The Ladder has a Broken Rung
“Women are demanding more from work, and they’re leaving their companies in unprecedented numbers to get it,” McKinsey’s 2022 Women in the Workplace report finds. The report describes a “broken rung” for women on the ladder to leadership and states, “Women leaders are as ambitious as men, but at many companies face headwinds that make it harder to advance.”
Woman climbs ladder in NYC, 1918. (Western Newspaper Union)
Women in architecture hold proportionally fewer leadership positions than their male counterparts. While 36 percent of licensed architects identify as female, just 23 percent of firm partners and principals do, according to the AIA’s 2022 Firm Survey Report. This 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. Among twelve impacts of biases identified in the study, two are “Clear path for advancement” and “Fairness of promotions.”
Although there is increasing gender parity among newly-licensed architects—NCARB reports nearly 49 percent of new architects identified as women in 2021—the profession needs to fix the broken rung on the ladder to leadership, as well as other biases, in order to retain these and other female architects.
To move the profession to greater gender equality, the Women in the Workplace report authors suggest firms focus broadly on “getting more women into leadership and retaining the women leaders they already have.” While changing an office’s culture to achieve this requires sustained action, interrupting biases can start immediately, Joan C. Williams and Sky Mihaylo write in the Harvard Business Review. The authors suggest the following interruptions to correct for bias in promotion:
“Clarify evaluation criteria and focus on performance, not potential.”
“Separate performance from potential and personality from skill sets.”
“Level the playing field with respect to self-promotion.”
“Explain how training, promotion, and pay decisions will be made, and follow those rules.”
Unfavorable opportunities for advancement are just one reason women leave firms, or leave the profession altogether. Inequitable pay—female architects earn on average just 78% of what their male colleagues do--, unrewarding work assignments, microaggressions, and other inequities are among the other reasons women walk away.
The AIA/The Center for WorkLife Law study includes a number of tools for interrupting biases in architecture firms. The AIA’s Guides for Equitable Practice offer additional tools for creating a more equitable workplace. Read up! The future of the profession depends on it.
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