Deborah Singerman outlines the results of Paula Whitman’s research on women in the profession and reviews the recent NSW women’s forum convened by Caroline Pidcock.
RAIA NSW President Caroline Pidcock is determined to pursue the subject of her 2004 President’s Award: equality for women in architecture. As she wrote in Architecture Bulletin (4.04), statistics for women in the profession show that for all the efforts to encourage workplace equality numbers of women in key decision making roles have changed little over the years.
Women architects are also poorly represented in those aspects of the profession regarded as critical for promotion and recognition - registration (only 15% of NSW’s registered architects are women), RAIA membership (less than 30% women), awards (very few women) and board membership (infinitesimal).
The President’s Forum, “Redesigning the Architectural Workplace”, held at the Institute on 11 August, kept up the momentum. It featured a presentation on the preliminary report (August 2004) of a national research project into the career progression of women architects, led by Paula Whitman of QUT, and presentations from President’s Award winner, Hassell, and the six other nominating practices.
The event attracted around 50 women from sole practices to large commercial, a few babies (accompanied by their mothers!) and three men including Brian Meyerson, the only male representative from a nominating practice to attend. Ken Maher of Hassell sent his apologies.
Career progression research
The career progression research was led by QUT’s Dr Paula Whitman, RAIA Queensland President, and presented at the forum by student team member Sarah Rush. The survey drew a 49% response rate from women RAIA members nationwide. It addressed the question: “How is it that approximately 40% of architecture students are female yet the number of registered architects who are directors of firms and female is around 1%?”
Respondents’ profile
As Whitman says, respondents were a “very connected” group of women. Their profile was as follows:
·74% were registered
·age range was 21 to over 71, with just over 40% between 31 and 40 years
·most worked in state capital cities, 11% in regions and 2% internationally
·almost half had children, with 84% of the mothers taking over 50% of the parental responsibility
·almost 70% of mothers said this had had a significant or very significant impact on their careers.
Major finding
The media (eg Elizabeth Farrelly in the SMH, 17 August) has made much of one of the main findings:
·More than one in four women architects have turned down promotions.
·More than 60% of these women declined senior roles because they had different career aspirations.
·More than 50% felt that promotion would not increase their work satisfaction.
Life balance
This main finding was supported by personal attitudes to career progression:
·Almost 70% of women were “willing to forgo career success if it threatens personal happiness and balance in my life”.
·While personal satisfaction and balance were rated the most important measures of success, monetary rewards were the least important.
Factors in job satisfaction/dissatisfaction
For job satisfaction, the most important factors were:
·control over work hours
·varied tasks
·intellectual challenge
·personal autonomy.
Notwithstanding respondents’ low ranking of monetary rewards, the most dissatisfying aspect of work was remuneration. (About a third of women turned down a senior position because of inadequate remuneration.)
Goals and indicators of success
Respondents’ most important goal was to grow their practice; least important was publication/public recognition.
The most important indicator of career profession [should this be success?] for the women surveyed was quality of projects completed. However, the women believed the most important indicators as viewed by others in the profession were coverage of work in journals, awards, and size and number of projects.
Career progression
Pointing to wider practice issues women listed important factors for career progression as:
·work performance
·leadership skills
·ability to bring in work
·compatibility with senior management / office culture.
Gender, age and academic qualifications were ranked lowest.
Barriers to career progression
Suggesting similar frustrations were some of the reported barriers to career plans:
·“poor relationship with industry” (eg, failure to network and lack of reputation)
·“lack of professional support” (eg. employer marginalisation of their work type).
·lack of time and family commitments
·“negative personality characteristics” - poor self-discipline, self-confidence and self-image.
Portfolio careers
63% of the women took breaks of longer than three months in their last five jobs, mainly for family commitments, travel and full-time study. This career pattern, a portfolio of work rather than steady progress up that ladder, is “of increasing interest to both women and men” and a consequence of today’s emphasis on lifestyle,” says Whitman.
Overall, while on the one hand women appear to be generally satisfied with their professional work (except for remuneration), on the other, there are some points of dissatisfaction. Quotes such as, “Why would anyone want to put up with hassles of an office and that blokey culture when they can have a satisfying life at home and working for themselves” paint a more complicated picture. Provocatively, the QUT team asked, “Is what (women) want not very much? Do women have safe targets and low (career) goals?”
PRESIDENT’S AWARD
This research certainly fits in with the President Award nominees’ emphasis on flexible work arrangements and cultural change that aims to keep women in - and help them progress through - the firms, without wanting to leave and set up on their own. No practice felt they had all the answers but completing the submissions had inspired much in-house discussion about what they were doing to effect equal representation.
The submissions addressed seven key employment areas outlined by the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA). These are: recruitment and selection; promotions, transfers and terminations; training and development; work organisation; conditions of service; dealing with sex-based harassment; and dealing with issues around pregnancy and breastfeeding.
The award nominees were a range of small, medium and large firms: Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp Architects (fjmt), Hassell, McKendry-Hunt Architects, Woodhead International, Woods Bagot, Watermark, and Brian Meyerson Architects. Hassell took out the Award.
A number of common themes emerged in the workplace policies and practices of the nominees and the winning firm. These were:
Flexible and part-time work
· removing barriers or prejudices to exploring work arrangements
· flexible and part-time work a priority
· flexible work arrangements to support family, study and “other lifestyle” decisions, and that give autonomy for developing suitable management styles, workloads and client bases
· IT infrastructure including intranet, web-based email connections for working from home, and remote access for CAD users, laptop and home broadband access
Recruitment and promotion
·skills based recruitment, eg., by portfolio and experience
·recruitment objectivity, with interview and competency procedures
·recruitment based on standardised job descriptions
·stressing “ability and knowledge” in recruitment and promotion
·assessment of individuals according to key behaviours and skills
·encouraging promotions and high-level professional work for part-time staff.
Work policies and practices
·diversity of roles for women but with the same level of responsibility as available to men
·equal salary scale and pay guidelines
·flat, collaborative project team structure
·office environment that is open and transparent
·opportunities for women on all project stages and on “big” projects
Maternity, parenting and childcare
·leave arrangements including pre-natal leave
·parenting leave policy
·encouragement for women on maternity leave to maintain contact with the office
·funding childcare costs when work is required outside of agreed hours
·accommodating part-time work, including after maternity leave
Career development
·training and development encouraged and resourced
·mentoring systems, especially by partners
·innovative training and development strategies
·informal support such as lunches and networking with staff including seniors
Work culture
·explicitly engendering a culture of fairness, equity and productivity
·regular staff attitude and culture surveys fed back into policies and practices
·formal sexual harassment policies
·philosophy conducive to flexibility and change
·board level commitment to recruiting, promoting and retaining women.
Some of the women from the nominated firms spoke of their personal experience with issues of work/life balance and career advancement. Debra McKendry-Hunt of McKendry-Hunt Architects, a two-woman practice, detailed some very dispiriting experiences in larger firms (“You will make a good architect, for a woman” she was told early on), where it was impossible to secure part-time work locally at a senior level. Returning from maternity leave she was given little work because the firm believed she would not be able to concentrate on it.
Regional principal of Woodhead International Catherine Loker has had a happier experience with workplace culture, combining part-time work, motherhood and a senior role. The firm has established a number of equality-related policies, including equal opportunity for management roles, part-time work after maternity leave, parenting leave, and covering childcare costs for work out of hours. Staff turnover has fallen from over 40% in 1996-1997 to about 20% in 2003-2004. Women attending also shared their experiences dealing with their workplaces, clients and issues raised by the presentations.
Participants at the forum, including Caroline Pidcock, fjmt, McKendry-Hunt and others suggested a range of measures to extend the initiatives established by the nominee firms. These included:
·setting up a system of mentoring between firms
·developing a guide for all practices on how to cover the EOWA’s key areas
·development of an EEO policy for the RAIA’s own staff
·encouraging a review of the registration process
·improving networking including partnerships with other professional organizations
·helping universities develop a database of drop-out rates of architecture students
·increasing diversity and new ways of recognising women’s work including broadening the award system to include e.g. contract administration, documentation, project management.
The job of challenging “the underlying premises of how members of the profession should be recognised, rewarded and promoted”, as Pidcock had urged at the start of the Forum, has only just begun.
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