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Women and Leadership in the Australian Architecture Profession: Prelude to a Research Project

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Women and Leadership in the Australian Architecture Profession: Prelude to a Research Project Women and Leadership in the Australian Architecture Profession: Prelude to a Research Project Gill Matthewson,1 Naomi Stead2 and Karen Burns3 1School of Architecture University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, 4072 [email protected] 2School of Architecture University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, 4072 [email protected] 3Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC. 3010 [email protected] Abstract: This chapter discusses the preliminary stages of a research project investigating implicit and explicit barriers leading to women’s underrepresentation in the architecture profession in Australia, especially in leadership roles. When gender balance in the student population in architecture has been near parity for more than three decades, why do such a small proportion of trained women formally register as architects, or join the peak representative body? More importantly for this chapter, and despite dem- onstrated skill, talent and competence, why do so few women proceed to the highest and most influential roles in the profession, and hence to lead the creation of the built environment that the rest of the population uses every day? Using ethnographic research methods to make a close examination of three case study workplaces, the project will attempt a clearer picture of how women fare in the architecture profession, why they leave, and what the implications in one profession might mean for women and leadership more broadly. Keywords: architectural practice, gender and architecture, workplace, ethnographic research, gender and organisations, professions Women have been active participants in architectural practice in Australia for more than a hundred years. Those practicing in the early twentieth century include the Brisbane-based Lily Addison, daughter of well-known architect G.H.M. Addison, and Sydney-based Florence Taylor, who completed her training in 1904.1 From these small beginnings, in 1950 women made up 2.7 per cent of registered architects in Australia, while by 1970 this had climbed slowly to 3.3 per cent.2 By the late 1990s, the rate of women entering the profession had reached an all-time high, leading to predictions by Julie Willis that they would form 40 per cent of the profession by 2018.3 However, a landmark nationwide survey of women architects by Paula Whitman in 2005 found that progress had been much slower than anticipated.4 Women were just © The Authors 2012. Seizing the Initiative: Australian Women Leaders in Politics, Workplaces and Communities. Published by the eScholarship Research Centre, The University of Melbourne; all rights reserved. 247 Seizing the Initiative: Australian Women Leaders in Politics, Workplaces and Communities 14.2 per cent of the profession (as measured by registration) but more critically the study found that women were only one per cent of architectural company directors in Queensland, the only state for which a figure could be calculated.5 Such dramatic stratification and underrepresentation of women in professional leadership roles in architecture is not restricted to Australia. Canada, the United States, New Zealand and the United Kingdom all report similar patterns. The results of a 2003 UK study from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) were published under the blunt title Why Do Women Leave Architecture? while in the same year the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada sponsored a major report based on extensive consultations with women in architecture throughout the country, which identified very similar issues.6 The situation led the American Institute of Architects to a number of affirmative action initiatives in the early twenty-first century – to increase gender equity and diversity more broadly, and to increase the number and proportion of women in leadership roles.7 Back in Australia, one of the surprising findings of Whitman’s survey had been that some women architects explicitly chose not to pursue high levels of seniority, and that a significant proportion of survey respondents – 26 per cent – had declined a promotion at some time in their career.8 The leading reason given for this was that ‘I had different career aspirations’, followed by ‘I felt that I would not gain any increase in satisfaction in my work’, followed again by ‘I did not see the more senior role as offering a viable career path into the future’. But in the context of this chapter, it is important to note the fourth and fifth most-cited reasons for turning down a promotion: ‘I felt that it would take me away from the sort of work that I enjoyed’ and then, as only the fifth most-cited reason: ‘I felt it would interfere with my family commitments’. Clearly the assumption is wrong, that women do not seek advancement to leadership positions simply because they are inhibited by caring duties. Whitman’s report acknowledges that data was gathered from a limited group and therefore the survey could not be considered representative, but nevertheless the finding on women’s refusal of promotions was widely reported and discussed.9 What continues to be missing from research in the field is a study of the kind of conditions that inform the ‘choices’ women architects make in Australia, and indeed an analysis of whether these are genuine choices at all. It appears that present conditions produce constraints and impediments that slow women’s progression to the highest and most influential levels of the architecture profession. These impediments are still poorly understood both by the profession and its representative bodies. As Francesca Hughes has noted, ‘absence of women from the profession of 248 MATTHEWSON, STEAD AND BURNS • Women and Leadership in the Australian Architecture Profession architecture remains, despite the various theories, very difficult to explain and very slow to change’.10 In response to this ongoing issue, in 2010 a collaborative group of scholars from five universities across three states were successful in applying for an Australian Research Council Linkage grant for the project ‘Equity and Diversity in the Australian Architecture Profession: Women, Work, and Leadership’.11 The project seeks to understand factors that might aid or prevent women’s entry into senior and leadership positions in architecture today, as well as engaging directly with industry and membership bodies to encourage a more equitable profession.12 The situation There are four important sites of architectural production. The first is the architecture schools where the process of becoming an architect begins. Second is the building site where the production of architecture is most clearly seen. Third, the architectural media in all its diverse forms is where representation and discussion of architects and buildings set the terms of definition, judgment and circulation of buildings and profile. The fourth and final site of architectural production is the architectural office or workplace. Of all the four, the workplace is by far the least visible, and it has not been well studied. But since it houses, structures and organises architectural labour and processes of decision making, communication and negotiation, the architectural workplace is a crucial site of production and representation. And so the research project will work with three large architectural practices, which are both partners and case studies for the investigation. Using the culture of these offices as a study, we seek to understand how gender and workplace intersect both in positive ways and in ways that may slow women’s career progression. We aim to gain a sharper picture of women’s participation in the profession and to understand why women are underrepresented in senior management. We will look at both barriers and good employment practice, and we aim to argue the case for the social, economic and architectural benefits of a gender-diverse workforce. The statistics from the architecture profession confirm a clear trend within business and the professions more broadly. A gap is frequently reported between women’s access to education, and subsequent professional achievement and levels of seniority. For instance, the Victorian Women Lawyers Association reports that across 2008 and 2009, almost 50 per cent of barristers signing the law rolls are women. However, women form only 22 per cent of lawyers at the bar. As widely reported in 2011, in Australia in 2010 women represent 9.8 per cent of directors in the top two hundred company boards.13 249 Seizing the Initiative: Australian Women Leaders in Politics, Workplaces and Communities Some have argued that such figures represent a ‘pipeline’ issue, where insufficient women have been coming through the pipeline to reach senior positions. One of the striking things about the architecture profession, however, is that it comprehensively disproves the pipeline thesis. Whitman’s Going Places report notes that in 2002 women were 43 per cent of architecture students in Australia but only 14.2 per cent of the profession.14 In 2010 those numbers are 44 per cent of students, and 20.4 per cent of registered architects.15 This marked disparity between education and the profession is noted in other countries (2010 figures for New Zealand are 48 per cent of students and 17.3 per cent of registered architects). While the proportion of women in the profession is indeed increasing, it is a very slow increment. The foreword to a 1996 North American anthology of architectural history and theory titled The Sex of Architecture observed: For the last two decades, [women] have constituted nearly half the enrolment in this country’s most prestigious architecture programs – programs from which they consistently graduated at the tops of their classes. Yet in 1995, only 8.9 per cent of registered architects and 8.7 per cent of tenured faculty in the United States were women.16 Fifteen years later, in 2010, women comprised 17 per cent of registered architects in the United States. This was a significant increase, yet still very low considering thirty-five years of near equal numbers of male and female architecture students.
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