards recruitment practices and a culture where long hours prevail and flexible work is a long way from becoming the norm.
The team has released a set of 11 guides for the profession based on the ARCL research called The Parlour Guides to Equitable Practice, offering statistical research, surveys and focus groups on some of the key barrier affecting women in architecture. They’re content-rich, good-looking guides aimed at disseminating “collective knowledge” that can challenge traditional workplace practices and suggest more transparent means for hiring, retaining and developing jobs within the profession.
So, could these guides be replicated elsewhere? Could women in areas such as engineering, technology construction and other male dominated fields pull together to lead on their own change?
I asked Justine Clark, one of the lead editors of the guides and editor of the publication that created them, Parlour, what advice she’d have for other industry professions look to do something similar.
She says success on such a project starts with ensuring you have a strong base of evidence, and a well-developed communication and engagement program. Then bring your individual talents and skillets together to make it happen.
“I think one of the reasons for the success of our project is that it is a collaboration between a group of excellent academics, who are all highly respected in the profession, and me – my background is as an editor, and I previously edited Architecture Australia – so between us we had very complementary skills, and excellent networks.”
Clark believes that if you create guides like what Parlour has produced, it’s essential to ensure they look professional and are very clean. “This is very important, to produce something that looks a bit shoddy or weak means that you instantly lose a bit of credibility in the eyes of the reader.” (Parlour used Catherine Griffiths of Studio Catherin Griffiths for the design work, while Susie Ashworth assisted with the editing). That takes money, and as such Clark says funding is essential in producing and disseminating great information.
But even with such funding, a huge amount of passion for these projects is required. Clark studied architecture in the late 80s and 90s when she says feminism had a huge impact on architectural theory and, upon graduating in a class that was half female, expected things would rapidly improve for the numbers of women in the profession.
“That feminist theory influenced a lot of what I did subsequently in subtle ways, but over time it also disappeared from the conversation – as it did in many disciplines,” she says, noting an editorial she recently wrote on the disappearance of feminism from architectural discourse.
“When Naomi (Dr Naomi Stead) set up the research project it was apparent to many of us that things hadn’t changed as we had hoped they would have, and that it was time to have another look at the issues. All of the researchers have excellent track records in looking at gender and architecture. This time, the focus of the work was on the architectural workplace, and I think this have been a very important shift in focus.”
It takes a lot of work to study architecture, as it does to enter many leading professions. We need industry by industry projects to ensure such efforts do not go to waste, and that the professions can fully maximise their talented women.
Check out Dr Karen Burns’ piece sharing research on women in architecture.