LAST month, shocking data from The Architects’ Journal’s first Women in Architecture survey showed almost two-thirds of women believe the building industry has yet to accept the authority of the female architect.
The results from the survey make for depressing reading for women in architecture, and don’t exactly make for an enlightened.
For us female architects, this is not new information. I know several women in the region who can reel off their personal, professional experiences that reinforce the survey’s dismal findings – most especially the discrimination they face after returning to work from maternity leave – and they are not alone.
Almost 700 people completed the survey, open to all women working in the built environment. Respondents were asked about challenges in their careers, as well as factors such as sexual discrimination, role models, pay and having children.
Eighty per cent of women thought having children put them at a disadvantage in architecture. In contrast, only 8% felt raising a family would harm their male counterparts’ careers.
To some of us, this was no surprise. I know of professional contemporaries whom, upon returning to work after maternity leave have faced considerable demotions, outright refusal to assign them to projects, or working conditions made so difficult or inflexible – for example relocating them to remote offices – that it makes their jobs unworkable. Fortunately for me I have an enlightened and flexible employer, others are not so lucky.
Seven years training means starting a family can be challenging enough for young architects without the prospect of barriers to their career in the form of discrimination. This active prejudice could be one of the reasons why our profession has found it so difficult to achieve equality compared with other allied careers such as medicine and law.
The North East has been hit harder than most other regions with the recession, and as one respondent from the survey noted: ‘The recession will have a greater impact on women – as the profession finds it difficult to accommodate part-time working, a more important issue for women with young children.’
With the economic climate, and the short term outlook not much brighter, pay parity in architecture looks less likely. As individuals, we can only do so much to combat these inequalities and illegal discrimination. The RIBA, as the professional body representing architects, should be doing more to tackle these unfair imbalances – 82% of the women who took the survey agree with me.
Hopefully the results of this survey will serve as a wake-up call for the RIBA, and for the wider industry. View the results on www.architectsjournal.com
For information on Constructing Excellence in the North East, call Catriona Lingwood, on 0191 374 0233 or catriona@cene.org.uk.
Christine Thornley, associate director at Mackeller Architecture Limited.
