Five top women in world architecture: ‘Now is our time’

2018  Matthew Ponsford, CNN,

From the website: as long as there have been cities, women have built them: shaping structures, influencing architecture, and designing the neighborhoods we live in. But today, in the world-leading firms imagining the cities of the future, equality remains a long way off.

Even as the gender gap closes in architecture school -- with nearly as many women graduating in architecture as men -- research shows that across the world women are hired less, paid less and blocked from key creative positions at the top of firms.
In a survey of the world's 100 biggest architecture practices, only three were headed by women, and just two had as many female managers as male, according to magazine Dezeen in November.

World's top architects and designers revealed in 2018's AD100 list
But, at the same time gender equality comes under the spotlight across the creative industries -- from the Hollywood to high art -- a transformation is happening in architecture.
There is now a "crescendo" in female designers' creativity, said Denise Scott Brown, the pioneering post-modernist designer who has blazed a trail through the industry's male-dominated world for five decades.

"The efforts of women are making architecture a better atmosphere for women as they are in politics, art, and beyond," said Scott Brown, the principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, and co-author of the classic "Learning from Las Vegas."
"We need to be brave and encourage our children to be brave."

In wake of movements such as #MeToo and the international efforts to force industries to publish their gender pay gaps, the architectural world is opening up to change and the realization that, by embracing women, we can create better cities, according to top designers.
For International Women's Day 2018, we asked five of the world's leading architects what it will take to break down barriers -- from the classroom to the boardroom -- for women in architecture, and offer words of advice for the next generation of female creatives.