Hospitality Design - July 2010 - 74

we’re dealing with Saudis now and I think it works to our advantage to be women quite honestly. I think they sit up straight and they listen to us more believe it or not. Maybe there is a glass ceiling and I just don’t care.”

principal designer of her Santa Monica, Californiabased firm, Indidesign. “Just the fact that when you go into a room and the ratio is one woman to 10 men it says something. Probably that balance is changing and it’s changing quickly but it’s definitely something that cannot be denied,” she says, noting a current project

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I think women have to curate their lives more carefully than men…
owned businesses.

Design is Different
“It gets back to the basic starting point, which is that the design business has always and historically been an OK business for women to be in in the first place,” says Jill Cole, managing principal, Cole Martinez Curtis and Associates, Marina del Rey, California. “So you take someone like Eileen [Slora] or Glenn [Wilson] and you say, OK, those are male dominated corporations but it’s OK to be a woman in the design department. But the president of the company isn’t a woman, and the chief engineer isn’t a woman.” “In a larger company I still think that there is that stigma,” says Amy Hulbert, now director of interior design at Best Western International, but at the time of this interview director of interior design, Latin America and the Caribbean for Hilton Worldwide. “And there’s certainly more men being promoted within some organizations, and this isn’t just us, it’s a lot of hotel companies. I think in the interior design world it’s definitely an advantage [to be a woman], but once you get into the realm of a larger corporation, especially a hotel corporation, I think [the glass ceiling] still exists.” “I’ve seen a lot of promotions happen within the company and it’s generally men, it’s just not women,” says Eileen Slora, executive director interior design at Fairmont Hotels and Resorts. Even if you look at the industry outside the design arena, if you look at the [hotel] general managers, it’s very few women. And the point that you may have an advantage being a woman [designer] working with [men as clients], there could be, but within the organization there definitely is a huge glass ceiling.” “I think it’s naïve to say that the glass ceiling doesn’t exist,” says Italian architect Beatrice Girelli,

in Malaysia where the majority of the consultants, including structural engineers and MEPs are women“We have a mentorship program at our firm that we are really actively trying to promote the women in the firm,” says Nancy Nodler, principal at Gensler. “So I think that is the case; I think that will be the case. We will see change.”

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Global Scale
“By the time you’re winning projects in an international arena you’re dealing with a different kind of executive,” says Anita Degen, principal at Seattle-based Degen & Degen architecture and interior design. “I don’t do any work in the Middle East, but I do a lot of work in China and being a woman has never been an issue. And very often I’m the only woman in the room.” “India and China everything is, ‘I respectfully request,’ and you’re real low key with that,” says Slora. “My personality totally changes there.” “I think it’s dangerous to stereotype. There are a lot of parts to the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is very different than the Emirates,” says Firestone, noting a Saudi residential client in California with whom she will never meet in person due to his royalty. “But I find it very different in Abu Dhabi and Oman and Dubai. I think the men there and the sheiks that we deal with are extremely respectful toward women. I have no feelings like I have to hold back who I am.” “We were doing a project in Doha and we purposely didn’t send the female project manager because we really wanted to talk turkey,” says Trisha Wilson, president and CEO of Wilson Associates. “We explained to her why, and it is easier for someone like me to explain that to a woman. I didn’t go either, but I

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Hospitality Design - July 2010