Tracking progress: Q+A with Gill Matthewson

As it turns out this interview was done just prior to revelations in the New York Times about the alleged disgraceful conduct by Pritzker Prize winning architect Richard Meier. The full consequence of such a high profile architect being called out like this still remains to be seen. What is clear however is that cultural change is occurring both inside architecture and in broader society.

Michael Smith – So Gill, how did you become involved in your particular area of expertise?

Gill Mathewson –  I’ve been involved in women and architecture for a very long time. It’s been bugging me since pretty soon after I graduated. I didn’t really get into it when I was a student, although some of my colleagues and peers were, but after I graduated I started sort of going “well, what’s going on here?”

I did quite a few things in that first, say, five or ten years after I graduated, then it died down for a little, and then I did my Masters by research, and that was on the presence of women in the Barcelona pavilion. So Lilly Reich, the statue of a woman that’s in the pavilion and myself. So that’s how I structured the Masters.

And my interest died down again. Then about ten years after that I got really annoyed because people were still asking, where are all the women in architecture, so I undertook another bout of research. And then a bit after that, came the diversity in the architecture profession ARC research project.

Naomi Stead at University of Queensland, plus just about every other female academic working in the area in Australia combined together to get an Australian Research Council funded project. And they were advertising for a PhD student. I thought, even at my late age, that’s right in my area of interest. So I went for it, they interviewed me and I was selected.

MS – And so out of that PhD research, came the backbone of what later became Parlour Inc.

GM – That’s right.

MS – What was the most surprising thing that you identified from your PhD research?

GM – There was quite a lot. The numbers is the component that’s got all the attention, basically. It has been incredibly useful for Parlour for building up that basis of saying “You thought there was nothing wrong, but here’s the figures, this is what’s going on.”

I think the usefulness of that data component surprised me, and also the way we’ve been able to build on the data and change the conversation with it. But it was only a small part of my PhD. There was a much larger component which included qualitative interviews and things like that. I think out of that came the kind of power of the culture of architecture. There’s a whole lot of bad effects that derive from how we think an architect must be. What happens is you get all these imperatives on how an architect should be, and when they intersect with how a man or a woman must be in our society you get a kind of clashing of these different expectations.

MS – It’s now six years since the launch of Parlour. Given where the Australian architecture profession was at during the early part of your PhD research, and now several years on, how do you rate our progress towards an equitable profession?

GM – I think it has improved. I think we’ve empowered a lot of women to be quite stroppy, which I think is really good. To make people say “hang on a minute, this isn’t just me, there’s something else going on.” This has actually revealed itself in the latest statistical work that I’ve done, with the 2016 census data. There’s been a greater tenacity between 2011 and 2016 of women in certain age groups – less of them have left over that five year period.

MS – That is a fantastic result.

GM – It’s a great result. There may be a whole lot of other factors that come into it, but I would like to think that the work Parlour has done has made an impact on that. I think we are also seeing more women going for registration, although I don’t quite have all the data behind that.

“The importance of registration is something that we really push. Registration means more to a woman’s career than it does to a man’s. Credentials matter for women more than they do for men.”

MS – So what kind of programs or initiatives do you think have the greatest results in improving gender equity?

GM – I think the Parlour Guides have been absolutely brilliant. It’s put a whole lot of Human Resources issues on the table. There was an event in Sydney last year called Participate. The structure of this event was a series of presentations followed by the participants being divided into four groups. Each of the groups looked at different issues. Towards the end of the day Lee Hillam was presenting what her group had come up with and she basically summarised it saying, ‘if people just followed the law, we wouldn’t have a whole lot of problems’.

There are a whole lot of laws that architects are breaking on a daily basis to do with HR. I think making people aware of that and calling it out is important. I also do work for the Association of Consultant Architects on their annual salary survey. Every year I find there are people who are paying below the award. The award is the minimum. But every year there are firms paying below the award. Now that’s illegal.

I think if people were aware of what their obligations were as employers, a whole lot of things would get sorted out. But the culture of architecture gets in the way a bit, because we tend to think of architecture as a vocation, you do it for the love.

So the idea that you might complain that you’re being paid below the award goes against the culture. We are led to think that we’re getting all this fabulous experience from this highly regarded architect, who projects the idea that “I’m an award-winning architect, therefore you should suffer anything I throw at you.” So often there is a mix ego and culture, which I think is messy and it muddies the water.

MS – In your recent paper published by the Cambridge University Press you highlight some of the shortcomings of the data collected by the institutions and governments. How would you like to see this data collection improved?

GM – I would really like to see a national registration for architects instead of this business of every state having its own registration. As someone compiling and analysing this data, you find people who are registered in multiple jurisdictions, which throws all sorts of calculations out. I just don’t see why there isn’t a national one. The Productivity Commission, I think it was, came out with something a few years ago asking why isn’t this national?

Given that, if you are registered in New South Wales and you want to become registered in Victoria, all you have to do is ask, pay the fee (and prove you are insured) and it happens, I don’t see why there is this regional distinction.

MS – It is certainly the case for other professions such as medicine, that there is a national register.

GM – It must be a real annoyance for those people who are working, say on the Gold Coast, they have to be registered for Queensland and New South Wales, because their work is spread across the border.

There’s a lot of architects who are registered in the ACT. That doesn’t mean they’re living there, but they’re registered there presumably in order to do federal government work.

It’s interesting to think, what is architecture and what is an architect? I have a friend who I went to architecture school with in New Zealand, and she organises (and instigated way-back-when) the largest community festival in New Zealand. She considers building a community as important as building a building. And she thinks that part of an architect’s job, and a very important part of an architect’s job. But we have no way of measuring or acknowledging or recording all those things that architects do.

MS – I think a great example of this is Nightingale Housing.  Yes they’re about sustainable housing, but it’s also about the community of people who live in those buildings as well.

GM – Yes, absolutely. Nightingale is architects working at their very best, I reckon.

MS – The Parlour Guides to Equitable Practice are sorted into categories such as Pay Equity, and Leadership, and Mentoring and so forth. Do you think there is an area, or a category, which is the most difficult for the architecture profession to address? And, is there an area that you think is also most important for architecture to address?

GM – The issues that are impacted by the culture of architecture are probably the ones that are the most difficult to deal with.  I think that the long hours culture is one of those. I personally think long hours make bad architects, because they’re too tired to make good decisions and a lot of making good architecture is about making good decisions. So I think it’s counter-productive to good architecture. But I think it’s also one of the hardest issues because you’re almost trained into it, right from day one of architecture school.

And also there are certain parts of the profession who find long hours incredibly useful as a business model. They really count on the unpaid hours of enthusiastic recent graduates to help their bottom line.

MS – The word for that is ‘exploitation’, isn’t it?

GM – Certainly is.

MS – Do you think architecture moment will have a “Me Too” moment or, do you think architecture needs a “Me Too” moment?

GM – It needs a “Me Too” moment. I don’t know whether it will get one. It’s too small a community and there is this terrible thing that if you complain, word will get out that you’re a complainer. It’s also partly to do with the fact that to get anything built, you need a team. Often there is a group of architects working with external consultants. A complaint about another member of the team means that you’re kind-of attacking the team, and that means the team won’t work as good as it could.

I think that’s a kind of false thinking, but I think it’s quite a common one as well: ‘For the sake of the project, I will not make a fuss over the fact that I’ve just been dissed, or insulted.’ But there was a recent Parlour posting, on Instagram, of a woman saying about a new consultant coming in and shaking hands with everybody in the group, except for her. And it happened more than once.

I also heard examples of that when I was interviewing architects. There were women who were saying ‘there was a guy who went around and gave his card to everybody in the team except me.’ And you go … what? So it’s not uncommon and it’s often those small things, they just kind of get you to the state where you go, can I be bothered with this anymore?

MS – Thinking about all of the efforts in the architecture profession towards gender equity, do you think we need to try and export these ideas into the consultants that we work with as well? Is it more about a build environment culture than an architecture one?

GM – Well, to some extent. I think there were some big issues in the engineering profession, because engineering has a woeful story for keeping its female graduates. It’s pretty much within ten years of entering the profession they’re almost all gone. So I think they were ahead of the game compared with architecture. They took it much more seriously, much earlier than architects did. But I think it is still very common for a lot of the consultants on a team to be male. There’s also often an assumption that if there’s a female architect she’s a junior architect and she may well not be. These sorts of things are kind of ongoing. They’re a bit endless.

In the comments on the Instagram post I mentioned earlier, there were quite a few people offering advice on how to approach the situation.  For example, to actually just in some way, maybe not in the meeting but afterwards, approach the person to have a discussion on the issue.

And that’s one of the nice things about the power of Instagram series. You know, some get more noticed than others, but you know the comments can be really useful, from people saying “well, in this situation, I would do this.”

A friend and I were wondering about the idea of a separate Instagram account, which is specifically about what to do in specific situations. And then get the wisdom of all the people who might be around to sort of say, “Oh yeah I had that. This is what I did.” And often it comes with experience. And it comes with age. So when you’re two years out of architecture school, you’ve got a different level of confidence than what you have when you’re ten years out of architecture school.

That said, a lot of the more experienced women architects that I interviewed, a lot of them were at the point of saying “I just ignore it these days.” “I just can’t be bothered making a fuss about it.” “I’m just bored.” And I’m not sure that’s quite the right answer. But I can completely understand why they do. They’re over it. And they’re over fighting all the time. Or they decide that they’ll pick their battles. But I think that making a stand, it doesn’t have to be a big, outraged stand, but making a stand and calling something out in a non-threatening way, just makes it a bit better for women down the line. You sort of hope that an engineer or an architect or whatever who is dismissive of a woman architect, who is called out about it just sort of goes, “Oh yeah, I won’t do that again.” You hope that, anyway.

MS – As a final question, what is next for Parlour Inc?

GM – Well we’ve signed the contract for a book with The MIT Press, which we’re very excited about. But the deadline’s coming up awfully fast, and we’re all busy people. But we must get that out there. There’s a lot of interest in having that. I think another thing that we might look at is how to … you know, there’s a core of Parlour people, but I think there’s a lot of people that are interested in what Parlour does and I think we need to find a mechanism or a way of harnessing the energy of those people. So it’s a bit like having a Parlour umbrella, sort of saying, “Oh are you’re interested in this sort of thing? Yeah, okay, we can help you with advice here or whatever. I would like to see it broaden and bring in more people. And the salons do that very successfully. Ultimately we’d like to get people talking to each other more too. That’s important.

MS – Thank you very much for your time.

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