A note from our Chief Executive, Alan Vallance...
This year’s International Women’s Day (Friday 8 March 2019) focuses on building a gender balanced world.
Driving improvements in equality, diversity, and inclusion in architecture is a top priority for the RIBA, and this important date in the calendar presents a great opportunity for us to celebrate the success of women architects and showcase the work we're doing to address inequality.
We are actively committed to increasing the diversity of our membership and the wider architectural profession through a range of measures - from promoting new routes into architecture, to developing tools and resources, and shining a light on good practice.
Our Codes of Conduct promote and enforce good employment practice, and several forthcoming updates will go even further on fair and equitable working environments, and stamping out gender discrimination. We also require Chartered Practices to maintain and monitor an equality, diversity and inclusion policy, and we provide guidance on flexible working arrangements.
Our mentoring schemes support architects from diverse backgrounds to progress their careers through different life stages; and our RIBA Role Models and Practice Role Models highlight people who are making a real difference to our profession.
To help address the issues underlying gender inequality in practice, we have been working with a core group of large practices to develop practical guidance for employers which is set to launch later this spring.
Profiling the achievements and increasing the visibility of women in our profession is vital. Last year, 52% of speakers participating in our Public Programme events at 66 Portland Place were women - an increase from 30% three years ago. Just last week we hosted ‘Forum: A Celebration of Women in Architecture’ – a powerful and inspirational event which celebrated the work of emerging and established architects working internationally.
There are several RIBA events taking place across the UK this week to celebrate International Women’s Day. You can view the full programme here.
There is still a long way to go to achieve #BalanceforBetter. We are committed to driving the necessary change and excited to support International Women’s Day.
