What It’s Like to Be a Woman of Color in Architecture

What is it like to be a woman of color in the workplace?

My team has done six studies documenting how gender and racial bias play out in different industries, including law, engineering, and science. The overall pattern is stunningly consistent: White men report lower levels of every form of bias and the highest confidence that business systems are fair, while women of color report the highest levels of bias and the lowest confidence in systems’ fairness.

We recently published a new report that looks at bias in the architecture industry that aligns with our previous findings. We surveyed 1,346 architects and designers at small, medium, and large firms and spoke with 18 individuals via focus groups and one-on-one interviews.

Among our findings:

• 84% of white men, but only 54% of Black women, said they get paid fairly.
• 89% of white men, but only 69% of Latinas, said their performance evaluations were fair.
• 89% of white men, but only 63% of Black women, said they had equal access to networking opportunities.

The list goes on and on.

Women of color in our study were dramatically more likely to report prove-it-again bias: Only a quarter of white male architects, but more than half of women of color, reported they had to prove themselves more than their colleagues. “I felt that extra hours and two times the work was necessary to get the same recognition as male counterparts,” said a multiracial woman. We heard repeatedly from Black women who feel they cannot make a single mistake. That’s a hard standard to meet.

Our study found that fewer than one in five white male architects, but fully half of women of color (and nearly two thirds of Black women), reported questions being addressed to someone else even though they are the expert. “As a young Black woman I am often not seen as an expert when on construction sites,” one woman told us. This aligns with prior research on expertise which found that women were seen as less influential when they possessed expertise, while the opposite was true for men.

Another bias we saw in our study of the architecture industry is the tightrope: While everyone needs to be authoritative and ambitious to succeed, women of color need to be authoritative and ambitious in ways that are seen as “appropriate” by those in charge, typically white men. “Office peers tend to criticize [behavior] … as hyper aggressive or ‘passionate,’ when the male in the same position would be regarded/lauded as a leader/assertive. Women that lead are perceived as bitches,” said a multiracial woman. Only about a quarter of white men reported pushback for assertiveness, as compared to half of the women of color, and 60% of multiracial women.

“Sometimes being deferential is the price of being seen as reasonable,” concludes one prominent social scientist. That’s why nearly two thirds of Black female architects, but only one third of white men, reported that they are seen as worker bees, which affects who gets the glamour work and who does the “office housework” – planning parties, finding a time to meet, doing non-promotable tasks. A Latina we spoke to didn’t sugarcoat it: “Women are given the bad projects. Men get the juicy jobs.” Nearly 90% of white male architects said they get to develop their design ideas, but only 72% of women of color did. Twice the percentage of women of color as white men said they do more behind-the-scenes work than their colleagues.

A 2021 study found that 30% to 50% of the gender gap in promotions is attributable to these types of bias. That study didn’t address the strongest form of gender bias, which is triggered by motherhood. In architecture, only 15% of white men, but about half of women of all races, reported that having children changed their colleagues’ perceptions of their commitment and competence. “After getting back from maternity leave, there was a perception that as a newly working mother, I wouldn’t be able to put in the same effort,” said an Asian-American woman.  

Male architects also were more likely than women to report that they can take family leave, work family-friendly hours, and take time off after working hard to meet a deadline. Is the solution not to have kids? Nope. Women of color without children are dramatically more likely than any other group to say they have to work longer hours to cover for colleagues who see them as having “no life.”

A final way bias acts as an invisible escalator up for white men and down for women of color stems from homophily, or the idea that “like likes like.” Similarity is the strongest determinant of who is in your social network. This means that, if a certain demographic group dominates at the top, they will tend to have others like them in their networks. This in-group, which gets privileged access to inside information, sponsorship, and plum assignments does not include all white men, but typically consists chiefly or exclusively of white men. The consequences are dramatic: Only one in five white men reported being left out of information sharing, but half of Black women did (as did 41.5% of all women of color).

Bias against a group often fuels conflict within it. Nearly half of women architects of color said that women are in conflict with other women, for example, for the single “women’s spot.” More than one third of women of color said people of color are in conflict with other people of color, for example, for a single “diversity slot.” White men typically don’t have to worry that if another white man gets a prized position the quota for white men will be filled, precluding opportunities for them.

So that’s what it feels like to be a woman of color in a predominantly male, predominantly white workplace: White men swimming comfortably with the current, while women of color struggle to swim against it. To us, the amazing thing is not that most women of color don’t survive and thrive. The amazing thing is that some do.

Fixing this will take more than a sincere conversation about inclusion. Addressing structural racism requires structural change. It’s true in policing, and it’s true in companies. Real change will take companies willing to adopt a sustained, evidenced-based approach to interrupt bias in everyday workplace interactions and business systems, using metrics to establish baselines and measure progress.

In other words, companies need to address diversity using the same tools they use to solve any pressing problem: evidence, metrics, and persistence. After all, if your company had a problem with sales, it would not host a sincere conversation, declare “Celebrate Sales Month,” and expect anything to change, now would it?