It’s a Man’s World?
Why aren’t more women practicing architecture? An excerpt from the second installment of Lance Hosey’s Huffington Post blog series.
From Women in (Green) Architecture Now:
This month’s cover story in Architectural Record, “Women in Architecture Now,” paints a sorry picture of the profession. While the number of women in architecture schools has doubled over the past two decades, and enrollment now is about evenly split between men and women, the industry has trouble retaining and rewarding women after they graduate. Among practicing architects, men still outnumber women four to one and earn nearly 30 percent more on average. According to Sarah William Goldhagen, the article’s author, the disparities represent both lost opportunity for women and diminished talent in the profession. But she shies away from the most interesting topic: “Whether a woman qua woman brings anything special to architecture is a tricky, uncomfortable question. So let’s leave it aside….” This sidesteps one of the greatest potential benefits to gender equity–by and large, women are greener.
As Kira Gould and I show in Women in Green: Voices of Sustainable Design (Ecotone, 2007), statistically women are much more likely than men to support environmental causes–through voting, volunteering, activism, advocacy, charity, recycling, consumer choices, lifestyle habits, business decisions, and investments. In fact, in the U.S., the average carbon footprint of women is considerably lower than that of the men, who are more skeptical about climate change, although they understand the science less. By virtually every measure, women are smarter about and better for the environment.
Read the rest here.
Image via RTKL
CallisonRTKL
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What a great post! Food for thought for sure! If I were a man (and thank god I’m not ) I would see this as a challenge to be more green!
Lance, the reason women are reluctant to practice Architecture is two folds. One those like my wife who has a Master in Architecture from PENN worked for some firms over the years, then left when our first son was born. She never returned,
Two her top complaints is about most Architects think they know everything and most aren’t open to new ways of thinking. Every male architect she has run into has been a Frank Lloyd, Michael Graves wannabe.
This is why women don’t practice architecture.
Andrew, thanks for the comment. This was part of Sarah Goldhagen’s point in the Architectural Record article, as well. In “Women in Green,” Kira Gould and I found that a large number of the nearly 300 people we interviewed offered similar anecdotes about the profession’s cultural obstacles around collaboration. Here’s how Sally Helgesen put it to us in the book: “The idea of the ‘master architect’ is very much about one man’s vision. That can be very dangerous because it’s responsible for much of the dysfunction we see in our cities—it exalts the individuality of that person above what the community needs and wants. ‘Visionary’ speaks of a tyrant.” It may have less to do with individual men and more to do with the habits of a culture (admittedly traditionally dominated by men) that focuses on individuality.