There’s a lot going on at the moment to celebrate and reinforce the rising numbers and importance of women in the architecture profession. The process also allows due recognition, at last, to some of those who have unaccountably been side-lined. Currently, a sustained effort is being made by the Part W action group to ensure a woman is nominated for the next RIBA Gold Medal. A highly deserving candidate is surely Denise Scott Brown, so shockingly Tippexed (or Photoshopped, if you prefer) out of the 1991 Pritzker Prize that was awarded solely to her professional partner, who happened to be her husband, Robert Venturi.

A useful measure of the rate of progress comes from the comparisons offered in the July 2019 update of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) which illuminates several of that cohort of young women who entered the profession in the 1920s and 30s. Now wrested from the shadows, or at least from the more niche areas of feminist reappraisal, several emerged when the Architectural Association marked the centenary of women’s entry into their school in 1917. Early AA graduates were numerous enough, the archives sufficiently extensive to provide rich material for an exhibition, a book (to which I contributed a chapter) and a conference. But for all the AA’s dominance in those years, women were emerging from elsewhere, too, and it was the shift away from pupillage to the courses offered by architectural schools that nudged the door open to insistent women, only for them to face the casual misogyny that set them obstacles at every turn.

…