You’ve probably heard that today is International Women’s Day. But what exactly is it? And why is it important?

For many in the global West, the significance of March 8th is probably a lot less familiar than, say, Mother’s Day. In fact, the holidays originated around the same time, during the early 20th century, at the nascence of struggles for equal rights and suffrage. But unlike Mother’s Day, International Women’s Day has always been explicitly political: a day to both celebrate women and to fight for emancipation.

A first iteration of Women’s Day was organized by the Socialist Party of America in 1909, but its international observance began properly in 1911 with large protests throughout Europe, albeit on different days in the different cities. In 1914, International Women’s Day was held for the first time on March 8. Sylvia Plankhurst, the great British suffragette, was arrested in front of Charing Cross on her way to deliver a speech at Trafalgar Square.

Then, on March 8, 1917, Russian women went on strike, demanding the end of World War 1, of food shortages, and of czarism. Their protests sparked the February Revolution and the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. The following October, a subsequent revolution would bring the Bolsheviks to power.

After that, International Women’s Day held a significant, and sometimes controversial, role in the holiday calendar of the Soviet Union and states in its sphere of influence. In 1977, the United Nations General Assembly voted to make March 8 an international holiday in celebration of efforts towards achieving women’s rights, marking the first time it was observed in many Western states.

Today, International Women’s Day maintains its political bent, even if it’s less explicitly tethered to a socialist politic. And with reason: as the BBC notes, women’s participation in the workforce remains 25.5% lower than men on average around the world. That’s just .6% smaller than 1995 – two decades ago. And, across both the developed and developing world, women work longer and harder for less compensation, particularly if you consider less visible, and often unpaid, labors like domestic work and care.

But employment statistics only account for a part of the problem. Women, across the planet, face violence, abuse, and structural forms of sexist oppression entirely absent from the lives of their male counterparts. According to Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the UN, at least one in three women “has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime with the abuser usually someone known to her.” And sexist violence and oppression – whether physical, emotional, cultural, socioeconomic – disproportionately affects poor women and women of color.

The architectural profession, long-considered a so-called “gentleman’s profession,” has historically excluded women and continues to be a deeply unequal field, both in statistical terms as well as culturally. “As the education of an architect is so historically weighted to a canon of male practitioners, theorists and educators, a woman entering the field often operates as a kind of architectural androgyne – we are trained to see world of design through black-framed, male-coloured glasses,” writes Mimi Zeiger in an excellent essay published recently on the Architectural Review.

In the practice of design, architecture has played a significant part in instituting and maintaining oppressive gender roles, notably through norms of domestic architecture. The groundbreaking work of women like Dolores Hayden, Truus Schröder and Eileen Grey laid the foundations for contemporary expositions and critiques of the complicity of design in the subjugation of the women.

Today, women like Dame Zaha Hadid, Jeanne Grey, Denise Scott-Brown (who was denied the Pritzker Prize when her husband was awarded it for work done collaboratively), Elizabeth Diller and Kazuyo Sejima have achieved levels of success that would have been entirely unimaginable at any other time in human history. The radicality of this cannot be overstressed.

Still, one in five women worldwide said they would not encourage other women to start a career in architecture today, according to a recent poll. About half of architecture school graduates are women these days (and of that, more than half have reported experiencing sexual discrimination while in academia), but that number plummets down to a mere 18% in the workforce, as Rosa Sheng of Equity by Design recently pointed out. 

Two-thirds of female architects believe the construction industry hasn’t accepted the authority of women. When 710 female architects were polled about their experiences working in the field, 66% stated they had faced sexual discrimination. 31% said they experience it on a monthly or quarterly basis. 27% reported facing bullying at work.

Women also face disadvantages if they choose to have children, and often are not provided adequate paid maternity leave. Across the board, female architects are less likely to hold senior positions, such as partner or director, and more likely to be paid less than male counterparts.

In short, International Women’s Day is an opportunity to consider the struggles of women across the world, in terms of employment inequity as well as more perverse and insidious instantiations of patriarchy. For architects, it should occasion self-reflection closer to home as well, motivating renewed action to aggressively and demonstrably move against wage disparity, patriarchal design norms, sexual violence and harassment in the academy and the studio, and other institutionalized practices that keep women from achieving equality and success. And this should be followed with more thought and action tomorrow, the next day, and everyday.

Today's a good day to revisit our first Archinect Sessions podcast episode, which focused on the issue of gender in the architecture world, prompted by the news post from ACSA, "Where are the women? Measuring progress on gender in architecture".

For more on the situation of women in architecture, check out these links:

• "Women in architecture" vs. "now in architecture": Mimi Zeiger on gender and architecture today
• AIA moves one step forward in approval of Equity in Architecture resolution
• Results from The Architectural Review's 2016 Women in Architecture Survey are... not heartening
• Women at the pinchpoints of architecture
• The uphill climb to gender equity continues...
• Sexism means women still can’t break the glass ceiling in architecture