Links On Workplace Fairness

I’m using “fairness” as a catch-all term for workplace equality issues. I happen to have read several items in the last few days that relate to this topic, so it seems like a good idea to combine them into one post. They’re listed below in the order I read them:

• “Where Are All the Female Architects?” by Allison Arieff is a look at the issue of gender equality in the architectural profession. Almost a year ago I discussed the Architecture Lobby Manifesto and, as I said then, a lot of the issues are similar in the engineering profession. The biggest difference is that architecture undergrads are, as Ms. Arieff discusses, pretty evenly split between men and women, while civil engineering undergrad programs are still in the same range of having 20 to 25 percent women that was true when I graduated 32 years ago. Engineering has a “pipeline problem” of needing more girls to enter the field in high school; both professions have a retention problem caused by their cultures. I don’t really have anything to add to what I said in January, other the addition of eleven more months.
• Things being what they are, Ms. Arieff tweeted this not long after the article was published: “In response to this article, someone just emailed me that ‘architecture requires a certain personality type that’s inclined towards both science and creativity… and it’s quite rare for females to be both'” It should go without saying that the email she received is nonsense but unfortunately we have to keep saying it again and again.
• A few days earlier, Christine Hauser’s piece “How Professionals of Color Say They Counter Bias At Work” was published. It does not discuss the design professions specifically but it does talk about people in similar high-status jobs who, on top of the difficulties of their work, have to deal with the assaults of racial bias.
• Finally, I reread the SE3 website: Structural Engineering Engagement & Equity. It’s good, but it’s not a solution. First, anyone who voluntarily follows the guidelines there is convincible, and probably not one of the people causing trouble in the items linked to above. Second, it is mired, perhaps unavoidably, in the language of corporate Human Resources departments. That is neither inspirational nor particularly clear.

I make no claim to have the answers to these problems, which are deeply embedded in our culture as a nation and as a profession. But the first step towards solving the problems is making sure that the people not personally suffering from them – like me, for example – are aware of how serious they are.