Theodosia Reynolds Beacham (c. 1853 - ?) of Kalamazoo, Michigan, traveled the United States constructing railways. Her achievements were documented in the first decade of the twentieth century in numerous articles that followed headlines such as “Women who Make Money in Odd Ways” and “Builds Railroad in the Wilderness: Feminine Contractor Bosses Gangs of Rough Laborers and Wins Respect.”

The public found Beacham’s profitability as remarkable as her gender. One journalist wrote, “It was learned from other railroad sources that she makes $40,000 [more than $1.4 million in 2024] and upward annually….Mrs. Beacham says her biggest contract was with the Tennessee Central Railroad in 1900. She made about $75,000 or $80,000 on that, and it took nearly a year to do it.” Beacham also worked on the Tidewater Railway in Virginia (where she built from Kilby Station westward for five miles, “a relatively small job to Mrs. Beacham”), Old Dominion Railway, and Southern Railway, among others.

Women make up 34 percent of licensed architects but are just 24 percent of firm principals and partners, according to The Business of Architecture: AIA Firm Survey Report 2024. The percentage of licensed architects identifying as female has declined two percent since 2022, while their representation in firm leadership increased just one percent since the AIA’s 2022 Firm Survey Report.

The 2024 report found that only about a third of architecture firms surveyed have policies regarding equitable pay or reducing bias in performance reviews, hiring and recruitment. The lack of attention to equality likely contributes to why women, especially women of color, are far less satisfied with their architectural careers at their current employers than white men are, as a 2021 AIA/The Center for WorkLife Law investigation into bias in the architecture profession found.

In its announcement of the May 1930 opening of La Posada, the Fred Harvey hotel and restaurant located between the railroad tracks and Route 66 in Winslow, Arizona, National Hotel Reporter called the building “unique in every detail.” The article continued, “The idea, as carried out by Miss [Mary] E. J. Colter in designing and decorating, is that in inaccessible localities…it was impossible to follow exact styles and materials used in Spain.” The result, the reporter wrote, was “a style peculiar to itself and the attempt has been made to create such a building so found in ‘La Posada.’”

While Colter was engaged in preliminary design and decorating, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway’s architects and engineers produced the working drawings for construction for the building. When complete, the railway owned and Colter’s employer Fred Harvey operated La Posada. The contract for construction, including the adjacent depot, was awarded to an El Paso company in April 1929, with a bid of approximately $600,000. Later reporting said that, with furnishings, the project cost about a million dollars.

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Alice Durkin (c. 1875 – 1934) built schools, hospitals, and other large-scale projects in the New York City area. “It is always the big work that attracts me,” Durkin told the New York Times. “I like the municipal contracts best, perhaps, but then I like anything big.” She also liked competing with and beating men on the big projects. “I know lots of them must be jealous, just because I am a woman. And I do enjoy showing them that doesn’t make any difference—that a woman’s work must be considered just as work, the same as theirs!”

Durkin’s interest in building began after high school when she joined a contractor’s office as a clerk. Because of her aptitude in math and her fascination with specifications and blueprints, she quickly progressed to preparing estimates for bidding. She spent eight years with her employer and became his “right-hand man.” Durkin described her mentor as “astonished” when she announced she was leaving his company to compete against him, although she said they remained “good friends.”

Gender bias is often unconscious, yet it permeates our society including our workplaces. While firm leaders must implement structural changes to make performance reviews, tasks assigned, recruiting, hiring, promotion, and pay more equitable, all people must take actions to mitigate bias.

 “Gender allyship” is when men promote gender equality and equity through “supportive and collaborative relationships, acts of sponsorship, and public advocacy in order to drive systemic change,” Carmen Acton writes in the Harvard Business Review (HBR). A male ally confronting bias is more effective than a woman confronting it, researchers Laura K. Hildebrand et al found. This is because of “perceptions of target group confronters as complainers and overly sensitive, whereas dominant group ally confrontations are perceived as more legitimate and appropriate,” they write in the European Journal of Social Psychology.

In October 1911, women in California obtained full suffrage. Federal suffrage was not achieved nationally until 1920 when the 19th amendment was enacted.  In addition to California, in 1911 women’s state voting rights were equal to men’s only in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, and Washington.  Women in 28 states could vote in municipal and school elections that year.

The women’s suffrage movement in the US began before decorator and future architect Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) was born. The same year that California granted full suffrage to women, Colter, then 42, moved to California. She moved from Seattle, where Colter had developed the decorations department of a department store. Since Washington had full suffrage a year earlier, voting rights were not the motivation for the move.

Laura Hayes (1867 – 1956) came in third in the competition for designing the Woman’s Building for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1891. A newspaper article described the difficult decision for the Exposition’s Board of Lady Managers between winner Sophia Hayden and second-place finisher Lois L. Howe and made note of their architectural training. The article did not mention any of Hayes’s qualifications, although she had completed two years of college. It did report that, at the time of the competition, Hayes was the private secretary of the President of the Board of Lady Managers, Mrs. Potter Palmer. Hayes’s entry was a surprise to Mrs. Palmer. The third place prize award was $250, or roughly $8,650 today.

Hayes was also listed as the designer of the Columbian seal later exhibited in the Woman’s Building. She received the most acclaim for writing the book Three Girls in a Flat which was published in 1892. Hayes co-authored the book with friends Enid Yandell (a sculptor) and Jean Loughborough. It was the semi-autobiographical story of three young women making preparations for the Exposition, with a focus on the work of the Board of Lady Managers. A reviewer described it as “a charming booklet, and it remains extremely doubtful whether the Columbian Exposition gets any more potent or persuasive advertising than is contained between its covers.”

While workplace relationships with high-status colleagues can help in advancing careers, decades of research has found that building these relationships is more challenging for women than for men.

One challenge is that confidence and assertiveness are typically required for lower-status workers to make these connections. Owing to gender bias, women exhibiting these traits are often perceived as pushy or arrogant. Self-promoting or refraining from doing so to avoid backlash are both obstacles to women creating strong collaborative connections with high-status individuals.

 Since its opening in 1905 near the El Tovar hotel, Hopi House at the Grand Canyon has sold hand-crafted objects made by American Indians. In its early days, Hopi House also housed some of the indigenous people who worked as artist-demonstrators in the building.

The hospitality company Fred Harvey, which worked closely with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway on their Grand Canyon developments, managed the Hopi House. Like the train depot and El Tovar, Hopi House was built on part of the 20 acres that was the railway’s right-of-way next to the Grand Canyon’s rim.

Emily Elizabeth Smith Holman (1854 – 1925) practiced architecture in Philadelphia from about 1892 until she retired in 1914. During that time she designed numerous projects including opera houses, theaters, stores, hotels, and many homes. She published at least six plan books of cottages, houses, and camps, and designed projects in every U.S. state and in Canada, Jamaica, England, and France.

Holman got her training in an architect’s office where she was hired as a clerk. “It wasn’t two weeks, however, before she felt that if she tried very hard and kept her eyes and ears open very wide she too could become an architect,” a 1915 newspaper article recounted. In time, Holman’s role in the office grew, until “Finally she realized that in everything but name she was really and truly an architect.” At that point she left the firm and opened her own office.

Promoting your accomplishments can be important to landing a job, advancing your career, or earning awards and other recognitions. But gender norms require that women behave modestly. This can result in women struggling to self-promote, whether from having internalized the message regarding modesty or from seeking to avoid the backlash that might occur if they depart from societal expectations, researchers have found.

Read on for strategies to reduce the struggle and neutralize the risk of backlash.

A luxury hotel opened near the south rim of the Grand Canyon in January 1905. “El Tovar is probably the most expensively constructed and appointed log house in America,” The Hotel Monthly declared in 1908, while going on to call it “the quaintest hostelry on the continent.” The hotel, built by the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railway for a reported $250,000, was designed by architect Charles Whittlesey and operated by the renowned Fred Harvey hospitality company.

Publicity material from the railway described the hotel as a combination of a Swiss chalet and Norwegian villa. It could accommodate 250 guests at a cost of $3.50 to $4.50 per room, meals included. In spite of its remote location, the hotel was described as offering “[m]etropolitan luxuries and services.” These included electric lighting, steam heat, sanitary plumbing, and water reserves in case of fire. During the summer of 1902, Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) had worked with Whittlesey in Albuquerque on his design of the hotel.

Emily Butterfield (1894 – 1958), the first female architect licensed in Michigan, designed multiple buildings; showed her art in two states; and wrote two books. She earned her Bachelor of Architecture degree from Syracuse University in 1907. While a student, Butterfield worked for an architecture firm in Syracuse. She was also a founding member of the sorority Alpha Gamma Delta in 1904.

After graduating, Butterfield returned to the Detroit area where her father Wells D. Butterfield had an architecture firm. In 1907, she earned her architecture license. Butterfield worked independently until around 1914 when she joined her father’s firm. Around 1917, they established the firm Butterfield and Butterfield together.

Male-dominated organizations with better representation of women in their senior ranks as compared to their peers might unintentionally overlook gender diversity at more junior levels, researchers Priyanka Dwivedi and Lionel Paolella write in the Academy of Management Journal.

That is because when progress toward more equal gender representation is visible in leadership, organizations may become less concerned about diversity efforts firm-wide. This complacency can lead to fewer resources being devoted to mitigating gender biases in recruiting and hiring at all levels. This tendency harms not only the female candidates who don’t get the jobs; it also harms the firms who don’t get the female candidates.

Artist, decorator, and architect Mary E. J. Colter’s decades-long association with Southwestern hospitality company Fred Harvey began in 1902. That summer, she traveled to Albuquerque during her summer break from teaching art in St. Paul, Minnesota. One of her tasks was to help arrange displays of goods made by Native Americans in Fred Harvey’s museum and salesroom that would be named the Indian Building.

Colter likely had the opportunity to work for with Fred Harvey that summer owing to her acquaintance with Henrietta Hamilton, a collector who the Fred Harvey company hired to help set up the Indian Building. Hamilton was recognized as having accumulated one of the best basket collections in Seattle, said to include baskets from every tribe in the United States. Company founder Fred Harvey’s daughter Minnie Huckel and her husband John Huckel were also avid collectors of goods made by Native Americans. The couple fostered the creation of an Indian Department at Fred Harvey which was led by John Huckel.

Architect Nelle Elizabeth Peters (1884 – 1974; née Nichols) was well-known in the 1920s for her efficient, economical, practical, and pleasing designs of numerous low- and mid-rise apartment and hotel buildings in Kansas City, Missouri and beyond.

In 1927, Building Age called Peters’ Ambassador Hotel “one of the best recent examples of a combined apartment and commercial hotel.” Without mentioning the architect by name, the publication lauded the flexibility of the single room units, calling Peters’ design a “delight” and “a revelation to designers of this type of building.” Peters’ room plans included a closet designed to receive a “disappearing bed”—a bed that could rotate to vertical and roll out of sight—thereby transforming the single-room units from a bedroom into a parlor.

When discrimination is overt, we recognize it and call it out for what it is. But when discrimination is ambiguous, it is harder to take action against it. It can be more troubling to some than obvious discrimination, a recent study by Laura Doering, et al, found. It is also more common. In the researchers’ survey of professional women, 74 percent had experienced an ambiguous incident while 64 percent had experienced obvious discrimination.

Examples of overt gender discrimination include offering women lower pay than equally or less qualified men, sexual harassment, and holding female employees to a different standard than males in performance reviews. All of these biases impede women’s careers. They can also be identified and addressed.

In contrast, biases that are ambiguous are not uniquely attributable to discrimination. The receiver of these biases might wonder whether they were passed over for promotion, receive lesser work assignments, or are frequently interrupted in meetings owing to their gender of for some other reason. Do they need to work harder and speak louder? Or are they being harmed by systemic biases?

Architect and decorator Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) had a life-long interest in the arts and cultures of Indigenous peoples. After 1902 when she began working for the Southwestern hospitality company Fred Harvey, Colter’s opportunities for collecting grew. Whether from her travels in search of furniture for a hotel, in researching Ancestral Puebloan architectural precedents, while attending Inter-Tribal Ceremonials, or in one of Fred Harvey’s “curio” shops, Colter added to her collections of baskets, pots, and jewelry during the course of her career. By the time Colter retired in 1948, her collection of Hopi, Navajo, and other Native American jewelry included more than 500 pieces, Arnold Berke writes.

Colter kept notes of her acquisitions describing where she purchased them and what she had learned about them from the seller. Her collections spanned centuries. While she admired the artistry of the jewelry, she also enjoyed wearing the pieces. She was known to have a ring on every finger and sometimes on her thumbs, too. She also wore bracelets, necklaces, hair combs, and sometimes even a stomacher.

When Joel “Joe” A. Roberts (1874 – 1916) of Mobile, Alabama, married attorney Lee J. Ninde in 1900, she apparently had no thought of designing homes, “her only task to be happy and to make happiness for others with those social gifts with which she was so richly endowed,” a newspaper reported after her death. But after moving to Fort Wayne, Indiana, to her new husband’s family estate “Wildwood,” Ninde found she would prefer not to live in the family mansion.

Although Ninde had no architectural training, she designed a cottage for herself and her husband. It would be the first of many starter homes that she would design. She was working at a time when most modestly-priced homes were described as charmless boxes and was committed to doing better. Ninde believed in designing with economical materials employed appealingly for durability and efficiency. She also believed in admitting a “volume of fresh air in summer, and at all seasons the bringing in of the out of doors,” she wrote in 1914.