'Female Architects Speak Out'

A selection of the roughly 200 responses were published yesterday, coinciding with Equal Pay Day in the United States; that "public awareness event," as the National Committee on Equal Pay calls it, "symbolizes how far into the year women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year." A few of the responses address the pay gap, but most deal with, for instance, how women are viewed by clients and contractors, among other less easily quantifiable concerns. Here, we highlight responses by a couple NewYork-Architects member firms.

Yen Ha, Front Studio Architects:

"We absolutely face obstacles. Every single day. It’s still largely a white, male-dominated field, and seeing a woman at the job site or in a big meeting with developers is not that common. Every single day I have to remind someone that I am, in fact, an architect. And sometimes not just an architect, but the architect. I’m not white, wearing black, funky glasses, tall or male. I’m none of the preconceptions of what an architect might be, and that means that every time I introduce myself as an architect, I have to push through the initial assumptions. Every new job site means a contractor who will assume I am the assistant, decorator or intern. It usually isn’t until the third meeting that the project team looks to me for the answers to the architectural problems."

"I have heard discussions where Zaha Hadid’s name came up as a suggestion to do a high-rise tower, and the men around the table declared her too risky. This is emblematic of the obstacles inherent in the field of high-profile projects. There needs to be more awareness among women in a position to be clients to consider hiring architectural firms that have women in design leadership roles."