Interior designer Helen Liu Fong (1927 – 2005) played a key role in the design of numerous futuristic coffee shops, motels, gas stations, and more in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s. The challenge was to get people out of their cars. With brightly colored finishes, large glass windows, dramatic rooflines, and a lot of neon, Fong’s buildings beckoned to passing drivers. This style of architecture had been dubbed “Googie” by critic Douglas Haskell. It proliferated in Southern California from the 1940s to the 1970s.

Fong was born in LA’s Chinatown to Chinese immigrant parents. Growing up, she and her siblings helped in the family’s laundry business, but her father wanted them to get an education so they could be independent. Fong was a good student. She was admitted to UCLA, then transferred to UC Berkeley. She graduated with a degree in City Planning in 1949 and returned to LA.

‍Women are less likely than equally-qualified men to apply for positions when their qualifications do not meet all the criteria. This results in a smaller pool of female candidates, which in turn contributes to the lower rate of women in leadership positions across most professions.

It is not a lack of confidence that keeps female applicants from applying when their skills and experience do not match a job description perfectly, Tara Sophia Mohr writes in The Harvard Business Review. “What held them back from applying was not a mistaken perception about themselves, but a mistaken perception about the hiring process,” Mohr writes. “When those women know others are giving it a shot even when they don’t meet the job criteria, they feel free to do the same.”

Throughout her four decades as a decorator and architect for the Fred Harvey hospitality company, Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) collaborated with many different people. One of the first architects she worked with was the Santa Fe Railway’s chief architect.

Charles F. Whittlesey (1867 – 1941) was just two years older than Colter but had significantly more architecture experience when they met in 1902. Although both received their training in an architect’s office, Colter began her first career as a teacher in St. Paul. Whittlesey got a position as a clerk and later apprentice in a Chicago architecture firm. He began working for Addison & Fiedler, Architects around 1882 when he was just fifteen. In 1889 he started his own firm, and around 1890 he became the chief architect for the Santa Fe Railway.

In 1959, Ruth Gordon Schnapp (1926 – 2014) became the first woman to earn her structural engineering license in California. She specialized in designing for earthquakes. “To insure safety of public buildings, I think that’s probably the most important thing that I do, as far as the public is concerned,” Gordon Schnapp said after retiring from her 41-year career.

In addition to her licensing “first,” Gordon Schnapp became the first female member of the Structural Engineer’s Association of Northern California in 1953; the first female president of the Bay Area Engineering Council in 1982; and the first woman to receive the Tau Beta Pi’s Eminent Engineer Award in 1995.

‍ Because the great majority of workplace leaders are male, greater gender equality requires the active participation of men. Although 88 percent of men surveyed in 2019 said they wanted to help women advance, progress has been slow at best. For example, in 2024 the gender pay gap increased for the second year in a row, the US Census found, with women’s earnings at just 80.9 percent of men’s. There are both barriers and strategies to increase men’s active support of gender equity in the workplace.‍
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The good news is that most Americans (70 percent of women and 78 percent of men) surveyed believe women are getting more well-paid jobs than they did 20 years ago, Pew Research found in 2024. However, 18 percent of these people believe that the gains have come at the expense of men. Where most women see equality as justice, some men might see it as a threat to their status.

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Much of the work architect and interior decorator Mary E. J. Colter (1859 – 1958) did for the Fred Harvey hospitality company included selecting—and sometimes designing—furnishings for their hotels and restaurants. As the company expanded into railway station concessions, so did Colter’s work.

Construction of Chicago’s Union Station was completed in 1925 at a cost of $75 million—roughly $1.4 billion today. The building’s architect was Graham, Anderson, Probst & White. Colter had previously collaborated with the firm when helping the National Park Service create a comprehensive plan for Grand Canyon National Park in 1922.

Bertha Louise Yerex Whitman (c. 1892 – 1984) attended normal school, but after a brief teaching career she decided she would prefer to be an architect. In 1914, when she went to the University of Michigan to apply to the architecture school, she was not made welcome. She later recounted that the professor she spoke with—who would later become the school’s dean—told her, “’Well, you’re a woman, and the law says we have to take you; but I’ll tell you right now we don’t want you.’”

Yerex was not deterred. She enrolled in the architecture school and did well. She was a founding member of “The T-Square,” a group of female architecture and engineering students that later became a national professional organization.  In 1917, when many of her classmates left to serve in World War I, Yerex joined Dodge Motor Co. as a drafter.  After the war she returned to the university and became the only woman to graduate from the School of Architecture in the class of 1920.

There is a strong business case for hiring a diverse group of employees. A diverse workforce can offer unique perspectives that can improve problem-solving and increase innovation; has the capability to successfully serve a broad client base; and results in higher employee satisfaction and retention, the Diversity Council reports.

But workplaces are becoming less diverse as women are leaving them in greater numbers than men. Between January and June of this year, 212,000 women left the workforce. In contrast, 44,000 men entered it in that same time period, according to Time.

Architect and decorator Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) often incorporated references to Native American cultures in her designs for hospitality company Fred Harvey. For her Southwestern projects, she frequently took inspiration from the region’s Pueblo and Navajo peoples.

In 1923, Colter called for wall paintings in the lobby of the El Navajo hotel in Gallup, New Mexico, to be based on Navajo sand paintings. Colter always strove for accuracy in her depictions of indigenous cultures. With the help of several of Colter’s Fred Harvey colleagues, the company obtained watercolors made by four Navajo singers that depicted sand paintings, Arnold Berke writes. At Colter’s direction, Fred Harvey artist Fred Geary, with assistance from Navajo medicine man Miguelito, copied some of these onto the walls of the El Navajo hotel.

Anna Wagner Keichline (1889 – 1943) was an architect and industrial designer who received seven patents for her building-related industrial designs. A 1911 graduate of Cornell University’s architecture program, in 1920 Keichline became the first woman to earn her architecture license in Pennsylvania. Owing to her fluency in German, she volunteered as a special agent in the military intelligence division during World War I.

For most of her life, Keichline lived in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania where her father was a prominent attorney. At age fourteen, Keichline earned first prize at the country fair for an oak card table and walnut chest that she made. “They, in quality and finish, compare favorably with the work of a skilled mechanic,” a newspaper reported, noting that Keichline had “the best outfit of carpenter implements to be found in town.”

While bullying in the workplace is both perpetrated and received by people of different genders, women experience more bullying than men do, researchers Misawa et al found. Almost 75 percent of workplace bullies are men, and 60 percent of these target women. About two-thirds of female bullies also target women.

Bullying actions are by definition repetitive and malicious and can include harassing, offending, humiliating, gaslighting, or excluding behaviors. About 20 percent of workers report having experienced or witnessed bullying, Misawa et al found. Zapf et al found employees at all levels in the hierarchy may experience bullying (p. 118).

Teacher, artist, architect, and decorator Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) had a lifelong interest in Native American culture. This interest was reflected in her visits to the lands of Southwestern indigenous peoples; her collections of their baskets, pottery, and jewelry; lectures she gave; and her design work for the Fred Harvey hospitality company. It was also reflected in her personal library.

At the time of her death in January 1958, Colter had retained a library of about 130 volumes, most about the ethnology, archaeology, and history of the southwest, and some about architecture. These books, published from 1893 to 1957, must have been among her most prized since she held on to them through several moves.

Rose Ishbel Greely (1887 – 1969) was a landscape architect and the first licensed female architect in Washington, DC. An early member of the American Society of Landscape Architects, in 1936 she became a Fellow in that organization.  The Washington Board of Trade awarded her two medals for her work. In addition to her practice, Greely also wrote many articles about architecture and landscape architecture. Most of the homes and gardens she designed were in Washington, DC, Maryland, and Virginia, but Greely also did projects in Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Mexico.

The daughter of famed polar explorer Major General Adolphus Greely, Rose Greely had the luxury of studying for different careers before landing on home and garden design. She also had the opportunity to travel widely, joining her family on a two-year trip to Europe, Asia, and South America after her father’s retirement. After spending a year in Florence, Italy studying metalwork, Greely decided she lacked the talent to be a metal artist. She would later integrate Arts and Crafts ideals into her design work, in tandem with the Beaux Arts concepts she observed in Europe and learned about in her studies.

Mentoring can support the career development of junior employees and help their organizations thrive. But while mentoring has benefits, female protégés are at a disadvantage.

The investment that mentors make to support their mentees’ career is based on the potential they see in the junior employee. But these judgements, researchers Belle Rose Ragins et al write in the Journal of Vocational Behavior, are “susceptible to implicit biases and stereotypes….This is particularly problematic for women as they are held to higher standards in assessments of their advancement potential.”

In her career as an artist, architect, and decorator for the Fred Harvey hospitality company, Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) collaborated with many creative people. These included furniture makers, architects, muralists and other artists. One of these artists was Fred Geary (1894 – 1946) who joined the Fred Harvey company around 1917.

Geary grew up in Carrollton, Missouri and attended the Kansas City Art Institute and later the Art Students League New York. His work for Fred Harvey was varied and included art and design work for menus, tourist brochures, playing cards, and postcards. His painting of El Navajo Hotel in Gallup, New Mexico, a building Colter played a role in designing, was used as the basis of Fred Harvey’s post card of the hotel.

Architect Ida F. McCain (born c. 1885) designed multiple homes and dominated the San Francisco bungalow market in the late 1910s and early 1920s. This success followed prolific design work in Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon. By 1919, McCain was reported to have designed a thousand homes.

McCain made no secret of her financial success, telling a reporter, “There’s money in it for the right women and when I say money I don’t mean the bread-and-water wage many women work for when they are capable of earning more.” The article noted that “McCain’s ability as architect is recognized to such an extent that the company which now has her services paid her more than they paid the man who preceded her.”

The need to recruit and retain women in the construction trades is obvious. Labor shortages are driving up construction costs and potentially affecting project quality and schedules. At the same time, just 4.3 percent of those employed in construction and extraction occupations were female in 2024, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In construction management, 10.5 percent of the positions were held by women.

While this gender imbalance represents an opportunity for addressing the labor shortage, there are barriers to recruiting and retaining women in the skilled trades. The National Center for Construction Education and Research (NCCER) and Ambition Theory surveyed and interviewed women working in the skilled construction trades in 2024. Read more for some challenges and how to address them, as highlighted in the NCCER report.

Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) worked as a teacher, artist, interior decorator, and architect over the course of her career. While she started her career in St. Paul, Minnesota and is best known for her design work in the Southwest, she spent several years in Seattle before going to work full-time with the Fred Harvey hospitality company.

Colter later recalled, “1908 and 1909 were spent in Seattle developing the Decoration Department for Frederick and Nelson.” Frederick & Nelson was a popular store that opened in 1890 and evolved into a department store through their founders’ philosophy of selling whatever people wanted to buy. In 1906, store innovations included an in-store tea room and selling ready-made clothing.

In 1939, architect Henrietta Cuttine Dozier (1872 – 1947) recalled drafting plans and wanting to study architecture since she was seven years old. After graduating from high school, she apprenticed for a year with an architect in her hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, before attending the Pratt Institute in New York for two years. She then attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for four years before graduating in 1899 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Architecture. Although she had started at MIT with two female classmates in the architecture program, she recalled being the only woman to graduate that year.

Dozier returned to Atlanta and practiced architecture there for almost fourteen years. She primarily designed apartment buildings, residences, and churches, although she also designed office buildings, schools, and other building types. Her work included being the associate architect on the Federal Reserve Bank building in Jacksonville, Florida. In 1905 Dozier became only the third woman to gain membership in the American Institute of Architects. In 1906, she helped organize the Atlanta chapter.

Thirty percent of people polled feel invisible at work and 65 percent feel unappreciated, Zach Mercurio writes in Harvard Business Review. People need to feel like they matter. Employees who don’t believe their work is valued find their work less satisfying and are more likely to leave. They are also less likely to be promoted. For some populations, not mattering correlates with an increased risk of burnout and emotional exhaustion, researchers Rebecca Bonhag and Laura Upenieks write in Society and Mental Health. Mattering matters.

Women are more likely to feel that their work doesn’t matter because they experience behaviors like selective incivility and being interrupted more frequently than their male counterparts. In addition to communicating  disrespect, gender bias often results in women’s work being undervalued when compared to men’s work. There are three reasons for this, researchers Ella J. Lombard and Sapna Cheryan write: “Actual work contributions being valued less coming from women than men; assumptions that women's contributions will be less valuable than men's; and lack of recognition or credit for women's contributions.”