07.03.2022
In 2022, bringing focus to International Women’s Day, is the call to imagine a world that is free of stereotypes and discrimination: an environment where bias of any sort is unacceptable. To enable this, say Veronica D'Ambrosio and Angela Dapper, we can all take steps toward meaningful difference locally, and use our influence to encourage change in our profession and wider society.
The design and construction industry is emerging from a history of a lack of diversity, and our society is increasingly aware of the bias structures we live within that are no longer tenable in today’s world. From our own work, and looking to examples like the RIBA’s Close the Gap policy guidance and the AIA’s Bias Interpreters study, we know these changes are not necessarily sweeping societal movements, but rather incremental and specific. We live in a time of growth, and inspiring progression is being made across regions and sectors that brings us closer to breaking the bias for all.
Our answer lies in local action and global thinking, applied across three levels: self-governance, industry engagement and societal change. We can create change through a domino effect by searching for and trailing solutions ourselves locally, and collaborating to share knowledge and action more widely.
Significant change, over the past 30 years, has come from organisations and institutions. This includes Grimshaw’s commitment towards gender equity. Prioritising addressing gender disparity, in 2016 we launched our Eight Action Diversity Plan, which has been instrumental in shifting gender balance across the practice from 32% to 48%. We have equal parental leave policies for all staff regardless of gender or seniority, robust recruitment policies and most importantly we measure the success of our policies and initiatives qualitatively and quantitively – making sure we identify barriers to progression and a constant improvement our gender equality. There are inspirational companies in our design and construction industry as well. This year, Australian developer group Mirvac was named the world’s most gender equitable company by Equileap, leading a global field of 4,000 companies.
These changes – which we have the power to embed ourselves – have had positive repercussions across our wider built environment. Grimshaw’s Eight Action Diversity Plan is included as best practice in the RIBA’s Close the Gap guidance and the Mayor of London's Good Growth by Design ‘Supporting Diversity’ Handbook. Leading by example can catalyse change that steps beyond our own organisations and begins to highlight and break bias in our broader industries. The power of role models, encouraging built environment professionals to engage with discourse around gender and raise the importance of diversity, attract more women into the industry and give women a greater voice.
What is our responsibility in enacting this change at a societal level? Scaling out further can be as simple as encouraging our own learnings and knowledge to permeate and influence. Or encouraging a more diverse group of young people to consider careers in design: missions shared by Scale Rule, supported by Grimshaw, and Grimshaw Foundation. As a microcosm of what can happen on a national and global scale, we can lead by example by discussing our own work and the value we place on diversity, and by doing so set precedents for others to replicate on increasingly larger scales.
We recognise systemic bias exists on many fronts. Although we might not know just yet where it all lies, the more work we do personally, and within systems we have the power to change, the more strategies we can encourage others to adopt and promote. Through measuring, understanding and tackling our own bias, we can share the right steps toward breaking it with our peers, communities, and governments. We need to work together, with the knowledge that this will make our workplace and society better for everyone.
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