In recent years, before the Trump administrations crusade to repeal inclusion initiatives, more women architects had actually feltseen, but that doesnt mean they were beinghearduntil now.Lately when you might expect women architects to be worried about the rebuilding of gender barriers, they already have a solution: all-women teams. Today, you can find entire project teams and construction leadership with no men in sight. That is both a response to the rollback in womens rights in general and a triumphant blow to misogyny in the design industry specifically. Still, career recognition lags behind these efforts. After seven women presidents and two years of all-female leadership at the AIA, the organizations fellows remain decidedly maleapproximately 18 percent of them are women and 81.3 percent are men, according to the groups 2023 Membership Demographics report. It gets worse when considering the Pritzker Prize: Of the 58 laureates recognized with the award, just 6 are women, or about 10 percent of the awardees.Even the most successful women practitioners carry with them a familiar story of being underestimated, undermined, dismissed, micromanaged, harassed and just plain mansplained out of seats at the table.So a growing number are simply done with waiting, and instead are making their own safe, fulfilling spaces where they feel free to focus on actual work.Field Operations led an all-women construction crew in completing the $98 million Presidio Tunnel Tops. (Courtesy Presidio Trust)For Women by WomenTwo years ago in San Francisco, for instance, the firm Field Operations led an all-women construction crew in completing the $98 million Presidio Tunnel Tops, a 14-acre park built over and around that citys traffic tunnels. In Vancouver the same year, an all-women team led by GBL Architects principal Amela Brudar broke ground on a government-funded affordable housing projectfor women residents. Now, the award-winning Mariam Issoufou Architects (formerly atelier masm) is heading up an all-women team who are building the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Center for Women and Development (EJS) in Monrovia, Liberia. (Issoufou recently opened a New York office after the coup in Niger prompted a pivot in operations.) Representation on the project team is a priority for the client, because its the first presidential library ever commissioned by a woman head-of-state. Counterspace founder Sumayya Vally and Pan-African Engineering Group principal Karen Richards Barnes round out that crew.Another all-women team led by MASS Design Groupfrom the lead designer to lead landscape architect and lead engineerbuilt the Ellen DeGeneres Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund campus in Kigali, Rwanda, in 2022. In June 2024, the project won a COTE Top Ten Award for excellence in sustainable design.Architect Mariam Issoufou Kamara ( Rolex/Stphane Rodrigez Delavega)Such commissions, which place budgets and design decisions entirely in womens hands, are having a significant industry-shifting impact. Thats especially true when the projects legacy is female, as is the case for the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Center and for Fossey, MASS Design director Emily Goldenberg told AN.I was there for four years leading the design and construction supervision of that project. Our construction arm, MASS.Build, was actually founded out of that projectout of a desire to have a larger impact. We set impact goals at the very beginning related to equity, Goldenberg explained. Goldenbergs team for the Fossey campus not only reflected the projects namesake female primatologist, female funders, and executive director, but also expanded local recruitment of women construction workers to an unprecedented degree. A significant 24 percent of that projects skilled laborers were women, which is an exceptionally high rate of participation, doubling Rwandas average and eclipsing that of women on American projects, Goldenberg said.In 2021, women were only 3.9 percent of all those who work with tools in U.S. construction, according to the Institute for Womens Policy Research. The upside however is that even that modest percentage represents a jump in womens overall employment in construction and extraction to a record high of 11 percent that year from 9.1 percent in 2016. Typically, the only women in sight [on my projects] are the ones from my office. The construction or engineering teams have none, Issoufou said her of jobsites.An astonishing 24 percent of skilled laborers for the construction of the campus for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Funds were women. (Iwan Baan)A Cultural MovementSo with a construction site full of women now seeming like a possibility and architectures gender politics unlikely to disappear (not to mention recent corporate backlash against equity initiatives), these projects suddenly take on the feel of a movement. In fact, Carla Guerrera, developer of the Vancouver project, told the Vancouver Sun she intended to demonstrate the leadership of women in development, design and construction. She added that having previously been the only woman at the table, she felt an all-women team engendered a different culture in how we work together and make decisions.MASSs Goldenberg also spoke of the transformative power of such teams when theyre viewed collectively as an intentional act of resistance. Like most, she has been literally the only female at site visits or in design meetings and has felt isolated and intimidatedeven by contractors who were supposed to report to her. I didnotfeel that way on the Fossey site, she clarified. I was surrounded by brilliant females who led with empathy, and that uplifting feeling is a unique attribute of working in groups of women, she said. Office PoliticsPresumably that feeling is easier to sustain in women-led studios. So it is meaningful that Issoufou,whose accolades span two Global LaFarge Holcim awards for sustainable architecture, a Prince Claus award, distinction as the 2021 Aga Khan Visiting Critic at Harvard GSD, and recognition as one of TheNew York Timess 15 Creative Women of Our Time, also maintains a studio that is 60 percent women. With women, you can skip the pissing contests and just focus on the work, she said.The difficulty that women architects have endured to secure the mental freedom to focus purely on work can be seen in the disciplines own #metoo stories, like the allegations of sexual harassment made against starchitect Richard Meier in 2018 and David Adjaye in 2023, among other fallout from items like the Shitty Architecture Men list.Womens (Home) WorkGiven the fraught history, pros and clients say all-women teams also just feel safer. Thats apparent in residential projects where single women homeowners have outnumbered menfor the past 20 years and yet still complain of trouble with mostly male contractors. The female-to-male homeownership ratio was 58 percent to 42 percent in 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, butthat purchasing power hasnt saved women clients or tradeswomen from routine harassment, mansplaining, and other bad behavior from male architects and tradesmen.Lacey Soslow and Gabriela Ainslie, cofounders of Matriarchy Build. (Courtesy Matriarchy Build)That problem is so pervasive that two-year-old online home-services platform Matriarchy Build (MB) was designed to address it. Like other directories, MB maintains a database of plumbers, electricians, and general contractors. But unlike its competitors, MBs directory is exclusively women and nonbinary professionals who are vetted for the value they can bring to women-friendly project teams. The fundamental desire [among our users] is connecting with folks who make them feel safe, said MB cofounder Lacey Soslow. Thats why the companys services require clients and pros to opt into the same code of ethics, added MB cofounder Gabriela Ainslie.Even having completed around ten gut renovations herself and knowing a bit more than the average consumer, Soslow said she still faced condescending attitudes from male contractors. I still get told you cant do that. And its like I actuallyknowyou can. If Im feeling bulldozed, I can imagine how the average person feels, she shared.Conversely, the communication on women-dominated teams like Issoufous can be, as she puts it, quite effortlessand with no biases to overcome in the process.MBs directory is exclusively women and nonbinary professionals who are vetted for the value they can bring to women-friendly project teams. (Courtesy Matriarchy Build)Thats the kind of safe and satisfying renovation experience activist builder Shelley Halstead intended to provide black women homeowners when she founded Black Women Build-Baltimore (BWBB) in 2017. The initiative trains women in trades-related skills by having them restore vacant and deteriorated houses.In the current political climate, with government and private businesses reversing their equity and inclusion efforts, its easy to see why women are seeking the camaraderie of women-led project teams. Less clear is why the industry and the media continues to exalt the narrative of a heroic male architect. Architectural designer Melissa Daniel, who hosts the Architecture is Political podcast, has a theory about why. (Along with three other women, Daniel created Riding the Vortex group, which hosts a speaker series that spreads awareness about Black women architects and was recognized with a Whitney M. Young Jr. Award from the AIA in 2022.) I think many men believe that if they acknowledge systemic gender bias, then they also have to acknowledge their own disproportionate and sometimes undeserved advantages, she said.In the meantime, it seems women will just keep building their own winning teams.Kelly Beamon is a freelance journalist specializing in architecture and design and sustainable building materials. She has held senior editorial roles at Metropolis, Architectural Record, and This Old House, but has slipped the bonds of the corporate office. She now writes from her home in Central New Jersey.