World Architecture Festival is failing to attract enough leading female architects as speakers despite efforts to improve its gender balance, according to organiser Paul Finch.
At this year's World Architecture Festival (WAF) 30 per cent of the 125 award judges were women, and just 27 per cent of the speakers female ? although the speaker's page of the event's website places this figure at 22 per cent. In 2016 only 13 per cent of speakers were women.
But Paul Finch, the festival's programme director and the editorial director of The Architects' Journal, said the figures are not wantonly imbalanced. He said that WAF has had on-going problems securing high-profile female architects as speakers throughout the event's 10-year history, with 2017's iteration suffering from two last-minute withdrawals. "As a general rule we try to ensure at least one woman per three-person jury, and we try hard to get a decent gender balance in respect of speakers," he told Dezeen.
"Our experience over the last ten years is that it is quite difficult to get prominent women architects as speakers in quantity, but it doesn't mean we don't try," Finch continued.
"For various reasons we find that high-profile women architects are more likely to withdraw from the event quite late on (two French examples this year), and it is difficult to get like-for-like replacements."
He said the imbalance also extended to WAF's attendees, which he estimated as being "well below...