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.

“Women don’t negotiate” is one explanation given for the gendered salary gap. But this belief is a myth. For at least the past two decades, researchers Laura J. Kray, Jessica A. Kennedy, and Margaret Lee have found, “women negotiate for a higher salary more, not less, often than men….[O]ur data show women were paid significantly less, not more, than men, despite their attempts to negotiate.”

Blaming any part of the pay gap on women’s failure to negotiate is not only erroneous, it also inappropriately justifies the existing gender hierarchy. This can result in reduced support for policies that try to mitigate pay inequities, the researchers found.

When Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) first worked in an architect’s office in the late 1880s, architects routinely studied and drew on Renaissance, Neoclassical, and other architectural styles. Once Colter began creating her own designs several decades later, she also drew from the past. Instead of relying on European precedents, however, Colter was inspired by the architecture of the Ancestral Puebloan peoples in what became known as the United States.

In researching her design for the Desert View Watchtower at Grand Canyon, Colter spent six months traveling to heritage sites in the Southwest studying ancient structures, masonry patterns, and other architectural elements from the Ancestral Puebloans. She integrated some of these into her design for the Watchtower. She also commissioned Hopi artist Fred Kabotie to paint murals on the walls and ceiling of the Watchtower’s second floor. In this way, she reminded visitors of the continuity of Puebloan culture in the Grand Canyon region.

Florence Kenyon Hayden (1882 – 1973) was raised by and as a supporter of women’s rights. After her father died in 1892, her mother Kate Bemis Hayden moved her daughters from St. Louis to Columbus, Ohio. Kenyon (who dropped the “Florence” at a young age), her sister Gillette, and her mother became members of the National Woman’s Party and fought for passage of the 19th Amendment recognizing women’s right to vote.

Kenyon Hayden was one of three women enrolled in the architecture program at Ohio State University (OSU) in 1901. Although she didn’t finish her degree, she did impress campus architect and professor Joseph Bradford with whom she studied. Bradford recommended Hayden to design OSU’s first woman’s dormitory. In 1905 and 1906, newspapers across the nation reported on the award of this project to Hayden and two female colleagues, often under the heading “Built by Girl Architects.”

“Burnout” is defined by the World Health Organization as consisting of three simultaneous occupational experiences: exhaustion; disengagement or cynicism; and feeling ineffective, Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter write in Harvard Business Review (HBR). Across professions, more than 50 percent of workers say they feel burned out, researchers Emma Seppälä and Marissa King write in HBR.

While all workers are susceptible to burnout from chronic stress, some contributing factors disproportionately affect women. Owing to pervasive gendered stereotypes, women must outperform men to be considered equally competent, studies have found. In addition to having to work harder than men at their professional duties, women are also expected to take on more “office housework” that does not contribute to career advancement.

In 1890, when Mary E. J. Colter (1869 -1958) was young, just 54 percent of the school-aged population attended school at all and only 3.5 percent graduated from high school, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The path to becoming an architect was also very different. University architecture programs existed and some admitted women; by 1891, twelve women had graduated with architecture degrees from US universities, scholar Mary N. Woods found. However, it was far more common for aspiring architects to get their training in an office than a university during this era. Of the 3,250 students entering architectural programs in the US from 1867 to 1898, only 650 of them earned their architectural degrees, Woods writes. With the US Census listing well over 10,000 architects working in 1900, it is apparent that most 19th-century architects received their training in offices rather than universities.

Colter was one of these who learned to practice architecture without earning an architecture degree. After graduating from St. Paul (Minnesota) High School in 1888, Colter moved to Oakland to attend the California School for Design (now known as the San Francisco Art Institute) across the bay where she studied drawing and decoration. While there, she worked for a San Francisco architecture firm. This experience appears to be her only formal training in architecture.

During her fifty-plus-year career as an architect, Lulah Maria Riggs (1896 - 1984) exhibited a strong talent for design, fulfilling her clients’ desires, and sensitivity to the environment. She spent most of her professional life in Santa Barbara, California, where she contributed to the development of a California style of modernism without ever adopting or being constrained by a style herself.

Born in Toledo, Ohio, Riggs moved with her mother to Indianapolis after her father died. There she earned her high school degree at a manual training school in 1914. She moved with her mother to Santa Barbara and earned a certificate in architecture from a junior college in 1917. Riggs went on to study architecture at the University of California, earning her B.A. in 1919 and completing her architecture degree in 1920. With help from a scholarship, Riggs pursued graduate studies in architecture at Berkeley for another year and a half, until, she later wrote, “Family responsibilities necessitated quick exit—and getting to work.”

March 12 is Equal Pay Day in 2024. It represents how far into this calendar year women in the U.S. had to work to earn what men earned in 2023. Women across occupations earned 83 cents for each dollar earned by men, a Payscale report found. Women of color face even larger disparities in pay, Forbes reports.

In architecture, full-time female architects received just 83.2 percent of their male colleagues’ earnings, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 2022. The same report shows female civil engineers earning 86.5 percent; female construction managers earning 91.3 percent; and female landscape architects earning 96 percent of what their male colleagues did.

When Mary Colter (1869 – 1958) designed the Desert View Watchtower at the Grand Canyon in the early 1930s, she integrated several sustainable features into the observatory and rest house. Although included for practical rather than environmental reasons, measures such as using locally extracted materials and salvaging demolition waste (see Reusing Materials: Colter’s 1932 Desert View Watchtower), using durable materials, moderating temperatures with thermal mass, and conserving water foreshadowed measures we consider sustainable today.

The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway began bringing travelers to Grand Canyon Village in 1901 and, with its hospitality partner Fred Harvey (Colter’s employer), offered dining, accommodation, and activities to visitors. In 1926, passengers arriving at the canyon in private automobiles outnumbered those arriving by train for the first time. The Desert View Watchtower was constructed near Grand Canyon National Park’s east entrance in part to serve visitors arriving by automobile.

The white father of Amaza Lee Meredith (1895 – 1984) was a skilled carpenter who taught his daughter drafting and model-making but discouraged her from pursuing her dream of becoming an architect, probably because he understood the barriers that a Black woman would face. Meredith’s Black mother imparted a faith in education in her daughter, and Meredith excelled in school and pursued a teaching career. Later in life, she did create opportunities to design and alter homes.

In 1912, Meredith attended a summer program at Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute to obtain her primary school teaching certificate. There she met Edna Colson, a college instructor six years older than Meredith who would later become her lifelong companion. Colson, scholar Jacqueline Taylor writes, “was an enthusiastic participant in the politics and practice of racial uplift, and she had a deep influence on Meredith’s career trajectory, guiding her and supporting her with pedagogical literature and advice.”

While all leaders might experience occasional loneliness, 53 percent of women report feeling lonely at work, researchers found, with higher rates at higher levels of seniority. Loneliness can increase health risks and lead to disengagement and other behaviors that can impact performance. While women often face discrimination and microaggressions at work, the odds of them doing so increase when they are the only woman, a 2019 McKinsey Quarterly study found.

Because of systemic gender biases, female leaders have to parse whether people are reacting to their behaviors or their identities, psychologist Mira Brancu writes in Psychology Today. “Therefore, in addition to navigating the usual challenges of leadership, there's an additional level of cognitive and emotional overload occurring internally for people with marginalized identities in leadership roles,” Brancu writes.

When Mary Colter (1869 – 1958) designed the Desert View Watchtower at the Grand Canyon in the early 1930s, she integrated several sustainable features into the observatory and rest house. Employed for practical or aesthetic rather than environmental reasons, salvaging and reusing material was one of these sustainable features.

The Desert View Watchtower is built on one of the highest points along the south rim of the Grand Canyon at an elevation 7,360 feet. Colter’s design challenge was to make the proposed building unobtrusive so as not to mar the natural surroundings while at the same time providing a tower for visitors to see across the Grand Canyon and the Painted Desert beyond it.