In 1890, only twenty-two of the more than eight thousand architects in the U.S. were female, according to the U.S. Census—just 0.3 percent. In contrast, the occupation category “Artists and teachers of art” was 48 percent female. This was a significant percentage, especially since only about 17 percent of females over age ten were employed in any occupation in 1890.

Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter (1869 – 1959) was one of the women drawn to a career in art. After graduating from high school in 1888, Colter left St. Paul, Minnesota to attend the California School of Design in San Francisco. While studying art there, she also worked in an architecture firm. By spring 1892, Colter was supervising drawing at the Manual Training School in Menemonie, Wisconsin. ln November 1892, Colter returned to St. Paul when she got a position teaching freehand drawing at its manual training school. Her pay was $50 per month (about $1,600 in 2023 dollars).

Anne Graham Rockfellow was born in Mount Morris, New York in 1866. By age thirteen, Annie had decided to pursue a career in architecture—a decision apparently supported by her family. One visitor to the Rockfellow home in Rochester, New York was architect William C. Walker. After seeing plans drawn by young Annie, Walker encouraged her to take the Tech course at MIT and offered to hire her when she finished.

Rockfellow followed Walker’s advice and was the first woman admitted to MIT’s two-year program in architecture. While she later recalled most of her fellow students—all male—as “good comrades,” she felt the weight of her singularity. “I felt that the reputation of my sex on my shoulders and worked long and hard,” Rockfellow wrote in 1938. After earning a Diploma in Architecture in 1887, she returned to Rochester and the promised employment with Walker’s firm.

As humans, we equate confidence with competence and believe that women are less confident than men, researchers found. We also link competence and maleness, another study found. As a society, then, we hold a generalized, unconscious belief that men are more competent than women—regardless of individual skill or ability.

As a result of these biases in the workplace, many women endure inequities like lower pay and fewer opportunities to advance than similarly or less qualified males; receiving less desirable work assignments; and being interrupted at meetings at far greater rates than their male colleagues. They also often face backlash for (or anticipate backlash and refrain from) self-advocating or assertive behavior that is not only tolerated but expected from men.

In 1914, Mary E. J. Colter designed and supervised the construction of two observatories and rest houses on the rim of the Grand Canyon. The buildings were constructed in anticipation of a surge of visitors stopping at the canyon on their way to the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco and the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego. “Two fairs for one fare!” trumpeted an ad for the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway; “Plan now to go and visit Grand Canyon Arizona on the way,” directed another.

The railway’s investment in the Grand Canyon extended well beyond the canyon itself. It also created a 5.5 acre Grand Canyon exhibit at the San Francisco exposition. A newspaper report described the exhibit as “an exact replica of nature’s masterpiece.” It was reported to cost about $350,000—more than $10 million in today’s dollars. Back in Arizona, Hermit’s Rest cost $13,000 to construct.

Hazel Wood was born in Tuskegee, Alabama in 1865 and moved to California with her family as a young child. She studied art at the University of California-Berkeley for a year before leaving after the 1882 – 1883 school year to marry Waldo Waterman.

The couple moved east of San Diego where Waldo managed his family’s gold mine. When the economic depression led to the sale of the mine in 1894, the Watermans relocated to San Diego. Owing to investments in railroads, they were able to hire architect Irving Gill to design a house that would overlook the San Diego Harbor for them and their three children. Working with Gill on the design of her home proved to be a turning point for Hazel Wood Waterman.

Implementing a diversity, equity, and inclusion policy is important, but creating a culture that fosters a sense of belonging for all workers is an essential practice. With 40 percent of employees feeling isolated at work and just 30 percent believing that their opinions matter, much remains to be done for everyone to feel included.

A sense of belonging is necessary for the well-being of employees, but it also benefits their companies. Disengaged employees are less productive and more likely to seek a better opportunity elsewhere. Citing research conducted by BetterUp, Evan W. Carr et al. write, “High belonging was linked to a whopping 56% increase in job performance, a 50% drop in turnover risk, and a 75% reduction in sick days.” At the same time, “[F]eeling excluded causes us to give less effort to the team.”

Expositions and world’s fairs played a significant role in the early career of decorator and architect Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958).

The 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia is considered the beginning of the Arts and Crafts movement in the United States. It helped create a market for hand-made objects at a time when mechanically-produced everyday items were readily available. By doing so, it opened doors for female artisans including Colter.

Juliet Peddle (1899 – 1979) designed and remodeled homes, schools, and commercial buildings, many of them in her hometown of Terre Haute, Indiana. Her father, a professor of machine design, taught Peddle mechanical drawing and photography to prepare her for a career in architecture.

Peddle graduated from the architecture program at the University of Michigan in 1922. Her student activities included serving as President of the T-Square Society, “a society of engineering and architectural women,” and as a member of the national honor society Tau Sigma Delta Honor Society in Architecture and Allied Arts. She was also president of her dormitory.

While many women face a broken rung on the ladder to leadership, mothers may face what researcher Joan C. Williams terms a “maternal wall.” She writes, “Women who have been very successful may suddenly find their proficiency questioned once they become pregnant, take maternity leave, or adopt flexible work schedules. Their performance evaluations may plummet and their political support evaporate. The ‘family gap’ yawns: An increasing percentage of the wage gap between men and women is attributable to motherhood.”

Motherhood can impact the type of projects assigned opportunities to advance in a firm, according to a 2021 AIA/ The Center for WorkLife Law investigation into bias in the architecture profession. “Mothers leave the architecture profession not only in search of work-life balance, but also because they feel their careers stalled out due to discrimination against mothers in the form of pay inequity, lack of opportunities, and assumptions about their priorities,” the same report found.

Architect and decorator Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) collaborated with many artists and craftspeople during long her long career with hospitality giant Fred Harvey. Among these were furniture makers, metal workers, and painters. Two artists who painted murals in spaces Colter designed in the 1930s are Fred Kabotie and Hildreth Meière.

Colter worked with Hopi artist Kabotie (1900 - 1986) for the first time at the Desert View Watchtower that she designed on the rim of the Grand Canyon in the early 1930s. Colter considered Kabotie to be “one of the three greatest modern Indian artists.” Since her building design for the Watchtower adapted elements of ancient ancestral Puebloan architecture from the region, Colter thought it fitting for Kabotie to decorate the tower’s walls. Kabotie later said he chose to paint the Snake Legend to show that the first man to float through the Grand Canyon was a Hopi.

Eleanor Raymond (1888 – 1989) became known for her modern residential designs and innovate use of materials and technologies during her more than fifty years of practice. She was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and graduated from Wellesley College in 1909. After travelling around Europe, she returned to the Boston area where she took a course in landscape architecture. She began volunteering in her instructor’s landscape architecture office and in 1917 enrolled in the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture for Women. There her primary design interest shifted to domestic buildings.

In 1927 Raymond opened an office with her former architecture professor, and in 1935 she established her own architecture office in Cambridge. Although Raymond’s training was in the classical tradition, she gravitated toward modern design. She drew a link between vernacular architecture and modernism in her 1931 book Early Domestic Architecture of Pennsylvania: Photographs and Measured Drawings.

“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.