Benchmark Report 2023: Women in Canadian Architecture—An Update featuring Jennifer Esposito and Heather Dubbeldam
Six years ago, I wrote an article for Canadian Architect entitled Because it’s 2017: Gender Diversity in Canada’s Architectural Profession (see CA, Jan 2017). It identified at least thirteen significant barriers to Canadian women architects achieving equity—from low or unequal pay and slower rates of promotion, to inflexible working hours and poor return-to-work training following parental leave. Despite women’s university enrolment and graduation rates for architecture exceeding 50 percent for many years, only 28.8 percent of employed architects at that time were women. Quebec was an outlier at 38 percent, a result my research attributed, at least in part, to the province’s earlier introduction of affordable daycare. This said, the tenor of the article was cautious optimism. Despite the consequential obstacles that remained, change was happening, and there was some evidence that major firms were taking action and that the rise of grassroots women in architecture groups across the country was having a noticeable impact.
