Just as women do more unpaid work at home than men, at work they do more tasks with “low-promotability” than men—tasks that benefit the organization but are unlikely to advance their careers. “[W]omen, more than men, volunteer, are asked to volunteer, and accept requests to volunteer for such tasks,” economist Linda Babock (et. al) found. “If women hold tasks that are less promotable than those held by men, then women will progress more slowly in organizations.”

Both men and women judge women who turn down such tasks more harshly than they do men taking the same action. Both men and women also think more highly of men who accept these assignments than they do of women who accept the same assignments, psychologists Madeline E. Heilman and Julie J. Chen found.

Ever wonder what architect Mary E. J. Colter (1869 - 1958) looked like in action? The Grand Canyon Museum Collection has assembled a short (less than 4 minute) film from clips culled from Grand Canyon National Park archives. It includes Colter at the Desert View Watchtower construction site circa 1931 as well as more whimsical moments, like her sharing a smoke with a Harvey Car decal or riding shotgun on a treacherous road. It’s well worth watching, whether you are a Colter fan or merely interested in a glimpse of the past.

Ray Eames (1912 – 1988), born Bernice Alexandra Kaiser, was a painter, sculptor, graphic artist, filmmaker, and designer of houses, furniture, exhibitions, toys, and more. She is known for her work with husband and architect Charles Eames and their employees at the Eames Office. “I don't know how to separate anything,” Ray Eames said when asked to define her role on projects; the office’s work was truly collaborative.

Charles Eames (1907 – 1978) was the public face of the firm. This, combined with the assumption that the man was the lone genius, meant he received a disproportionate share of the credit. Charles Eames constantly emphasized the importance of Ray’s contributions, making statements like “she is equally responsible with me for everything.” But his attempts to set the record straight were often ignored or dismissed, as in this 1977 interview:

Men typically speak more than women in meetings. As the dominant speakers, it is their opinions that are disproportionately heard. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant writes, “People expect men to be assertive and ambitious but women to be caring and other-oriented. A man who runs his mouth and holds court is a confident expert. A woman who talks is aggressive or pushy.”

Yet even though women spend less time talking, they are more frequently interrupted, usually by men. “In a meta-analysis of 43 studies, men were more likely than women to talk over others—especially in intrusive ways that silenced the rest of the room and demonstrated their dominance,” Grant writes.

One hundred years ago in June 1922, the construction of Phantom Ranch on the floor of the Grand Canyon was completed. Although the Santa Fe Railway expanded the rustic tourist resort in 1928, the camp initially consisted of four guest cabins, a dining and kitchen building, and accessory structures. Located a vertical mile below the south rim’s Grand Canyon Village and accessed by a steep, winding trail, materials used in construction had to be delivered by pack animals or carried on foot.

Mary E. J. Colter’s design called for the walls, piers, fireplaces, and chimneys to be built with stone found near the site. This not only reduced the weight of materials to be packed in, it also contributed to how harmoniously the structures sit in the landscape. A journalist visiting Phantom Ranch not long after it opened wrote, “Working with the native red Supai sandstone of the canyon walls for building material, Miss Coulter [sic] accomplished something…perfect [in its] fitness to its surroundings.”

“Miss Martini is a very Goliath in persistence,” S. M. Franklin wrote in a 1914 profile of the architect Elisabeth A. Martini (1886 – 1984). Although this observation was made regarding Martini’s insistence that architects from whom she sought work explain why her gender was a disqualifying factor, it could have as easily been said about her determination to fund and receive training, find employment, or pursue her career.

Martini was born in Brooklyn in 1896 to German immigrant parents. Her father was a Congregational minister. Martini attended high school in Fitchburg, Massachusetts before taking classes at the Pratt Institute and Columbia University in New York. She partly funded her tuition by working as a chambermaid, teaching German to children, and selling books.

Even wonderful workplaces with congenial colleagues do not make a family. In fact, branding a business as a “family” is toxic, according to leadership development trainer Joshua Luna, and employers should stop doing it.

“The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, lies in its loyalty to each other,” Mario Puzo wrote in The Godfather. So how is family loyalty bad when applied to the workplace? It implies that employees should prioritize work over the rest of their lives. Ultimately this can result in poor morale, burnout, and accompanying drops in productivity. At the same time they are over-working, employees might be made to feel they are not being a team player if they ask for reasonable compensation.

Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) was responsible for the interior design of the Fred Harvey restaurant and cocktail lounge in Los Angeles’s Union Station. The station opened in May 1939 when the era of passenger rail travel was already winding down.

The new station was commissioned in 1933 to consolidate the terminals of three railways. Consulting architects John and Donald B. Parkinson, a father and son team, developed the design of the station before handing it off to the architects from the three railroads to complete. The design was a blend of Mission, Spanish Colonial Revival, Art Deco, and Streamline Moderne.

Brooklyn-born Fay Kellogg (1871-1918) became an architect because of her father’s objection to her studying to become a doctor. After leaving medical school, Kellogg studied drawing and math for two years and at the Pratt Institute for one year. After a year of being refused employment owing to her gender, she found work with R. L. Davis. She moved to Beaux-Arts practitioners Carrère and Hastings for a year before traveling to Paris for further study.

Although the École des Beaux-Arts was not admitting women, Kellogg did secure a place in the studio of Marcel de Mancos where she worked on the same projects as the male students. She was not allowed to sit for the entrance examination. She asked a member of the chamber of deputies to introduce a bill admitting women to the École. He did so and the bill passed, but not in time for Kellogg to attend. When asked in 1908 what her greatest work was, Kellogg said, “The opening of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris to women architects.”

For female workers, having female role models increases motivation, job satisfaction, and engagement. Further, when a negative stereotype exists about a group, it negatively affects the performance of members of that group even in settings where individuals are not exposed to prejudiced behavior. The presence of positive role models that are members of the group has been found to be an inoculation against this “stereotype threat.”

What to do, then, in situations where role models are too few? Only 21 percent of AIA member architecture firm principals and partners are women, according to the 2020 AIA Firm Survey report. Some women might have to look outside of their firms, outside their gender identity, or even outside their profession to find role models.

Mary E. J. Colter (1869-1958) was well-known as a decorator as well as an architect during her nearly four-decade career with the Fred Harvey hospitality company. In addition to designing the interiors of multiple hotels, dining rooms, and lunch rooms, Colter also decorated several restaurants and retail spaces in the Union Stations in Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Kansas City.

Kansas City’s Union Station, designed by Chicago architect Jarvis Hunt with interiors by Colter, opened in October 1914, a few months after World War I started in Europe. Fred Harvey operated all the retail and dining spaces in the building and established its corporate headquarters on the second floor of the station.

Marion Mahony Griffin (1871-1961) was a founding member of the Prairie School and did significant projects in the US, Australia, and India, but she is not well-known today. This is partly because she was a master collaborator who contributed to the careers of Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Burley Griffin. She was also an extraordinary delineator who created many iconic renderings for both men.

Marion Lucy Mahony graduated from MIT in 1894 with a degree in Architecture, the second woman to do so. Mahony returned to her hometown of Chicago and went to work for her cousin Dwight Perkins. In 1895 she became Frank Lloyd Wright’s first employee and in in 1898 she was among the first group to sit for the Illinois state licensure exam. She passed, likely becoming the first woman in the US to earn an architecture license.

“I cannot, in whole conscience, recommend architecture as a profession for girls,” architect and Dean of MIT’s architecture school Pietro Belluschi said in the 1950s. This statement is found at the end of a brochure titled, “Should you be an Architect?” His career advice first ran as a public service advertisement in popular magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal and Collier’s before New York Life Insurance reprinted it in 1959 as a stand-alone brochure.

In the article, Belluschi directed all his remarks toward boys until the last paragraph when, after allowing that some women have done well in architecture, he said, “[I]t takes an exceptional girl to make a go of it. If she insisted on becoming an architect, I would try to dissuade her. If she still insists, she may be that exceptional one.”

“The greenest building is the one already built,” historic preservationists say today. Although it is unlikely that Mary E. J. Colter was motivated by sustainability goals in 1935, her preservation of several buildings on the Bright Angel Lodge and Cabins site at Grand Canyon reduced the project’s impact on the environment.

As part of the new project, Colter remodeled the existing Powell Lodge and preserved two nineteenth-century buildings. One of these, the Bucky O’Neill Cabin, was built of notched logs in 1895 and expanded in 1900. After Bucky O’Neill’s demise in the Spanish-American War, the cabin was used for many years as the lobby for the old Bright Angel Hotel. Most of this hotel and camp would be demolished to make way for the new lodge and cabins, but Colter remodeled and added on to the Bucky O’Neill Cabin, keeping it as part of the new complex.

Julia Morgan (1872 – 1957) designed more than 700 buildings in a range of styles during her long career. Her projects included homes, churches, clubs, hotels, schools, colleges, warehouses, and other commercial buildings. Her most well-known project is probably Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California, the estate she designed for newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst over a period of more than twenty years.

Morgan was born in San Francisco in 1872 and earned a degree in Civil Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley in 1894. She began working as a drafter for architect Bernard Maybeck who encouraged her to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. When the École opened evening classes to women in 1897, Morgan headed to Paris.

“Women can paint at an easel, but physically they are quite unfit to work at a large drawing board,” an editorial in London’s The Building News opined in 1908. The Western Architect reprinted this opinion from across the pond, apparently finding the idea that reaching over a large drawing board “is physically more than any woman should be called upon to bear” compelling enough to share with its readers. It is unclear who these gentlemen thought operated laundry-wringers, labored with men in the fields, worked in the chain factory, or performed all manner of other physically demanding tasks.

The concern of these male architects for women’s physical comfort and womanliness is an example of benevolent sexism. Unlike hostile or overt sexism, benevolent sexism is couched in terms that seem courteous, protective, or gallant.

Mary Colter incorporated methods that today are considered sustainable in the design and construction of the Bright Angel Lodge and Cabins at the Grand Canyon in 1935. These methods include minimizing site disruption, using locally extracted materials, repurposing waste materials, preserving and reusing existing structures, and tying the sanitary plumbing into a water reclamation system. These strategies were employed for aesthetic or practical rather than environmental reasons.

Colter designed the Bright Angel Lodge and Cabins in the Grand Canyon Village as an informal, rustic village. The main lodge included the lobby, shops, restaurant, kitchen, and offices. The lodge was connected by covered walkways to seven guesthouses. There were also fifteen free-standing cabins of one to four units each and several small utility buildings. Construction began in 1935 with one contractor for the main lodge building and another for the cabins and other smaller structures.

Beverly Lorraine Greene (1915 – 1957) is believed to be the first African-American woman in the US to become a licensed architect, in 1942. She graduated with bachelor and master of science degrees in Architecture and Architectural Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1936 and 1937 respectively. Her employers included Isadore Rosenfield, Edward Durrell Stone, and Marcel Breuer.

While at the University of Illinois, Greene was the only female and only Black member of the student chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers. A Chicago native, Greene worked for the Chicago Housing Authority before moving to New York in 1944. There she accepted a scholarship to Columbia University where she was awarded a Master of Architecture degree in 1945. Greene was a member of the Council for the Advancement of the Negro in Architecture, as were her three New York employers.

“There was the awful problem or prospect of matrimony, which upset so many plans and calculations,” commented architect Leonard Stokes in 1902 after listening to a speech about the suitability of women to practice architecture. “As a woman was expected to look after her house…he did not see how she could, as an architect, look after her practice as well.”

Successful professional women in past centuries recognized the challenges of maintaining a career after marriage, with many choosing to remain single in order to pursue their professional passions. Today the “awful problem of matrimony” is less awful and more equal—but it is unequal all the same. Inequity in unpaid work—cleaning, cooking, laundry, etc.—exists in the homes of opposite-sex couples regardless of their ages, according to a Gallup report. It is a persistent rather than a generational problem, and it reinforces the lower wages for paid work for women.

Mary Colter included a number of sustainable strategies in her design for the Bright Angel Lodge and Cabins that opened in Grand Canyon Village in the mid-1930s. Although these strategies were incorporated primarily for practical or aesthetic reasons rather than out of environmental concerns, they foreshadowed methods used in today’s sustainable buildings. This post will focus on strategies related to the buildings’ site design.

The Bright Angel Lodge and Cabins are located near the south rim of the Grand Canyon not far from the railway depot. When it opened, the Lodge building housed the lobby, restaurant, kitchen, shops, lounge, offices, and restrooms. Seven guesthouses were connected to the lodge by covered walkways, and there were fifteen cabins of one to four units each. There were also several utility buildings.