Gender Balance in Lecture Series: We are nowhere. Bartlett, Berlage, Mendrisio, ETHZ #fail, MIT, Tübingen #parity

November 1, 2016

You know we like nothing but confronting our colleagues and their pernicious sexism by checking the gender balance at lecture series. This semester, again, looks bad.

Some institutions are obviously not even trying.

We would also encourage you to forward this survey to the incriminated institution, pushing, asking, demanding CHANGE. Die Architektin always mails the institutions, trying to make them aware of the problem. Usually there are no answers. Sometimes Berlage says they tried. We would like to see pledges from our colleagues, in line with Owen’s Pledge.

It’s not hard to get more women at panels, you just have to want it. As a good anti-example, the University of Tübingen put an all female panel together. There seems to be no magic involved. The Gendered Conference Campaign has some great advice.

Just like our philosophy colleagues, we also believe that:

“All-male events and volumes help to perpetuate the stereotyping of (ARCHITECTURE) as male. This in turn to contributes to implicit bias against women in (ARCHITECTURE), which very likely leads even those genuinely committed to gender equality to evaluate women’s contributions as less good than men’s. (It may also in some cases be caused by implicit bias, which means that women’s names will leap less easily to mind than men’s.)”

TRY HARDER, FOLKS!