“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.”

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.”

Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) designed and decorated an 80-room hotel including its lounges, sunken garden, four dining areas, and other gracious public spaces. La Posada, located next to the depot between the railroad tracks and Route 66 in Winslow, Arizona, opened in 1930.

As with many of her other building designs, Colter strove to make the new building appear old. The local newspaper described the hotel as looking like “a real Spanish rancho,…typical of a home in new Mexico or Arizona between 125 and 150 years ago.” Colter designed the new hotel as if every imagined generation had made additions and other changes to it.

Lilian Belle Bridgman (1865 – 1948) turned to architecture after a career in science. While a student at Kansas State Agricultural College, she was so impressed with one of her science textbooks that she became determined to study with the book’s author at the University of California. Upon receiving her BS degree in Science in 1888, Bridgman started teaching in Argentine, Kansas, but she left it for California in 1891. Bridgman earned her Master degree in Science from UC Berkeley in 1893. Her thesis was titled, “The Origin of Sex in Fresh-Water Algae.”

Bridgman continued working as a science teacher in high schools and junior colleges, but she had fallen in love with the Berkeley Hills and with architecture. In 1899 she was able to purchase property in the Berkeley Hills with a small inheritance. With the help and advice of her friend the architect Bernard Maybeck and the drafting skills of another architect, Bridgman designed a home for the narrow, deep site and had it constructed in 1900. She would live there for the rest of her life.

Microaggressions are sexist, racist, or otherwise discriminatory actions or comments that are often not recognized as discriminatory by the majority population. Examples include interrupting women during meetings, assigning work based on gendered assumptions, attributing a woman’s idea to her male colleague, or questioning the judgement of women more often than that of their male co-workers. It also includes undermining or marginalizing comments like, “How did you get into that university?” and exclusionary language like “businessmen” instead of “businesspeople,” or the term “Fellow” as a professional or academic honor.

Often the result of unconscious bias, the harm caused by microaggressions is undeniable even if unintended. It can harm businesses as well as the individuals experiencing the microaggressions at work. “[W]omen who experience these microaggressions are three times more likely to think about leaving” than those who do not, Bianca Barratt reports.

Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) supervised the construction of most of the buildings she designed, beginning with two rest houses that were constructed on the south rim of the Grand Canyon in 1915. The authors of the US Forest Service’s 1916 Grand Canyon Working Plan wrote that the building now called Lookout Studio “was designed by and constructed under the supervision of Miss Mary E. J. Colter…. It is of stone and seems a part of the rim itself.” The same Forest Service document reports that Hermit’s Rest “was designed by Miss Colter and constructed under her supervision. Its effect is admirable.”

While employed by the hospitality company Fred Harvey from 1910 until her retirement in 1948, Colter was involved during the construction phase of many of the structures built for that company’s operations, whether or not she had designed the buildings herself. Colter was far from the only female architect to supervise construction in the early twentieth century. In fact, supervising construction was considered more acceptable work for women than designing non-domestic buildings.

Mary Rockwell was born in Junction City, Kansas, in 1877, the third daughter of a wealthy business man who, with his wife, believed in educating his five daughters. After Mary graduated from Wellesley College in 1900, she became the first woman to enroll in the architecture program at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1903. After a year there, she trained in Boston before leaving to study in Paris in 1905.

In preparation for taking the entrance exams at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, a family connection smoothed the way for Rockwell’s acceptance as the only female member of the studio of Jean-Marcel Auburtin. Not everything was easy, though; once Rockwell had to take refuge in a taxi to escape a mob of male students armed with water buckets and the intent to drench her.

Being happy at work has a host of benefits not only for the worker but also for their employer. Research has shown that “happier employees are healthier, have lower rates of absenteeism, are highly motivated to succeed, are more creative, have better relationships with peers, and are less likely to leave a company,” Paul B. Lester et al write in the MIT Sloan Management Review. “All of these correlates of happiness significantly influence a company’s bottom line.”

Firm leaders, then, have a financial as well as moral interest in the happiness of their employees.  But what gives people that sense of well-being? Different people have different “happiness set-points” based on heredity, while other factors like financial security and health also have an impact. A variance in happiness of 40 percent can be attributed to “our daily intentional activity, what we do and how we think,” professor of Management Golnaz Sadri reports.

In 1926, the hospitality company Fred Harvey hired local architecture firm Meem & McCormick to renovate and expand the La Fonda hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The lead partner was John Gaw Meem, a former civil engineer who had co-founded the architecture firm four years earlier. It was the firm’s largest project to date.

At thirty-two, Meem seemed to know when to take good advice. This was fortunate because Mary E. J. Colter had much offer. Then in her late fifties, Colter had nearly a quarter century of experience working for Fred Harvey as an artist, architect, and decorator. On the La Fonda project, Colter served not only as decorator but also as a key advisor throughout its design and construction.

Josephine Wright Chapman was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts in 1867. She later credited time spent in her father’s manufacturing shops with helping her develop mechanical and drafting skills. When Chapman’s family didn’t support her aspirations to become an architect, she pawned her jewelry and found a job as an apprentice in an architect’s office. Before long, she opened her own office in Boston.

Chapman won a competition to design Harvard University’s Craigie Arms dormitory, a brick and limestone building that was completed in 1897. This is the first of three buildings she designed that were later listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Worcester (Massachusetts) Women’s Club building constructed in 1902 and Hillandale, a 1923 house in Washington, DC, are two others.

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.