Despite growing scrutiny in the last several years of historical inequities in the profession of architecture, research shows that white men continue to have an intrinsically different—and in many ways, better—experience in the architectural workplace than women and people of color.
A joint study conducted by AIA and the University of California, Hastings College of the Law and completed by 1,346 architectural professionals measured bias based on gender and race/ethnicity in the practice of architecture. The study builds on recommendations from AIA’s Equity in Architecture commission and an industry-wide study published by AIA in 2016, “Diversity in the Profession of Architecture”, as another resource to move the needle on diversity, equity and inclusion in the architecture profession.
While the study is not a comprehensive overview of the profession, the study’s authors tried to be inclusive and thorough in their research methods. The report, titled “The Elephant in the (Well-Designed) Room” and released in December 2021, pinpoints necessary areas of improvement within firm and practice culture to continue building a profession that’s diverse and equitable. In this article, we offer some highlights that we believe will be useful to firms, architects, and industry professionals who are working to put an end to bias in the workplace.
“Even though many of the experiences we discuss in the report are small or isolated, they add up to patterns that can be career-defining for women and people of color,” says Rachel Korn, a research director at the UC Hastings Center for WorkLife Law and one of the authors of the study. “Current firm leadership needs to be proactive about addressing bias now if they want to see more women and people of color at the top in the future.” Learn more about the report and the survey data at AIA.org.
Bias From the Boardroom to the Break Room
Biases play out in two ways: in everyday workplace interactions and in formal business systems and policies. The study asked respondents about fairness in their organizations’ workplace processes and policies, including hiring, compensation, performance evaluations, sponsorship, and promotions.
While architects often delineate a lack of racial and gender diversity in the profession as a pipeline issue, as this study illuminates, it is also a culture issue. Open racism and sexism play a role, too.
The “Workplace Experiences Survey,” designed to identify experiences of bias, found that the largest divergences were between white men and women of color.
Throughout the study, Black architects and designers reported racial bias at what the authors call “stunningly high” levels. 52.4% of Black women and 50% of Black men reported dealing with negative racial stereotypes at work. As the study points out, one cost of racism is the time and effort people need to invest in managing it deftly; that is, stopping it without triggering resentment or retaliation.
As a group, Black women reported the most negative experiences in the architecture profession. Over 50% of those surveyed reported that they had to deal with negative racial stereotypes at work. The same percentage reported being left out of the information-sharing networks of their workplaces.
Sexism plays a large role in the rate of attrition for women from the profession. One white woman shared, “I’ve been told I should be a housewife.” In the survey, 70.9% of white women and 61.2% of women of color reported experiencing sexism in their workplaces, as compared with less than a quarter of white men and men of color.
The study shows that bias can be seen when people feel excluded at work and feel promotions are not fair, and as a result, feel less satisfied with their career overall and consider leaving the profession.
While all of the bias patterns studied were impactful, “tightrope” bias was one of the strongest. It can be difficult for women and people of color to balance authoritativeness with “approachability” while finding what leadership considers to be an appropriate way to demand career-enhancing work.
“Prove-it-again” bias was nearly as powerful. Women, Black people, Latinx people, and people from lower income backgrounds are stereotyped as less competent—so they are forced to prove themselves more than others in a professional workplace to get the same respect and recognition as white men from elite backgrounds, according to the study.
Women reported having to prove themselves repeatedly at much higher levels than white men—50% compared to 24.5%. Native American, Alaska Native, Indigenous, and others underrepresented in the architectural professions—as well as Black women—reported the strongest proveit-again bias. Black men reported more prove-it-again bias than other men of color.
Architectural professionals of Asian descent reported more “tug-of-war” bias (when bias against a group fuels conflict within it) compared to all other groups. They also reported being seen as team players rather than leaders (62% of women and 58.7% of men of Asian descent), being seen for their technical skills rather than managerial skills (55% of women and 51.5% of men of Asian descent), and being treated as “forever foreigners” (35% of women and 24.7% of men of Asian descent).
Among types of bias, motherhood, according to the study’s authors, triggers the strongest form of gender bias. The report states that being a mother, getting pregnant, or just being a woman of a certain age can trigger strong negative competence and commitment assumptions at work. Among women in the profession, 64% say that women’s opportunities diminish after they have children, and 59% report that women’s pay is worse as well.
The study found that mothers who leave the architecture profession do so not only in search of work-life balance but also because they feel their careers have stalled out due to discrimination against mothers in the form of pay inequality, lack of opportunities, and assumptions about their priorities. The authors of the study found a large discrepancy between the experiences of men and women in the architecture profession after they had children.
While the data suggest that family-friendly policies and working hours are present in many architectural firms, the 2018 “Equity in Architecture” study found the flexibility stigma was widespread: Of respondents, 70% believed that using the available work-life benefits in their organization would jeopardize their chances of promotion. Even if the official office policies support flexible arrangements, people do not necessarily feel free to use them.
As one woman told researchers, “Part-time and flexible arrangements exist and are promoted by HR and you won’t get fired, but women who use them find themselves sidelined or, in at least one case, harassed by another more senior woman about her perceived lack of commitment following having a child.”
Perceptions around parenthood disproportionately impact women, as do incidents of sexual harassment. Sexual harassment was something that most female architectural professionals reported encountering in their workplaces. Nearly a quarter of white women and women of color reported unwanted romantic or sexual attention in their workplaces, along with 6.4% of white men and 10.5% of men of color.
Other research has found that sexual harassment often hurts women’s careers and can lead to lost opportunities—46% of women who had experienced sexual harassment on the job reported that the harassment caused them to leave their job. For everyone to be on a level playing field in the workplace, every employee’s autonomy and boundaries must be respected.
Interrupting Bias in Your Firm
There are a number of strategies firms can put in place if they want to prioritize minimizing the impacts of bias on their workplaces.
Each solution presented in the study—in the areas of hiring, assignments, performance evaluations, meetings, family leave, and workplace flexibility—takes a three-step approach:
• Use metrics.
• Implement bias interrupters.
• Repeat as needed.
Bias interrupters, developed by the Center for WorkLife Law, are tweaks to basic business systems that are evidence-based and designed to produce measurable change.
Businesses use metrics to assess progress toward any strategic goal, and clear metrics can help firms pinpoint where bias exists—and the effectiveness of measures to mitigate bias. For each metric, consider whether patterned differences exist between majority men, majority women, men of color, and women of color (as well as any other underrepresented group that your firm may track, such as military veterans, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, etc.)
As the proposed solutions outline, firms must employ an evidence-based, metricsdriven approach to hiring. A few strategies include limiting referral hiring, tapping diverse networks, considering candidates from multi-tier schools, and insisting on a diverse pool of candidates.
When it comes to assignments, make sure that high-profile “glamour work” (as well as office housework) is distributed equally. Some suggestions: Don’t ask for volunteers for office housework or “glamour work” (women will feel pressure to take on less glamorous, but still important, tasks); hold everyone equally accountable; choose employees to serve as administrators and establish a rotation.
An informal study of performance evaluations in tech conducted by researcher Kieran Snyder found that 66% of women’s performance reviews contained negative personality criticism (for example, “You come off as abrasive”) whereas only 1% of men’s reviews did. Use metrics to analyze such questions as, “Do your performance evaluations show consistent disparities by demographic group?” and “Do the same performance ratings result in different promotion or compensation rates for different groups?”
In meetings, men tend to interrupt more than women. Women of all racial/ethnic groups were dramatically more likely to be interrupted than white men, with men of color falling in the middle. Another pattern, as the study points out, is that men will sometimes get the credit for an idea originally posed by a woman. In the survey, this stolen-idea phenomenon was reported by women—and women of color, especially—at a much higher rate than men. Actions to address this include making employees at all levels active participants in keeping metrics to track who speaks in meetings, who interrupts, and whose ideas get implemented, with the goal of using the data to have conversations and make adjustments in workplace culture as needed.
When it comes to family leave, companies need to create comprehensive leave and work-life balance policies to retain the best workers. If your firm offers disability leave, it needs to also offer it for childbirth. Offer equal parental leave (eliminating a “primary caregiver” model), as well as leave for all types of caregiving responsibilities. Perhaps most importantly, eliminate the flexibility stigma: Tell employees that taking leave won’t undercut their progress in the organization, and back up the policy by action. For example, track and share metrics showing promotion rates for team members who use all of their paid time off versus some of it versus none.
Lastly, workplace flexibility is something that 96% of architects say they need. When workplaces rely on an outdated model of a breadwinner who is always available for work, they exclude most people working today while hurting the company’s bottom line. This can be remedied by allowing for flex time, offering a wider range of work arrangements, and not valuing overworking—that is, paying attention to what an employee’s efforts lead to, not how many hours it takes to get there.
Ultimately, the study is a powerful source of information on the equity problems facing architecture—and how we can work together to fix them.