After more than a century of growth, female presence in architecture shrinks

Women have come a long way in architecture since Louise Blanchard Bethune became the first American woman to work as a professional architect in 1888, but lately, architectural staffs have employed fewer woman, an Arch Daily timeline showed.

At the outset of 2009 28 percent of U.S. architectural staffs were female, compared to just 21 percent at the end of 2011, according to a survey by the Architect’s Journal cited by Arch Daily. Perhaps that’s because four in five women think having children puts them in a disadvantage in the field, nearly half of women believe they would get paid more if they were men and nearly two-thirds have experienced sexual discrimination.

The rest of the timeline marks important achievements for women in architecture, culminating in recent Pritzker Prize winners Zaha Hadid and Kazuyo Sejima and Jeanne Gang’s Aqua Tower design in Chicago.

See the entire infographic below. [ArchDaily]

(credit: ArchDaily)