Margaret Hicks (1858 – 1883) was the first woman to publish her work in a professional journal and the second to earn an architecture degree from an accredited university. Her design for a workman’s cottage was published in the April 13, 1878 edition of The American Architect and Builder News. Hicks received a state scholarship to attend Cornell University where she earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1879 and a bachelor of architecture degree in 1880.

While attending Cornell, Hicks became friends with future activist and social reformer Florence Kelley. Hicks shared Kelley’s interest in social justice as demonstrated in her designing a worker’s cottage while many of her classmates’ student projects were for a wealthier clientele. An 1883 history of women in America lauded Hicks’s design skills and concern for the poor. It read in part, “The theme selected by Miss Hicks, as her Commencement Essay, was the ‘Tenement House,’ and she seemed—unlike many of the architects who have sent plans to New York for which premiums are offered—to have remembered that houses must have light and air, closets and bed-rooms.”

“Role Incredulity is a form of gender bias where women are mistakenly assumed to be in a supportive or stereotypically female role…rather than a leadership or stereotypically male role,” researchers Amy Diehl and Leanne M. Dzubinki write in the Harvard Business Review.

Role incredulity hurts both individuals and their companies, the researchers write. Women must spend time and energy correcting erroneous assumptions and controlling their emotional responses to them. This can cause cumulative harm. Philosopher Christina Freidlaender illustrates the impact of such slights with the example of the pain caused if you accidentally step on someone’s foot. If people have been accidentally stepping on that person’s foot all day, their foot is already in pain when you step on it. Your accidental misstep, while to your mind causing limited damage, will cause greater harm than if you were the only one stepping on that person’s foot.

Architect and decorator Mary E. J. Colter (1869-1958) worked off-and-on at the Grand Canyon for four decades while employed by hospitality company Fred Harvey. Attracting and entertaining guests was part of her brief, but she often achieved this with an educational flourish. In her design for the south rim’s Bright Angel Lodge, Colter integrated the geology of the Grand Canyon into the lounge’s fireplace. The rocks used in its construction were gathered from different strata of the canyon and packed out by mules led by trail guide Ed Cummings.

Colter’s goal was to reference the geology of the canyon to create an “authentic and therefore interesting” fireplace for guests. To achieve scientific accuracy, she relied on park naturalist Edwin McKee. “I know the design I want but depend entirely on you for the geology,” she wrote to him in 1935, when she also asked McKee to review the rocks collected by Cummings. “You know I am not trying to show every strata in every part of the whole canyon, - only those that occur either on the Bright Angel or the South Rim part of the Kaibab trails.”

Katherine Stinson Otero (1891 – 1977) had two careers, the first in aviation and next in design and construction. Born in Alabama, Stinson traveled to Chicago to find someone willing to teach her to fly. In 1912, she became the fourth woman to earn a pilot’s license, and by 1913 Stinson was performing as a stunt pilot. Among many firsts, Stinson was the first woman to fly at night, to deliver air mail, and to fly in Japan and China. Stinson kept her plane well-maintained, learning about its mechanics in the process. With her mother Emma Stinson, in 1913 she founded the Stinson Aviation Company in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The company built, sold, and rented aircraft.

Gender biases, which can result in treating male and female job applicants differently, has a measurable impact in architecture, an AIA/The Center for WorkLife Law investigation found. Gender biases affect women’s career paths, pay, sense of belonging, and more. It can also reduce the talent pool for employers and contribute to turnover. Often the biases are unconscious and therefore hard to mitigate.

Adopting processes that result in equitable recruiting and hiring is one way to reduce biases in architecture and other professions. Some of the available tools, like training to reducing implicit biases, are similar to those used to retain existing employees, but others apply to attracting talent.  Here are three things firms can do to attract female applicants:  

Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) had been working as an artist, decorator, and architect for hospitality company Fred Harvey for forty-six years when she was tasked with modifying the interior of the Painted Desert Inn, located in what is now Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, in 1947. As she had at the Grand Canyon’s Desert View Watchtower some two hundred miles to the west of the inn, Colter engaged renowned Hopi artist Fred Kabotie to provide wall paintings.

Kabotie’s paintings at the inn included representations of the Hopi Buffalo dance and the legend related to the ceremony of collecting salt. Kabotie chose to depict the salt legend because the inn stood on lands that Hopi people traditionally travelled through as part of this ceremony.

Elise Mercur (1868 – 1947) had been practicing architecture for about four years before she rose to national attention in 1894. That was the year her design was selected in a competition for the Women’s Building for the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. Thirteen women competed for the “substantial prize” offered for the best design.

The board of Lady Managers unanimously voted for Mercur’s design. A newspaper reported, “The [male] architect who conferred with the committee in regard to their choice of plans said he had no idea that women could do such artistic and practical designing and drawing.” The same man is quoted as marveling, “‘These buildings are bold enough to be drawn by men.’”

Ageism is a bias that disproportionally affects women, and it affects them at every age. “Gendered ageism sits at the intersection of age and gender bias and is a double whammy where there is ‘no right age’ for professional women,” Amy Diehl et al. found in their survey of female leaders and reported in the Harvard Business Review (HBR).

Older women (defined in the study as over 60) reported feeling undervalued and overlooked for advancement opportunities. Younger female leaders (defined as under 40) and those who look young reported being condescended to and of facing “role incredulity”: being mistaken for administrative support, an intern, or other junior woman. Non-white women experienced role incredulity at even higher rates than white women. These women also often face a “credibility deficit” and have to expend energy and time to prove they know what they are talking about.

Future architect and decorator Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) combined her talents for teaching, exhibiting art, and lecturing at women’s clubs in 1906. That was the year the General Federation of Women’s Clubs held its national biennial convention in St. Paul. Colter volunteered to serve on the host city’s Art and Decorations committees.

Colter’s role gained greater importance when a construction delay prevented the convention from being held in a new auditorium building. The Biennial was relocated to the St. Paul Armory, a building commonly occupied by National Guard troops. With help from her students, Colter transformed the military hall into a meeting space suitable for a national convention.

Mary Nevan Gannon (1867 – 1932) and Alice J. Hands (1874 – 1971) met in 1892 while studying architecture at the newly opened New York School of Applied Design for Women. “These friends work together most harmoniously, consult on every important enterprise, and are so inseparable that they are indiscriminately called Gannon or Hand by their fellow-students,” an 1896 profile of the architects read.

After completing their technical training in 1894, the women worked for two of their former instructors. These architects were in turn employed by a large firm so the work of entering design competitions was, Hands wrote, “left almost wholly to us. So largely were our suggestions accepted and so much of the work was practically ours that we decided after three out of the five plans we had worked out were awarded prizes, that instead of spending our time and energy working for others without receiving outside credit we would constitute ourselves a firm for independent work.” Gannon & Hands opened in New York in 1894 and was likely the first female architectural partnership in the U.S.

Sexual harassment is common in the architecture profession. Among female architecture and construction professionals surveyed, 85 percent reported experiencing sexual harassment. Of the male survey respondents, 25 percent reported having been harassed. These percentages are roughly twice those of the overall workforce across occupations.

The most common form of harassment experienced by female architecture professionals was sexist comments (64 percent), followed by uncomfortable jokes or stories (50 percent). Unwanted physical contact was experienced by 27 percent of women, while 15 percent were faced with sexual or other inappropriate images. Women in architecture experience harassment from co-workers (58 percent of white women, 59 percent of women of color), contractors and subcontractors (49 percent of white women, 64 percent of women of color), and clients (36 percent of white women, 35 percent of women of color), the AIA/The Center for WorkLife Law investigation into bias in the architecture profession found.

Before she became a decorator and architect, Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) taught art, created art, and gave lectures for the Civic League, New Century Club, National League for Civic Improvement, and other organizations.

Women’s clubs such as the New Century Club, where Colter was a member, provided women—at least, middle- and upper-class women—with an opportunity to find their voices. Whether in the discussions following talks by outside lecturers or by researching and presenting their own papers at club meetings, members gained valuable public speaking practice. Their skills and confidence opened doors for themselves and other women.

Alice Constance Austin (1862 – 1955) was born in Chicago and moved with her family to Santa Barbara, California. The family traveled extensively around the US and Europe. On her travels, Austin took note of geological formations, tunnels, and towns; her paper “Chalk and Chalk Towns” was published in the Proceedings of the Santa Barbara Society of Natural History in 1902. It is not known how Austin acquired her design skills, but in 1888 she designed a home in Santa Barbara for her parents and herself.

Austin was a feminist and socialist as well as a designer. Around 1914, she had the opportunity to pitch her design for a socialist city to socialist attorney and politician Job Harriman and several hundred like-minded people. They had left Los Angeles to develop their own community in the nearby Antelope Valley, living in tents and a few crude buildings on the site while the planning the construction of Llano del Rio, a Utopian community.

A recent study of 25,000 documents evaluating employee performance found that women were 22 percent more likely to receive personality-based feedback than men. Black, Latinx, and older employees also consistently received lower-quality feedback than white men. This was true across all organizations and regardless of the gender of the evaluator.

Personality-based feedback, which might include words like “abrasive,” “collaborative,” or “opinionated,” is not actionable or constructive. It potentially limits opportunities for career advancement. In addition, it is susceptible to implicit bias—bias the bias-holder may be unaware they hold. For example, women were 11 times more likely to be called “abrasive” than men, according to the study. Owing to gender stereotypes, women are often considered aggressive or abrasive for behaviors that would be considered assertive or ambitious—and completely acceptable—in men.

In addition to her architecture and interior design work at hospitality company Fred Harvey, Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) also helped design a china pattern. The Mimbreño china pattern was used in the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway’s Super Chief dining cars for thirty-four years beginning in 1937. The designs were based on pottery decorations made by people in the Mimbres River Valley in southern New Mexico and in southwestern Arizona from the late tenth century to 1130 A.D. The pottery featured both geometric patterns and whimsical figures of animals painted in black and red.

When Colter was asked to produce an “Indian-themed” china pattern for use on the Super Chief-Two’s service from Chicago to Los Angeles, she thought of the Mimbres pots. Colter had previously duplicated some of the Mimbres designs on the walls of her 1932 Desert View Watchtower building. According to Colter’s secretary Sadie Rubins (who did the leg work of locating examples of the pottery), Colter visited museum collections to further study examples of the prehistoric vessels before creating thirty-seven designs based on them.

Minerva Parker was born in 1862 in Glasford, Illinois. Her father died during the Civil War when she was 14 months old. Her mother, older sister, and Minerva moved to Chicago in 1871, and to Philadelphia in 1876 after her mother remarried. Minerva’s stepfather died the following year, and her mother opened a boarding house.

In 1880, Minerva was working as a housekeeper and governess but she aspired to enter her grandfather’s profession of architecture. During the early 1880s she took several drafting courses. In 1885, Minerva Parker found a position as an apprentice in an architect’s office, and in the late 1880s, she opened her own practice. She is recognized as the first female solo practitioner in the US. Parker designed many houses for clients in the nearby suburbs of Philadelphia, including one for suffragist Rachel Foster Avery in 1890.

Imagine contributing an idea at a meeting and having it ignored until a man presents the idea as his own, at which point the group takes it seriously. Half of all female architects do not have to imagine having an idea stolen because they have experienced it, an AIA/The Center for WorkLife Law study found. In comparison, less than one-third of male architects surveyed reported an idea-theft. For women, it is such a common occurrence across professions that they have come up with terms for it like “bro-propriation” and “he-peating.”

While the terms are amusing, the root cause and its impacts are not. It is a symptom of the usually unconscious bias resulting in women being considered less competent than men. This can lead to confirmation bias: “We see what we expect to see, so if we were not expecting a great idea to come from a woman, we are less likely to pay attention when it does, leaving the opportunity open for someone else to pick it up and repeat it,” the AIA/The Center for WorkLife Law study authors write.

In 1938, more than 334,000 people visited Grand Canyon National Park. Although this is a fraction of today’s visitors annually, it represented a 760 percent increase from just twenty years earlier. As more people traveled to Grand Canyon National Park, the need for accommodations for both guests and employees grew.

Hospitality company Fred Harvey was the park’s concessionaire and operated hotels, campgrounds, restaurants, and tours on the south rim of the park. Its Bright Angel Lodge and Cabins first opened in 1935 to help meet the demand for more lodging. Fred Harvey turned to the same architect for the design of two new employee dormitories: Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958).

Sophia Gregoria Hayden (1868–1953) was born in Chile to a Peruvian mother and American father. As a girl she moved to her grandparents’ Boston-area home and attended the Hillside School. In 1886, Hayden became the first woman admitted to MIT’s Bachelor of Architecture program.

After graduating with honors in 1890, Hayden began teaching mechanical drafting in a Boston-area grammar school. In early 1891, she learned about a design competition for the Women’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The exposition’s Board of Lady Managers restricted the competition for the building, which was to contain exhibits made by women, to female architects.

March 14 is Equal Pay Day. It represents how far into this calendar year women in the U.S. had to work to earn what men earned in 2022. Women across occupations earned 84 cents for each dollar earned by men in 2020, a Pew Research Center’s analysis found. In architecture, full-time female architects earned just 78 percent of their male colleague’s salaries, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 2019.

This disparity in pay has narrowed since the passage of the 1963 Equal Pay Act, but at a glacial speed. At the current pace, it will take 40 more years for women to reach pay parity with men, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. The wait will be even longer for many women of color as compared to white men: over 100 years for Black women and almost 200 years for Hispanic or Latina women.