Architecture Is Still A Thriving Boys’ Club. Will It Ever Let Women In?

When Mattel launched its latest Barbie earlier this month, the toy company proudly touted Architect Barbie’s pink blue-print container, black-frame glasses, and “symmetrically stylish outfit with bold colors and clean lines showcasing a city skyline.” But the latest triumph of America’s favorite blond belies a confounding and persistent gender gap in her new career field.

The American Institute of Architects, the industry’s professional organization, says that only 18% of its members are female. Women make up about half of architecture students in schools across the U.S. and are getting hired out of school at steady rate, but it is during the tough ten-year push to be promoted into middle management that a huge drop-off takes place. The community of “starchitect” superstars is almost exclusively male. This is a culture that New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff has described as “rarefied and strangely macho.” If architecture is still such a thriving boys’ club, will it ever be able to change?

Beverly Willis, who began working in the field in the 1960s and created the nonprofit Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation in 2002 to advance the position of women in the industry, estimates the number of women in the field is actually between 13% and 15%. Though the numbers are strong for female architects at the graduate school level, they are faced with challenges the minute they enter the classroom, where the elite classes in design are taught by men. According to Willis:

“While the deans may report to the president of the college, ‘Well, 30% of our teaching staff are women’ — this is an example — what they fail to mention is that within the studio, which is the design portion, they may have only one or two women. All those other women that are on the teaching staff are in interiors, materials, or sustainability.”

Those are perfectly respectable fields, but Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas did not become household names because of their tinkering with sustainability issues. Still, when women graduate, Willis says they’re hired at equal or even greater rates than men. But when it’s time to be promoted into middle management, she estimates the number of women drops to about 30%. Among senior vice presidents, it’s 10%. And then “the real issue,” which Willis’s organization is working to change, is moving women into the C-suite.

“The very top level of the C-suite, we’re dealing with about 1%,” she says. “It’s pretty dramatic. We’re calling that drop-off between 10% and 1% ‘the glass cliff.’ Women have broken the glass ceiling, but not the glass cliff.”

Erica Zoren, an architect in Baltimore, has just passed the 10-year mark in the field that Willis identifies as the first real hurdle, and her experience can partly be attributed to the fact the she is at a firm where one of three founders is female. She says this has “substantially impacted” the culture there. Between 25% and 30% of the 90 architects at her firm are women, a figure that’s significantly above average. It recently merged with another firm where that number was closer to 5%.

Zoren believes that another real challenge for women, even if they make it this far in the game, stems not from the architecture industry but from the other business spheres it intersects with. Becoming a top architect means designing complicated, high-profile projects. To snag that kind of assignment, a firm depends on cooperation from governments and developers — other areas where a boys’ club atmosphere often flourishes.

“This directly affects who is hired, as well as who an architecture firm may chose send to meetings or presentations. Often these decisions are made if someone knows the developer from a country club, or has something in common with the developer like being on the same board [or has] children attending the same school.”

Hollie Holcombe, an architect in the Philadelphia area, was laid off in 2009 and has not been able to find work at another firm. When she made the interview rounds, every single interviewer was male. The pattern she sees emerging is that men rise through the ranks at big firms, while women have to break out and start their own firms to be truly successful. One of her own mentors has resorted to designing concrete patios to pay the bills. But she admits that, as is common with many women in the prime child-bearing years that coincide with making major career strides, some women may just take themselves out of the running.

“Perhaps female architects don’t want to be at the top of the ladder,” Holcombe speculates. “They aren’t as aggressive, and maybe they just want to do a good job behind the scenes. Or perhaps their priorities are different. Things are so difficult for all of us right now that we may as well just relax and enjoy our families because there’s no joy in architecture today.”

Kraig Kalashian is an architect married to an architect, so he has perspective from both sides of the issue. “I find the stereotype to be true,” he told me. “Women seem to have more obstacles at every level,” starting with classes that focus on models and technical knowledge, areas that men stereotypically excel at. Since women are less likely to have construction experience, they’re also often treated differently by contractors on job sites.

Kalashian offers one other explanation: Most projects take years to complete, which puts women at a disadvantage when they become pregnant, since “employers have to scramble to transfer all project knowledge to other team members during the absence of a crucial team member.” When women return from maternity leave, they may find themselves on the outside. The dean of Yale’s architecture school, Robert A.M. Stern, offered a similar explanation in a video on BigThink.com: Architecture demands insane hours and international travel, and when women become mothers, they “get torn between their desire to have a family and be with their family and pursue their profession.” (Think of Michelle Pfeiffer‘s harried single mother architect character in One Fine Day, whose young son accidentally crushes her design model — and her chances of a big promotion.)

Willis thinks that change is possible, if the industry will just allow it. Technology has made it possible to work from hotel rooms and airports, so working from home is an option now in a way that it wasn’t when a superior had to physically peer over a junior employee’s shoulder to view the drawing board. And some corporate employers are starting to wake up to the advantages of a more flexible workplace. Willis points to the system employed by the worldwide consulting firm Deloitte, which uses a model it calls the Corporate Lattice — as opposed to a ladder. With the more adaptive lattice model, employees can leave and return to the workforce without punishment; it’s a system that benefits women who would otherwise to the pitfalls of the “mommy track,” but also any employee who has priorities outside working 80 hours a week for his entire career.

The bottom line, however, remains a fundamental fairness within each office — and, just as important, employees’ belief in that fairness. That’s one of the reasons that seeing even just a few women rise to the highest levels matters so much. “If you’re not happy in what you’re doing, you’re not going to stay,” Willis explains. “One of the of the things that causes unhappiness if the perception of unfairness. … If you’re happy with what you’re doing, you work your way around the roadblocks. if you’re unhappy, those road blocks seem like big walls.”

Holcombe, the Philadelphia architect laid off in 2009, found road block after road block when she applied for jobs. For now, she’s set aside the dream of working for a big firm, or even of launching off in the business by herself. “I’ve moved on from trying to start my own firm for now,” she told me. “I have 30 years left to practice, so there’s no rush for me.”

“The term ‘old boys club’ is another way of saying that that architectural culture is patriarchal,” Willis explains. “And the patriarchy is interested — very interested — in preserving the design aspect of architecture for men only.” If she is successful, then perhaps little girls won’t have to count on Architect Barbie being their only role model in the field.

Photo: EDHAR/Shutterstock