Archinect - Features

The Gender Pay Gap in Architecture

2019-10-10T08:00:00-04:00

On both sides of the Atlantic there is a significant pay gap between men and women in architecture. In April 2019, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) issued new guidelines as it emerged that the pay gap in architecture is 15-percent in the UK. According to statistics from 2017, the pay gap is similar in the US, where it is 14-percent, with the American Institute of Architects (AIA) releasing similar guidelines in 2018.

What are the reasons for this, and why is it such a controversial subject?

Soapbox: Gender

2018-03-07T09:00:00-05:00

Soapbox is a weekly series delivering a curated set of lectures, talks and symposia concerning contemporary themes but explored through the archives of lectures past and present. With the plethora of lectures, talks, symposia and panels occurring world wide on a daily basis, how can we begin to keep up and if not, find them once they are gone? Soapbox looks to assemble a selection of recent, archived and outlier lectures surrounding a given theme. Soapbox looks to curate this never-ending library of ideas into an engaging and diverse list of thoughts and provocations. Soapbox is just that, a collection aimed at discovering the occasional needle in a haystack.

Between the home and the market: an interview with Christine Bjerke from Next Up: Floating Worlds

2017-03-28T12:03:00-04:00

“The economy of the home becoming an investment culture instead of a savings culture disrupts the idea of very specific gendered roles in Japanese society,” states the Copenhagen-based architect Christine Bjerke during an interview conducted as part of Archinect’s Next Up: Floating Worlds. Bjerke’s project (On the Floating World of the) FX Beauties, which inspired the name of the event, derives from her research into the spatial implications of the work of the FX Beauties, a club of Japanese housewives who engage in day-trading on foreign exchange markets.

Decoding Gender Discrimination in Design with QSPACE

2017-03-02T12:20:00-05:00

Last week, President Trump rescinded an Obama-era order that had provided protections for transgender and gender nonconforming (GNC) students by allowing them to use bathrooms that correlate to their gender identity. Often unnoticed spaces, bathrooms have become the locus point for struggles to secure civil rights for trans and GNC individuals since the passing of exclusionary ‘Bathroom Bills’ in North Carolina and nine other states last year, which, among many other things, force individuals to use bathrooms that correspond to the sex registered on their birth certificate. QSPACE, a “queer architecture research organization” based at the GSAPP Incubator in New York, has been working to expose the complicity of design in this dangerous architecture of normativity: “how laws, codes, and design standards systematically create exclusionary and sometimes violent spaces for members of the LGBTQ community.”

Screen/Print #41: "Family Planning" from Harvard Design Magazine

2016-04-22T09:45:00-04:00

It’s among the worst clichés of architectural writing: towers are phallic; stadiums (or just any project by a certain recently-deceased icon) are vulval. But what about when the architects themselves describe their project in genital terms? And, in particular, when they take inspiration not from some heroic idea of rigidity, but rather acceptance of a more prosaic state of flaccidity?

CONTOURS: The Gender Gap in Top Management

2011-12-19T12:47:09-05:00

According to a recent special report on women and work in the Economist, “In America in the early 1970s more than half of all families with children consisted of a breadwinner husband, a stay-at-home wife and two or more kids; now only a fifth do. Instead there are lots of single-parent households, and even if couples live together they no longer necessarily marry. If they do, the wives are likely to go out to work, whether or not they have dependent children, and take only a short break for maternity. Life is too expensive for most families to be able to manage on one pay cheque. In most rich countries the dominant model now is the two-earner family, with both parents working full-time.”

Gender and Design Leadership

2011-10-24T13:12:37-04:00

Women in the architecture workplace is, oddly, a subject that does not receive a lot of press. Perhaps it is because from the time of school onward, women in the field are indoctrinated into being either as “hard,” “iron-like” or on a practical level, unbathed and unhygienic, as their male counterparts in order to be accepted. Indeed, at one school in Los Angeles, the women actively cultivate a hardened exterior that rivals any of their male classmates. Those who do not relinquish obvious signifiers of womanhood are dismissed as either attempting to “sleep their way to success” or as “lightweights.”