Design School Panel Laments Low Gender Diversity

The topic of female underrepresentation in design fields became a springboard for students to air wider-ranging grievances at a panel discussion at the Graduate School of Design (GSD) last night.

The two-hour event, called “Taking Stock: Gender and Design,” was so packed that students were spilling into the aisles of Piper Lecture Hall, located on Broadway, across the street from Memorial Hall.

While University President Lawrence H. Summers’ recent comments on women in science have sparked a renewed focus on gender differences at Harvard, his name only came up twice during yesterday’s discussion—but the students challenged the panel of ten GSD faculty members to address the status of women at their school.

The sponsoring organization, Women in Design (WiD), distributed fliers illustrating detailed statistics for the GSD, which has a total of twenty-four tenured professors, only three of whom are women.

When one student asked for an explanation of this gender disparity, the panel members were initially silent, with one member asking, “Can you repeat the question?”, prompting laughter from the audience.

But professors did offer several explanations. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture Toshiko Mori said that women’s desire to raise families had traditionally represented a barrier to their advancement in the design fields—but she expressed optimism that this might be changing.

“There is a huge attrition rate in my generation,” Mori said. “From my generation down it seems fairly solid. Women are in the profession, working and keeping up with it. It’s just a matter of getting into another wave of a generation.”

Students also raised concerns about their personal experiences at the GSD, focusing on the design studio courses in which projects are evaluated by outside professionals who are paid by the architecture department to judge student work.

“Many times the reviews themselves are not productive,” said WiD officer and event co-organizer Katherine L. Feather. She added that higher expectations should be placed on visiting judges to give constructive criticism.

While she said that many students found the review juries “less useful than they could be,” she said the juries could be particularly difficult for women.

“The reviews tend to exhibit a kind of ‘boys club’ behavior,” Feather said. “The boys club atmosphere is apparent often enough to be familiar and discouraging.”

Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Design Richard M. Sommer, a member of the panel, traced the hostile studio atmosphere to different socialization processes for men and women.

“There is a sense that because men behave in an impolite way, women who might add a lot to the conversation are just not included in the conversation,” Sommer said.

While no decisive plan was laid out to improve the atmosphere of studio courses, Feather said afterward that she was optimistic about the possibility of future change, judging from the panelists’ response to the students’ complaints.

During the panel discussion, Associate Professor of Architecture Laura Miller agreed that the current status of women in the field of design left much to be desired.

In response to one panelist who argued that women were better-represented in architecture than in other disciplines, Miller said she was not satisfied.

“Just because other professions might be better or worse doesn’t let us off the hook,” she said. “I think we can do better.”

—Staff writer Sarah E.F. Milov can be reached at milov@fas.harvard.edu.