Bhawna Jaimini
I graduated from architecture school in 2014 with a cohort boasting more than 50 per cent female students—a turning point in the history of architecture education in India. Since then, more and more female students have joined architecture schools in their pursuit of becoming architects—a field which has so far been completely dominated by men and continues to be. However, the rate at which female students are partaking in architectural education has nowhere been able to make a dent in the number of female-led practices in India currently. I used to think that women aren’t pushing themselves hard enough and are settling for less; after all, weren’t we all told that we can do everything that a man can do?
After I started working—and I have been very fortunate to work in varied socio-economic contexts—I have begun to realise that there are multiple systemic and societal hurdles that exist for women in a country like India, unlike men who have access to multiple support mechanisms required to set up a practice. For example, women in India still do not have access to inheritance and parental property even though they are legally entitled to them. Even today, families are more comfortable spending thousands of dollars on the wedding of their daughters than support her in establishing a practice or business. One can only imagine the compounded challenges for women coming from not-so-privileged socio-economic backgrounds.
However, women with architectural degrees are slowly finding new ways and spaces to claim, especially since architecture is becoming increasingly multidisciplinary and can no longer be confined into boxes of just ‘design’ and ‘build’. In the last few years, I have met more and more women who studied architecture and are now applying their skills and rigour to fields of cinema, art, graphic design and even fashion. I would definitely love to see the day where we have more female-led architectural practices in India, but for now, I make peace with the fact that women are pushing the envelope and creating new possibilities of what a woman can do with her architecture degree.
Heather Banerd
As a woman working in architecture, I have never felt out of place. Of course, I have been fortunate to work in Singapore, where women outnumber men in the overall workforce (just over 61 per cent in 2019). In the office, most of my peers are women, and on the construction site, contractors will respect anyone who understands the job. Yet, when I look for female role models, women leading the architecture profession who I can emulate, aspire to be, and write about, the ranks are slim.
Like many conventionally ‘male’ professions, architecture in Asia appears to suffer from a slow disappearance of women. This doesn’t tally with the ambitions of my peers, but anecdotally, I have seen many women leave companies at a higher rate than men. Some start their own practice, where they will have more autonomy and control; some switch to more lucrative or flexible professions; some opt out of working altogether. Others stay, while scaling down their ambitions to make room for family. Clichéd though it is, the studio culture that still reigns in our profession is not designed for flexibility, rewarding instead total immersion in work. We still collectively buy into the narrative that architecture is a calling, not a profession, and that personal sacrifice is therefore noble, rather than unhealthy. While this impacts everyone in the profession, the pressures it puts on women are disproportionately higher.
Nor is studio culture designed for introspection. Frederica Buzzi’s Critique on the Modulor Man highlights the intrinsic bias of Le Corbusier’s model (how many people in the world are 6 feet tall to begin with?), which nevertheless remains influential in how we learn about proportion and scale. Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez expands this critique to the broader world of design. She details how much of our world is designed for male bodies or lifestyles, from safety equipment and medication to urban zoning laws and the design of public spaces.
There is little dialogue on these challenges in the broader design industry. For a profession that prides itself on reimagining the future, critically examining our past and the historic bias inherent in our work seems to hold a lower priority. If we aspire to design the spaces and structures of the future, we must first examine the strength of the foundations on which we build. We are a profession of creative thinkers—who better to design a more equitable world?
FUTURARC 93
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