Women and men are constantly compared to each other with touchy results (look no further than the race for the Democratic nomination for proof) and sustainability is no different. So what does this mean in Seattle? A panel at the AIA’s ReGeneration conference Monday will try to find out.

What do you think? Is one gender more prone to green living, building and working? Or are both perfectly equal?

The “Women in Green panel” from 1:30 to 3 p.m. on Monday will bravely delve into the subject of gender and sustainability. Here in Seattle, there’s no question that many of the brightest (and most powerful) green minds are women. Four of them - Anne Schopf of Mahlum, Lucia Athens of the city of Seattle’s Green Building Program, Amanda Sturgeon of Perkins + Will, and Judith Heerwagen, an environmental psychologist, will flesh out the issue.

The panel is moderated by Kira Gould of McDonough & Partners, author of Women in Green: Voices of Sustainable Design. Gould is also chair of AIA National Committee on the Environment.

The National Perspective…

It’s a panel that promises to be at the very least entertaining. At November’s Greenbuild in Chicago, I heard Kira Gould moderate the national version of this panel and believe me, it was anything but boring. At that panel, the room was filled to the max with women (though a sparse handful of male faces dotted the landscape), and speakers included Christine Ervin of Christine Ervin Co. in Portland, Rebecca Flora of Green Building Alliance in Pittsburgh, Sandra Mendler of HOK in San Francisco and Traci Rider of Trace Collaborative of Cary, N.C.

It ended up being a high energy, sometimes volatile and tumultuous discussion that ranged from differences in gender to how the field has changed to comparisons with different professions to comments of ageism between older and younger women.

Rider was particularly interesting. She said when she grew up, she was trained to consider men and women as definitively equal. But that doesn’t leave room for differences between the sexes that help them better adapt to different situations. In sustainability for example, she said, “Women seem to listen a lot more and digest and understand what is being said between both parties.”

Flora put it as “We don’t get so solidly stuck in a position that we’re not willing to listen to other perspectives.”  

Ouch. Men out there, does this make you feel like the monkeys at right or are the ladies correct? It should be noted that speakers at the panel said this was not always a good thing, and often acted as a detriment too because men seem to be more clear about what they want and expect out of a project. 

Speakers also said women take on too much in different fields and don’t really know when to stop. Rider said, “We need to save the world and that’s a lot of pressure.”

“The main difference is that women have kids.”

And then came the obvious bombshell. A woman audience member said, “The main difference is that women have kids.” She said, “I tried to be like a man until I got pregnant and then I realized that’s not going to work.”

That brought the topic around to the culture of architecture and engineering firms. Gould, who was quite an impressive moderator, said the number of female leadership positions in architecture firms “is appallingly low,” even though women represent 50 percent of the architecture student body in university.

Speakers said that’s not the case with lawyers or doctors where women consistently represent 50 percent of the profession. But architecture and engineering professions haven’t concentrated on supporting that part of a woman’s life, and haven’t done a good job of reintegrating women back into the workplace once they have had children, speakers said.

LADIES, IS THIS TRUE? Have you had a child and found it hard to reenter a design, engineering, construction, etc. firm?

Then one of the lone men in the room piped up and asked how the profession could create a supportive workspace? Speakers said develop incentives to get women in positions of authority, increase mentoring, clarify what a culture of a firm is and just plain adapt.

And engineering wasn’t left out either. A professor in the audience from U.C. Berkeley said she thinks more women will enter the engineering profession if they see it is no longer so traditional, which she said is the case as the field is changing how it works due to green practices.

But Gould also said at some point, the conversation grows out of just gender and into diversity. “I think diversity is a challenge for this industry, not just in gender,” she said. But that, dear reader, is a topic for another time.

…And those were just some of the issues discussed. Needless to say, I’m very curious to see what Seattle women have to say about some of these same issues, and what Kira Gould will lead the conversation towards. Stay tuned for that, as I’ll keep you updated.

And if you go to the event, please keep me updated! I want to know whether you agreed with the speakers, whether this has been a topic in your head for a while and whether this issue even matters.

Let me know, you never know who could be listening…. 

Tags: AIA, Greenbuild, Men, Regeneration, Seattle, Women

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 5:02 pm and is filed under AIA, Green events, Greenbuild, Men, Seattle, Women. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.