BY BRADFORD MCKEE

FROM THE APRIL 2019 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE 

I signed the Women’s Landscape Equality (re)Solution, which appears in full on page 143, as soon as it came out last fall. In some way, it was a redress of the times much earlier in my career when I’d failed to observe the very first commitment the (re)Solution asks everyone to make: “We condemn inequality wherever we see it.” I saw inequality right in front of me at a job I used to have, more than once, and did nothing.

The boss in this case went through staff the way some of us go through facial tissues, so we were frequently interviewing new candidates for jobs. After an interview, in private, the conversation would become discomfiting when the candidate, however qualified, had been a woman of childbearing age. “Did you see that ring on her finger?” the boss once asked me after an interview. “You know what comes next.” The boss was a woman, though that is far from my point. The implication was that the candidate, if hired, would before long have a child, and of course that would disrupt the steady operation of the office. It happened more than once, with variations on the theme. In one of my earlier jobs, I had reported a lot on employment law, so I knew actionable deeds when I saw them, though that sort of background is not required to know right from wrong. But I didn’t game out any sort of protest too far. I needed health insurance above all else, and, this being America, felt stapled to my job for that if for no other reason.

The boss’s bosses, all men, were in a headquarters far away, and struck me as some of the sadder executive specimens in my industry. Only later did I learn that one of them was said to be the writer Alan Ball’s real-world inspiration in the 1999 film American Beauty for the boss who spent $50,000 on a sex worker by using a company MasterCard. As for my own boss, the comeuppance was a lawsuit by a staff member who was fired while pregnant, which resulted in a settlement. The staff member, as I recall, was said to have been fired for reasons of competence, so the justice may have been rough. The boss was also eventually fired for reasons of competence. In any case, she pursued a gender-discrimination suit against the company. I got a call, by then at a new job, from an attorney who asked me to give a deposition in support of my former boss. I declined. Besides, the truth, as I saw it, was not going to do the boss much good anyway.

The authors of the Women’s Landscape Equality (re)Solution —Gina Ford, FASLA; Jamie Maslyn Larson, ASLA; Rebecca Leonard, ASLA; and Cinda Gilliland, ASLA—committed to wide-ranging conversation, led by Steven Spears, FASLA, about their experiences as women who rose to top levels in landscape architecture offices and then left. That conversation begins on page 130. It expands on a panel discussion they held at the ASLA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia in October. Jennifer Reut, our senior editor, pushed and pulled the conversation together for print. Our women readers scarcely need telling that rising in the profession presents hazards to women that it does not present to men. Men have shown themselves to be oblivious or worse—the evidence for that can be seen in the stark gender disparities cited by the (re)Solution.

Those disparities tell the contours of where women stand in this profession. What one hears of time and again are the more direct and insidious challenges in real time, in office meetings, in studios, on faculties, on construction sites, that women encounter and that force them to decide whether to tax their energy to confront. Some women find new ways to parry the frustrations, as the four authors of the (re)Solution have done, and have the last word on the issue.