The Influence of Great Female Designers Still Persists in Today’s Office

Yet women still hold a fraction of leadership and owner positions in architecture and design firms, and they’re increasingly leaving the workforce. 

Women have proven to be trailblazers in modern office design, yet they still face an uphill battle when it comes to equality in design and in the office.  

As we celebrate International Women’s Month, we can acknowledge the impact female designers have had on design. Look no further than deceased architect and designer Florence Knoll Bassett, who emerged a pioneer of American modernism in the 1950s male dominated design world. She had a rare seat at the table in the architecture world and her designs are still inspiring, including her sofas, desks, tables and geometric minimalist designs that resonate in today’s offices. 

Many inspiring women have followed. The deceased British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid gained fame for her futuristic designs in a male-dominated profession, earning awards for designs that embraced fluid, curving facades and sharp angles with a sense of bravado. 

Charlotte Perriand, a French architect and designer, was well-known for her modern furniture designs that were simple and functional and used rare woods. Eileen Gray’s mid-century modern designs influenced lighting, textiles, and furniture, by adding lacquered touches of Art Deco elegance. Ray Eames, who practiced with her husband Charles, built a reputation for plywood furniture pieces. Her work still influences today’s office chairs.  

More recently, Franco-German designer Tatjana von Stein has come to the forefront of the design world for her intuitive interiors that blend warmth and history in offices and restaurants in European cities. Meanwhile, Spanish architect and designer Patricia Urquiola is forging the future of work by focusing on color, texture and materiality in her work.  

These women are a rarity in the architecture and design world. Women make up the majority of designers—61%— yet they hold less than a third of leadership jobs at architecture and design firms and own a sliver—just 0.1% of those firms. Some estimates put a pay gap between women and men in architecture between 5% to 29%. 

Not surprisingly, most workspaces and offices are designed with men in mind. That is starting to change. Leaders have begun to take a gender inclusive approach to office design, whether it’s ensuring the air temperature of the office is comfortable for women or adding on-site childcare, or re-imagining game areas with ping-pong and pool tables by adding meditation spaces or adding yoga memberships. 

It’s so important to make work and the workplace an environment in which women thrive and feel comfortable, because more of them are leaving. A 2024 report by McKinsey/LeanIn found that Gen X women are trickling out of the leaky pipeline. They’re exhausted from burnout, disconnected from their sense of purpose, and juggling work with the need to care for aging parents and children, says workplace expert and author Jennifer Moss. 

“Women will work and work and work and work as hard as they can. They never show what we define as disengagement—and then they just quit,” says workplace expert and author Jennifer Moss. “People don’t really know that it’s an issue, because women don’t speak up about it, and that’s why that data is so alarming.” 

Some worry that recent crackdowns on diversity, equity and inclusion will further impact the strides made by women in the workplace, reducing the number of good-paying job opportunities and causing overall economic harm for women. Already, we have the narrowest executive pipeline we’ve seen in a decade, as the number of CEOs globally for women has declined to 10%. 

That translates directly to the design and architecture industry. More women are becoming architects, making up 50% of architectural graduates, but there is a question whether they, too, will stay unless the tides change faster than they are.

In a March article in architecture and design magazine Dezeen, Danish architect Dorte Mandrup challenges architecture firms to look at whether women hold leadership positions, whether they offer equal pay and whether women are represented at all levels of the company. Owners wield power over who to hire, fire, promote or exclude, whether it’s consciously or not. 

“There should be no excuse,” she writes. “We need to create an industry where women are able to imagine that it is possible. If they cannot, then we have failed.”