Women are a big deal in Architecture at the moment. January just gone BD launched its 50/50 Campaign for more Women in Architecture (The current percentage of architects who are female is 14%). Now, a few people have asked me if I have any insight on this. I’m not really sure if I do. Lack of role models (either in terms of famous female architects or university tutors (the token female in each year’s tutor batch was invariably seen as ‘the “nice” one’ during my course)) is certainly a factor. And the ‘boys club’ attitude (whether real or anticipated) on building sites probably has some bearing as well.

At SXSW I attended the Where are the Women of Web Design? Panel (Monday). I also attended the (stunningly mislabeled, but more on that later) How to Incorporate Stunning Multimedia Into Your Accessible Site, which was on the previous day (Sunday), and was suprised that most of the room was female. The “Women of Web Design”, it seemed, were quite happily getting on with their own thing and building Flash Sites. But anyway, I really enjoyed the Women of Web Design Panel. It was generally friendly and full of people going ’so it’s not just me?’, which is always encouraging. I felt that the session could have benefitted from an extra hour for ’so what can we do to help matters?’ but I felt that with a lot of sessions.

So here’s the thing - Molly wrote a similar piece the other day which is what got me thinking about it again - I don’t think the issue is that there aren’t women on the web. I think there aren’t enough VISIBLE women on the web. Take a look at a few blogrolls. There are usually significantly more male names than female names. Take a look at Technorati Top 100, take a look at RubHub Top 10. Now admittedly those two are somewhat skewed (the top 3 on rubhub are the xfn creators for example) but in terms of visibility, it’s what people see. And what I can see is an all male list of muses.