MeToo, Gender Bias, and the Leadership Gap in Architecture

As Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in as Supreme Court justice earlier this month, millions of exasperated women across America took to social media and the streets to demonstrate their frustration and vexation regarding sexual assault and harassment. Just days later, starchitect and AD100 Hall of Famer Richard Meier stepped down from leadership of his firm, Richard Meier and Partners Architects, amid misconduct accusations.

Architect Stella Lee, a founding partner of Bureau V, was among the fed up. Seven months prior, she’d come forward with allegations against Meier, for whom she had worked in the early 2000s, her first job out of college. Instead of keeping quiet like so many other women, and as she had done at age 21, she decided to speak up about discrimination and harassment in the architecture industry by publishing an opinion piece in The New York Times.

Women leave architecture at an alarming rate. The long hours and low wages that many architects must sustain as they approach licensure—and, concurrently, childbearing age—is not inconsequential to the lack of female leadership in the field. Though women make up almost half of architecture school enrollment, they account for just 31 percent of architecture staff. And only 20 percent of partners and principals of AIA-owned firms are women. Unsurprisingly, research shows that women working in male-dominated fields experience more sexual harassment.

To keep women in architecture—and elevate them into leadership positions—better paid family leave policies are likely needed. Supporting caregivers (whether men and women) keeps women in the workforce and allows them to advance in their careers, which also helps close the wage gap. Consequently, this wouldn’t just reduce harassment (and liability) in architecture, but also boost the bottom line, according to experts. Employees who are healthy, happy, and have agency over their own careers are more productive employees who stay in their jobs longer, research shows. One global study of 21,980 companies even demonstrated a strong correlation between the presence of women in corporate leadership positions and improved profitability. In other words, harassment, diversity in leadership, and the pay gap are intrinsically interconnected; any company interested in one should be interested in all three.

“Our society at large needs to figure out how to keep these women in the workforce with the understanding that their continued presence is valuable,” Lee tells AD. Architecture also needs “a broader understanding of differing leadership styles with an eye towards diversity and its benefits,” she says.

But as is so often the case, changing the culture may be more difficult than collecting the data. And the ingrained culture of the design world may be traced back into architecture school. The long hours, harsh critiques, and grueling work ethic that begin there lend themselves to putting self-care last. This behavior, which continues into career life, “easily slips into normalizing sexual misconduct and its suppression as simply part of the practice,” wrote Lee in her Times piece.

Instead of burning people out, agrees Rosa Sheng, a principal and director of equity, diversity, and inclusion at SmithGroup and founding chair of Equity by Design, an AIA San Francisco committee, architecture communities should be offering the coaching, support, and mentoring that allows people to thrive.

“Being valued matters,” says Sheng, who uses terms like agency and diversity to describe successful teams. These aren’t just catchwords but assets that also help designers solve problems and better connect with clients and customers. Elegant solutions for better products, spaces, buildings, neighborhoods, and so on require designers to step back and rethink problems systemically and anew. Ironically, it seems that’s exactly what is needed at this moment culturally, too.

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