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2 responses to “The slow crawl up”

1. 

   Guy

   May 23, 2011

   Great post – thank you. After attending the NZIA conference last week, it was again rammed home to me just how much of an old boys club the profession is – as equally hard for the young and inexperienced to gain a foothold is, as it is for women to get by in as well. Out of a total of 18 speakers at the conference, only one was a woman – Christina van Bohemen, and she was also just about the only speaker with hair that was neither silver nor absent in entirety. Certainly not a lot of female role models on show.

   Related to this is the awful statistics given out by the brilliant speaker Eric Cesal, on which we will post more shortly. Let’s just say: an increase of 760% unemployment amongst architects. Ponder on that….

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2. 

   Guy

   May 23, 2011

   In a related matter, I was reading the Huffington Post the other day and found an interesting article – or, to be precise, the comments after it were more interesting than the article itself, as to who the top US women architects were, and why there may not be that many of them:

   If you’re interested, here is the link:
   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-mallory/top-10-buildings-women-de_b_844239.html#s260832&title=The_SOFT_HOUSE

   While there are some comments of typical banal sexist male style, such as Runtime AI who says that the reasons are:
   “When it comes to spatial, my wife is sorely lacking. And she knows it. So the answer is, lack of spatial.”

   I suspect that Runtime AI is not necessarily a sexist pig, but certainly is a computer bore. Maybe even a boar. There are also more erudite and thoughtful comments such as LaughingMan who says:
   “My architecture undergrad and Graduate classes had 60/50 ratio in favor of women and most of the girls were just as creatively skilled and capable if not more, in most cases, than the guys were.
   The problem is what happens in the profession between graduation and trying to get licensure. It’s a brutal, punishing, and (thanks to the incompetence of the NCARB, and AIA) ridiculously convoluted process that sadly leaves little room or capacity for those wanting to have families or provide for them.
   And then there’s the rampant sexism and old-boys-club nepotism that happens in the profession .
   None of any of this is ever appealing to women who know they have a limited window after finishing school during which they can start and have a family and comfortably provide for them.
   If you ask me, the main reason would be that women in architecture are just smarter than their male counterparts and figure out early enough to get out of the profession while they still have the most productive part of their lifetime available to them. By the time their former male classmates figure it out, it’s just too late and they’re just in too deep to be able to comfortably leave without losing a lot.
   Simply put, it’s not a great profession to be in (just ask any architect now during the recession – depression for them) if you’re a woman or a minority.
   Not even remotely close. ”

   I suspect that this is more of the real reason – it is on the whole no longer a profession with masses of sexism, although a mild dose of sexist behaviour still permeates the older generation – but that it is more that it really is a ridiculously cyclical profession, tied as it is to the vagaries of the almighty mortgage dollar.

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