How Equitable and Inclusive a Practice Are You?
As an architect, you have a unique opportunity to shape the world around you and make it a more equitable and inclusive place for everyone. But how equitable and inclusive are the practices architects, engineers and urban designers work in? This question was posed by WIA to the panel of six experts in our recent LFA event: How Equitable and Inclusive a Practice Are You?
Hosted by WIA Chair Igea Troiani, the panel were open and upfront, sharing successes, challenges, data, and roadmaps on inclusion.
Even as a small (5-person) practice, you can still influence change, says Teri Okoro, founder and Director of TOCA architects. TOCA are majority female and made up of 5 nationalities, helping to attract to the practice employees who are disadvantaged or without opportunity. This includes team members, and a diverse range of end-users.
Okoro shared three distinct dimensions - personal, cultural, and institutional - that make up an equitable and inclusive practice. Her strategic view starts with the practice but extends wider to the clients and end-users, the supply chain and the community. She emphasised the need for business structure and based her approach on culture, innovation, nurturing leadership, and processes.
In terms of policies for the office, TOCA offer:
Flexible working as always available;
Not many full-time staff;
No working past 6pm - overtime is not necessary;
Paternal and Maternal leave for all and;
All members of the team get the opportunity to work on the same stages and same work, no matter the experience level or qualifications.
Okoro is a member of the ARB board and very pro-collaboration. She is a founding member of Unione, a collective of female led practitioners who recently banded together in a successful bid to get on the Southwark Architecture framework. She urged listeners to go to schools, sit on boards, drive inclusion and take in work experience students.
“Our Practice is there to deliver inclusion through architecture. We are intentionally proactive. We are deliberately inclusive. We think conscioulsy about who we work with.”
Eleni Stathi, a Senior Associate at HTA Design LLP shared her company’s “people-centric” ethos. This involves lots of staff engagement. They are also very transparent with staff in information-sharing, including financial status. This is in line with their value of Continuous Improvement. Another of HTA’s values is “care for each other”. This shows up in their policies, including a miscarriage policy and menopause policy.
As a large office (250 people) from many different backgrounds, HTA encourages forums and groups to celebrate everyone. All discussions in these groups are headed by partners who can then discuss key issues at board level, helping to implement change.
Stathi shared ways in which you can show inclusivity every day. One of these is including the faces of the team on the website. When applying for a job, if you see a range of faces and someone you feel represents you, you feel more encouraged to apply for the job. HTA have also embraced the #mynameis campaign from Race Equality Matters. This campaign aims to highlight names and the importance of pronouncing them correctly. She also talked about the importance of understanding people at a person level - what people do outside work not just in the office.
Maggie Wang Zuniga, an Associate at Arup Architecture is from Costa Rica. In the UK, she often felt she was the minority in the room and realised that she had to find her voice and fight back. At one time in her career, someone asked her not to return to meetings because of her accent, race and gender, when she had recently moved to the UK.
Now, as a leader, she is highly proactive in helping the next generation find their voice to enhance office inclusivity. With younger women often being shy in meetings, Zuniga invites and encourages them to speak and learn digital tools, thus developing their confidence.
Arup runs an annual inclusion survey that looks to uncover the company's makeup. It took eight years to achieve a 50/50 gender split in the architecture group. Zuniga is open about how long the challenge took, saying: "it is our responsibility to make a change little by little”.
“Inclusion becomes the stage where people can lead their lives and play.”
Melanie Perkins, Architect and Partner at PDP London explained that employee-led initiatives were important to the practice. She says we are all attracted to the things that affect us in our careers and this allows people to enage in those topics.
She questions: How can you be fair in architecture? Architecture is a very expensive subject to study, and so how do you get involved if you don't know someone or don’t have the funds? This leads to the importance of mentoring. Mentoring is important for Perkins on a personal level, and mentors as a way to pay back the support she was given.
Whilst women in leadership at PDP London have led to an increase in open discussions, Perkins extolls the virtues of expanding your reach to help other people. She advocates drawing a range of diverse backgrounds into the office, she says, by looking wider than your own club of people. Again in the context of mentoring and development, she encourages architects in PDP London (and everywhere) to reach out to support those who don’t have support in their own office.
PDP London have Apprenticeship and work experience to offer. Working with CentrePoint on a pro bono basis was an opportunity for the office to hold internal design competitions where juniors could interact with the client.
“Take your interests and expand them to help other people.”
Feix&Merlin are an LGBT-led practice of equal gender balance. Co-founder Julia Feix says that sexuality has never been an issue; discrimination, for her, has always been about gender. Feix recalled a moment in her early career that many women architects can all relate to - one where she regrets not calling out unacceptable behaviour. Realising that she needed to change her behaviour to challenge this in the future and find her voice, she took this as a moment to move forward. Feix implores us to be the person with empathy, who calls out bad behaviour at work to make a difference.
Fellow Director and Co-Founder Tarek Merlin points out that our differences can be positive. Merlin's early upbringing gave him an understanding of cultural differences; however, he had more to learn from the experience of being in an English all-boys school where he was bullied. He calls to us to feel the pain of each other. Merlin's experiences now inform his approach to design problems. He believes it all starts with the questions: "who are you?" and “what makes us who we are?”.
“Human behaviour doesn’t change unless you have empathy.”
“Our differences make us who we are and shouldn’t be hidden away. They should be celebrated.”
The panelists inspiring presentations and comments led to a lively debate chaired by WIA Chair, Igea Troiani. The audience Q&A covered a diverse range of problems - from calling out unwanted behaviour, the cost of architecture education, recognising those without UK qualifications, the gender pay-gap, and the tick-box "beast" of performance metrics.
In regards to the cost barrier of entering the industry, Troiani say’s the good news is the government are looking to support more apprenticeship programmes which are shorter, more condensed courses. However, it was noted that apprenticeships tend to be limited to the larger practices in the City - again a cost to commute and less accessible to all. The ARB have an ongoing investigation into the outputs of training.
Where do we lose women? Eleni Stathi says we need to look at the pinch points, for example, after maternity. An audience member brings up the difficulty of being an international student. Hardships ensue when the UK doesn’t recognise your qualifications. Plus, there are staff that do not want to qualify - we need to find a place for everybody, says Stathi.
Troiani notes that small practices are often able to enact change quickly and have the advantage of agility in general. The larger practices can take more time to enact change but Zuniga warned that in big firms negative change can have wider negative affects simply because of the numbers and so care needs to be taken when creating new policies initiatives for equitability and inclusion. Caution was urged not to “create a beast” of a tick-box exercise. Perkin’s lamented that when you are driven by what staff want you may be conversely trapped by it. Though, it seems that most welcome initiatives like publishing salary bands - with no gender differences in the pay at each level - which may cause less salary issues in the long run.
Download the speaker’s slide deck HERE
The evening of presentations ended with a talk from Sumita Singha. Singha discussed her journey to becoming an architect, from India to the UK and her experience growing up.
Singha’s five top tips:
Your past does not define your future!
Do not be afraid to be yourself, and be even bolder when times are tough!
Make yourselves known for all that you do!
Make use of your life experiences to help others!
You are more than your work, so always take care of your health and wellbeing first!
Photos: Morley von Sternberg @morleyvonportraits @morleyvonarchitecture
Overall, it was a very lively and engaging debate and there is room for a lot more ongoing discussion.
What didn’t we all get around to discussing?
Race
Policy
Recruitment
Behavioural codes
Online working & proximity bias
and more!
Clearly there is further discussions to be had!
Thanks to:
WIA Host: Igea Troiani (PhD) - Professor and Head of Architecture, London South Bank University (LSBU)
Teri Okoro MBA ChPP FRIBA FAPM (PhD) - Founder and Director, TOCA architects
Eleni Stathi - Senior Associate, Senior Architect, HTA Design
Maggie Wang Zuniga - Associate, Arup Architecture
Melanie Perkins, Partner, Architect, PDP London
Julia Feix and Tarek Merlin, Directors and Co-Founders of Feix&Merlin
Our excellent hosts at Herman Miller: Shazia, Jo and Ines.
Morley von Sternberg for photos.
Writers: Karen Fugle, Bethany Scott. Contributors: Igea Troiani, Sarah Akigbogun, Laura Collins.