Like Selling Your
Pay-Day and Same-D
The Importance of
Perilous Scramble
MS Scarlett Feaver
Fight for Your Lif
We're Finally Play
Villains Have More
Travel Agent Fare
Investing, Stocks,

All Hell Breaks Lo
The Dragon Slayer
The Hidden Immunit
What's the Beef?
Got My Swag Back
Bum-Puzzled
Anything Could Hap
The Good Things in
Winner Winner, Chi
Fatigue Makes Cowa
<<      >>
Now’s the Time to Start Scheming to Blow up the Patriarchy at the AIA “The AIA is a nonprofit organization that is largely funded by public money and grants. This is an important moment for the AIA to ask if its programs, structure and work force are truly advancing design or advancing the status quo,” writes former AIA president David Dixon. When you go to see an architect, a house, you are also going to see their status as a woman in architecture, not as an architect. Cara Kelly Former AIA President “The AIA is a nonprofit organization that is largely funded by public money and grants. This is an important moment for the AIA to ask if its programs, structure and work force are truly advancing design or advancing the status quo.” In 2011, the AIA released the “The State of Diversity in the Architectural Profession”, a report that concluded that “American firms are doing better than their foreign counterparts in recruiting minorities and women, but much of that progress is due to self-selection rather than the efforts of architectural educators, and it is not a significant improvement over previous years.” “This is also not a report about hiring, but our findings are relevant to hiring,” says AIA President Cara Kelly, a professor of architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, in a statement. To see if the AIA’s efforts to recruit women and minorities into the profession are paying off, Kelly and Menei are collecting aggregate data on job placements. This data won’t just report the number of women and minorities in practice, but will look at the jobs people are filling. The full report will come out next year, but in the meantime Kelly is going to share the aggregate information with individual firms. She says she will be interested to see if firms’ efforts to “go deep” on diversity—to find solutions to the lack of women and minorities in their own firms—corresponds with increased diversity of their practices. “I think it is very important for AIA members to know that they are being held accountable for the actions of all of the entities in the industry and how those actions effect the overall environment in which architecture firms are working.” “I think it is very important for AIA members to know that they are being held accountable for the actions of all of the entities in the industry and how those actions effect the overall environment in which architecture firms are working.” —Cara Kelly, architect and former AIA President The group would like to see information on the racial and gender make-up of the construction industry, as well as the gender and racial make-up of clients and clients’ designers. Kelly also hopes to establish ways to hold AIA members accountable for their actions on diversity and inclusion. “There is a need to make sure all these factors are looked at, and that all AIA member firms report,” Kelly told AIA in an interview. “I think it is important that all information be available to the AIA.” Kelly said the industry needs to ask itself whether it is truly committed to gender equity in the architectural profession. “Whether or not you can really, honestly believe that you’re a diverse organization, when you haven’t put in place effective, meaningful programs that would actually result in meaningful diversity,” she said. Firms that do not actively recruit minority and women should be held accountable and not allowed to join the organization, Kelly says. However, she says the AIA can’t dictate what action firms take to get more women and minorities on their teams. While there’s no excuse for not having diversity of thought among construction workers, Kelly says, there are other organizations—such as unions and associations of construction workers—that have taken the lead on diversity and inclusion, and “AIA needs to take the lead on our profession.” The AIA announced the initiative—initially called The Role of Architecture in Diversity—at the October 2013 AIA conference in Chicago. In March, the AIA announced that Kelly would lead the initiative, but Menei stepped away from the project because of conflicts over who would be in charge. In addition to the data aggregation project, Kelly says the AIA is also establishing a Diversity Task Force to develop a list of best practices for getting women and minorities into architecture firms. She said the information from the diversity task force should be available at the 2014 AIA conference, which takes place in San Francisco next March. “We will be engaging members of the profession to help us design an education program to engage members of the profession to help us design an education program to better incorporate those goals into the educational curriculum in architecture,” Kelly says. The AIA is trying to be proactive about the lack of diversity, says former AIA president David Dixon. “The AIA is a nonprofit organization that is largely funded by public money and grants. This is an important moment for the AIA to ask if its programs, structure and work force are truly advancing design or advancing the status quo,” Dixon writes in an essay about the initiative on the website of the Center for Architecture + Design, an initiative to help minorities enter the design profession. Dixon, a partner in the Denver office of Perkins+Will, acknowledges that “there is not much doubt that there is disparity and that it needs to be addressed,” but he thinks the AIA needs to think more creatively about how to do it. “When you go to see an architect, a house, you are also going to see their status as a woman in architecture, not as an architect.” Dixon was particularly critical of how the AIA used the term diversity in its announcement about the task force in March. He wrote that the goal of the diversity initiative was to help people who have historically been disenfranchised find a place in the profession. “The AIA will now say ‘diversity’ in order to describe that work, which, again, is really about inclusion, not a narrow understanding of diversity,” Dixon writes. Dixon noted that even with women and minorities in more prominent positions within the AIA, the organization needs to push for diversity beyond race and gender. “AIA needs to think about its goals and how to improve on those goals and realize it will never really succeed if it remains in its current form,” Dixon writes. “It will only truly change when there is no room to deny the notion of an equitable society.” Dixon has a background in diversity, which is one of the reasons he was named president of the AIA in 2011, after being the first person in the AIA’s history to be both president and a female. He says that his decision to stand down from the role of AIA president, when Menei had left to start her own firm, was related to the lack of diversity. “The fact that the role is filled by an African-American, one of the most senior female executives in the architecture industry, speaks volumes about how much the AIA has changed, and how difficult it is to be a woman in architecture today,” Dixon said in a statement when Menei stepped down. Dixon also wrote that the “inclusion in gender diversity is important because women will contribute to the profession in ways that can only be discovered if we have diversity of thought.” He said he didn’t want to get embroiled in a controversy and wanted to stay on as AIA president. Since he retired from the AIA, Dixon has been vocal about the lack of women in architecture. In November he spoke at an event organized by the New York Times in which the AIA’s diversity initiatives were critiqued and ultimately scrapped. Dixon is more closely aligned with architect Linda Lewis, who recently resigned as the AIA’s new diversity task force chair and said the AIA’s diversity initiative was flawed. Lewis told the Times that the group’s report was a “whitewash” of the issue. “She saw a gap between the rhetoric and the reality of what was actually happening at the AIA,” Dixon said. “She was put in a position that was very difficult for her.” Lewis left the AIA after Dixon’s decision to step down as AIA president. Dixon says Lewis wasn’t afraid of getting her hands dirty, which is “probably why I’m so critical of her.” He says if the AIA wants to lead on diversity, it needs to go beyond diversity in gender and skin color. He suggests that the AIA include people of color, “who have been marginalized for hundreds of years in our profession, including native Americans, Hispanics, and people of color who are here in the United States of America.” If you want to read more about the critique and fallout of the diversity initiatives, check out this article by my colleague Emily Kirkpatrick in the New York Times Magazine. The Future of Architecture is a series from AIA Practice, a new online publication from the AIA devoted to connecting the architecture community around the world. We invite you to provide feedback and tips for the series through email to [email protected]