The glass ceiling at 1 Bligh St., Sydney designed by Ingehoven architects and Architectus – both male dominated architecture firms.
For the past 30 years more than 40% of architecture graduates have been female, yet they represent just 20% of registered architects in Australia, get paid less than their male counterparts, experience high levels of discrimination and are poorly represented in leadership roles. So why are women failing to climb the scaffolding?
New research by Architects Journal confirms a startling number of women have experienced sexual discrimination at work, and many more feel that the building industry has failed to accept the authority of the female architect.
Especially astounding is the salary gap between male and female architects in the United States is a staggering 33%. In Australia, figures are a little better, but not much. A 2012 Australian study, based on 11 years of Graduate Destination Survey data, indicates that the older we get, the wider the pay gap. The study found that on average, female graduates eared 5.2% less than comparable male graduates, by the time the graduates reached 56, the pay gap more than doubled to 13%.
According to the same study, architecture and building is the worst industry in Australia to be a woman in terms of pay disparity. The pay gap is 17.3%, compared with the average of 5%, according to the study. Architecture exists in that grey area between the construction world and the design world. Art and design, on the other hand, performed a lot better, at just 5.9%. Still, neither is ideal.
Justine Clark, editor of online publication dedicated to women in architecture Parlour, says that these figures are a little problematic, yet there is no denying there is an issue.
‘The Graduate Careers Australia (GCA) survey, which is the one that seems to get quoted most, lumps architecture and construction together. That includes architecture, quantity surveying, building etc – it’s a huge number of different disciplines.’
She says the 17% figure often quoted in the survey is huge but not necessarily accurate.
‘That does mean that women entering the wider industry are entering an environment where they are broadly on an unequal footing – if we say pay relates to prestige and power and influence and perceived value and all those kinds of things. This is an issue but it doesn’t mean that here’s a gap of 17% in architectural practices – I think it would be very unlikely if that’s the case. But if you look at the GCA data for architecture alone, it’s a 6.25% gap which is still not very good.’
New restricted data obtained by Parlour from the GCA survey allowed them to look at the pay gap in further detail. They looked at those who had studied architecture at a master’s degree level, had studied full-time, were working as architects and who worked between 38-42 hours per week. Using this data, it was determined that the pay gap was just 1.6%, but in a pool of just 77, more information – and certainly more architects – are needed to paint an accurate picture of the industry.
Late last year, the Australian Institute of Architects (AIA) approved a policy to help combat the gender imbalance in the Australian sector after research found that participation by women in architecture was disproportionately low compared with the number of female architecture graduates.
Dr. Naomi Stead was heavily involved in putting the AIA policy into place. She says it was a huge step forward.
‘Generally speaking architects are well-intentioned, and committed to egalitarian ideals; no doubt it would shock them to realise that inequity has crept in through the back door. But the point is that if employers don’t actively check for it or work to overcome it they might never know it was there, until all their brilliant and talented women employees started to leave. One of the great things about the Institute’s new policy is that it proposes that architectural employers could be more active in watching for and stamping out inequity where it appears,’ she told ArtsHub.
‘Pay inequity doesn’t only fall into the explicit, discriminatory and illegal categories – it can happen in ways that are largely invisible and accidental, growing from a small difference in starting salaries for example, or if pay reviews across an office are not done in a block but rather on an ad hoc basis. Importantly, the Institute has recognised that pay equity is not a stand-alone issue, it’s related to the need for equity in promotion opportunities, and to the need to recognise and enable alternative career pathways.’
The policy will hopefully raise female representation within the profession. Just 20% of registered architects in Australia are female, and there are very few in leadership roles such as directors of practices. A RIBA 2003 report Why Do Women Leave Architecture? lists a number of factors that may indicate why so may women drop out of the industry such as low pay generally, unequal pay, inflexible/un-family-friendly work hours and a macho culture among others.
While this paints a worrying picture, it appears that the architecture community is moving forward and wants to shift the currently sticky paradigm and get the wheel turning. Some may see the gender policy enacted by the AIA as nothing more than empty rhetoric, but it is an important step forward in at least acknowledging that there is an issue if nothing else.
That policy, alongside publications such as Parlour and the research project that it is part of, are certainly helping pave the way for a discussion about gender in the industry. Especially important is figuring out where these female architecture graduates go and determining if they are doing valuable work outside what is traditionally thought of as architecture.
‘We are really trying to understand why there is such a significant drop off of women leaving the profession,’ says Clark. ‘Architecture schools have been graduating approximately 40% of women for the last 30 years, so the idea that it’s all going to somehow even out eventually over time is wrong. We are trying to find out why they leave, where do they go, and we’re trying to find an evidence base for what is only known anecdotally and then the next step is to look at what we can do about it.’
‘So there’s two sides to it. One of them is just providing a much firmer understanding of what the situation actually is and the second one is providing a whole lot of material and guidelines and discussion around what we might do to change it collectively and practices.’
