The Best Woman For The Job
Tuesday, December 29, 2009 at 11:08AM by Theresa Dias
It’s no secret that architecture has traditionally been a male-dominated field. When I was a student, the proportions were probably close to equal, and thus we all assumed that we were on the cusp of change. However, in the profession, it’s another story – women are without a doubt in the minority of the over-30 (and certainly the over-40) age group.
Regardless, how has this affected me as a professional? The truth is, not too much.
As a result of being a housing designer, I find myself working with women clients every day. For whatever reason, an inordinate number of project managers for non-profit developers are also women, and so that may in fact be an advantage for me. Certainly when it comes to single family homeowners, the wife is frequently the one with a more vocal role in the renovation process – and as a fellow wife and mother, I can relate well to her concerns. I find that being a woman actually lets me connect easily with my clients on a friendly level.
I don’t mean to imply there haven’t been disadvantages. While fellow designers give me commensurate respect for my talents and skills, I find that older construction managers sometimes do not take me seriously at first. I’ve noticed that my concerns don’t always get addressed in meetings, or my questions may hang in the air unanswered. This is when I have to go out of my way to “prove” myself – to talk up a similar project experience, or state a professional opinion out loud even when I think it’s not new information – just to show that I do, in fact, understand the conversation at hand. Another technique I use to help them perceive me as a ‘peer’ is to adopt a more masculine body language – to spread out in my chair as opposed to sitting with my hands folded. So far these methods have served me well enough, but I’m aware there are times when I do have to go an extra mile just to get equal respect.
This double standard becomes apparent to women in the profession early on. I knew a talented fellow student who found that her professor was consistently giving her lower marks than the men in the class – even though my friend was certain that her work was in fact better. When she confronted the professor, the response was, “yes, I am harder on you – and it’s BECAUSE you’re a woman. Out in the real world you will have to work twice as hard as a man to get recognized.” I have to suspect that experience contributed to her eventual decision to leave the program – after all she was one of the most talented and hard-working first-years in the ranks. And ‘out in the real world,’ I believe the double standard happily is not quite what this professor remembered.
Most of the younger people who have approached me for mentoring and professional advice have been women, although I think this has just been a numbers game. I find that a lot my younger counterparts in residential architecture are in fact women like me, and so I wonder, is this true for hospital design? for institutional building design? Is the high number of younger women designers a phenomenon for residential design only, or industry wide? And will they stay with this profession as time goes by? So far history says 'no,' that a high number of them will change careers. This guy has his theories, but I’m not sure he’s right about the “why.” Clearly, though, it remains a fact that there are few women principals of design firms.
Years later as a principal in a woman-owned firm, I give equal credit to my own dogged determination as well as blind good luck in getting here. What do YOU do to overcome a perceived disadvantage in your workplace?
Reader Comments (8)
I’ve read several articles lately about women in the workforce, not just, architecture, that I have found fascinating and disturbing at the same time.
One was a really good story last week on msn.com looking at women writers, comparing how many there were, what they wrote about, and how many actually were published in the 1960s and now. There were shockingly few differences. It quoted the top 4 jobs for women, all of which were service oriented jobs; one of those had changed in the past 50 years and it still remains in the service industry.
The other written piece that I’m thinking of is a newsletter I have been getting for a couple of weeks now from monster.com that is specifically aimed at career women. I would say that 90% or more of the articles are things that could easily appear in any popular magazine at the checkout counter; it has articles about what to not wear to work (no Ugg boots, fanny packs, or hoodies), pictures of professional hair styles, and advice about what not to put on your facebook page (pictures of you at last weekend’s kegger). Maybe I need to consider the source, but I was certainly surprised that this was the level of discussion in a supposedly professional oriented newsletter.
As far as architecture goes, it’s interesting. While I have certainly been caught up in some office politics, I have not felt like they were a result of gender, but of other people’s agendas. I have not ever felt like more, or less, was expected of me as a women in the profession. When I got to my last office, one of the things I was impressed with when I walked around the office during the interview was the number of women in the office. However, after I started working there, I realized that while the office hovered around a 50-50 makeup of men and women, there were very few women above a job captain roll. And the couple of women who were at the PM or Director level where not perceived as nice people.
So it seems you may be right...while things were pretty equal in college, it seems we are still working to get there in the professional world.
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