As the stories of Hadid and Scott Brown show, the pairing of architecture prizes (or at least the big ones) and women raises hackles. Hadid won the Pritzker Prize amid talk that she did not deserve it; Scott Brown did not win the prize amid talk that she did not deserve it. No solo female architect has won the Pritzker Prize since Hadid, nor has a husband-and-wife architectural team ever been honored. Indeed, to date, of the 39 Pritzker Prize laureates, only two (or about 5 percent) are women. — Despina Stratigakos

"It's a triple whammy," [Hadid] told the BBC Radio 4 in February. "I'm a woman, which is a problem to many people. I'm a foreigner — another problem. And I do work which is not normative, which is not what they expect. Together, it becomes difficult."

Like any high-profile architect, Hadid was expected to produce strong, functional designs. But as a woman, she also faced the added pressure of having her work interpreted as some sort of gender statement. — Los Angeles Times

In 2000, women represented 13 percent of registered architects; today, that number stands at 19 percent. If this rate of progress holds, we’ll have to wait until 2093 before we reach a 50-50 gender split...Yet numbers alone won’t ensure retention if architecture’s gender-biased professional culture remains unchanged. Ten or 20 years from now, we may still be asking ourselves, 'Where are the women architects?' — Metropolis Magazine

For a while I’ve held the belief that identifying oneself as an architect is a kind of drag, a mannered persona donned for effect. How else to describe the clichéd sartorial signifiers: extreme eyewear, black daywear and designer footwear? 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... — Mimi Zeiger | Architectural Review

One in five women worldwide say they would not encourage a woman to start a career in architecture [...]

dissatisfaction among women is lower in practices where a significant proportion of management are women, and in practices with regular career development reviews and/or mentoring schemes, with mentoring the better of the two. [...]

Nearly three-quarters (72 per cent) of women worldwide say they have experienced sexual discrimination, harassment or victimisation during their career — architectural-review.com

Odile Decq has won the Jane Drew Prize and Julia Peyton-Jones has been awarded the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize in the annual Women in Architecture Awards.

The judges described Odile Decq as ‘a creative powerhouse, spirited breaker of rules and advocate of equality’. [...]

The judges celebrated Julia Peyton-Jones’ ‘incredible global impact achieved with limited resources – and as someone who has done so much to nurture architectural vision and make architecture available to many people’. — architectural-review.com

We just really felt that it was important to capture these stories, before they disappeared, even when finding information proved very difficult,” says Storms. “You see how history sort of evaporates—and then it’s like it doesn’t exist. — What Weekly

“We just really felt that it was important to capture these stories, before they disappeared, even when finding information proved very difficult. You see how history sort of evaporates—and then it’s like it doesn’t exist. These women deserve to be known, but they’re not known. Some of these women would have faded away, if we hadn’t caught the one existing granddaughter, or somebody, who could then lead us to some other information.”” -curator Jillian Storms, AIA — whatweekly

Architecture is both expansive and specific, artistic and technical. Agrest says that even after teaching and practicing the discipline for over 40 years, she still marvels at how much there is to learn.

'Architecture is really difficult. I realized that only very recently,' she says. 'It's like music. You can enjoy it but — to know it — it's a different story.'

Another bit of wisdom she shares with her students: The career of an architect blossoms late. — npr.org

Landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson of Seattle-based Gustafson Guthrie Nichol and London's Gustafson Porter recently received the eighth annual Obayashi Prize in Tokyo. Established by the Obayashi Foundation, the prize is awarded to a recipient whose work is in tune with the Foundation's mission of supporting interdisciplinary design research in relation to cities and urbanism. — bustler.net

The farther up you look in the world of architecture, the fewer women you see. In this chart, we’ve rounded up some common and publicly available metrics behind this claim. Like thousands of aspiring architects, we’ll start at the bottom and work our way up—while also pausing on the way to consider what these measures mean. — Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture