A response to “Sexism and the Star System” by Denise Scott Brown
Sexism in both romantic and professional relationships has always been a topic I consistently think about. Although, I believe that it’s hard not to think about if you are a woman. In her article Sexism and the Star System in Architecture written by Denise Scott Brown, she asserts that even today, “The discrimination continues at the rate of about one incident a day.” While I certainly don’t feel this is the case for me, I’ve watched many women around me be discriminated against in my (somewhat limited) professional experience.
During a summer internship in the bay area tech industry, I watched my bosses push my pregnant coworker to exhaustion until she ended up in the hospital. I’ve watched a female coworker take only a day off when she came down with a fever, while her male counterpart took a week off for nothing more than a sore throat. It seems that as a woman in the workplace, especially in the fast-paced startup environment that is currently in place in the Bay Area, we constantly feel the need to prove our worth. I have always wondered how much of my own personal need to prove myself is a result of being a young designer, versus how much if it can be attributed to being a woman.
Relationships that are both romantic and professional are even more complicated, but perhaps also more understanding and forgiving. Brown writes, “I have suggested that the star system, which is unfair to many architects, is doubly hard on women in a sexist environment, and that, at the upper levels of the profession, the female architect who works with her husband will be submerged in his reputation.” Working on joint projects with a significant other brings a new set of challenges that a woman alone wouldn’t face.
I’m lucky enough to be dating someone I love to collaborate with, and our skills work well together (a designer and a software engineer duo can go far in the Bay Area). One summer, we applied to the Lightspeed Summer Fellowship together, and the application asked us to list who the founder was. Although we both knew that we had come up with the idea together and done an equal amount of work on the project thus far, I remember having a long conversation about if a male or female name would ‘look better’ and which would be more likely to be accepted by the review committee.
A second experience also stands out to me. After landing a high paying tech job, and after listening to my complaints about not finding any junior designer positions that I really wanted, my significant other jokingly suggested, “Let’s just live in a studio and you can stay home and paint all day.” While I knew this comment wasn’t meant as dismissive or condescending and was in fact a thoughtful proposal given my complaints, I immediately recoiled at the idea of me staying home while he went into the office every day. In her essay, Brown states “I begin to dislike my own hostile persona.” It often feels like women must pick between this angry persona or submitting to and accepting the way things are.
The last point I want to make, which is slightly unrelated to the first two points, but is very related to sexism (especially in Silicon Valley) is around the idea of empathy. I have been fortunate enough to study under two influential people at Stanford. The first is David Kelley, who came up with the design thinking process which is honestly just a version of the scientific process with empathy tacked on the front. The second is Steve Blank in the business school who came up with the ‘Lean Startup’ methodology, in which the fundamental concept is that you need to talk to users and customers before launching a business. I have often found it frustrating that these ‘groundbreaking principles’ that these two men came up with are both essentially complicated ways of saying we should listen and empathize, when listening and empathy have always been demanded of women in society.
