“Surveys of personal values in men and women find that the men assign a lopsided value to pro- fessional status compared to all the other pleasures of life.” “Several eth-nographic surveys of tra- ditional cultures have found that the better a society treats its women, the less it em-braces war.” Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature. Viking, 2011, p. 527. 1, personally, found Pinker’s book to be a fascinating read. Although, Age of Empathy by Frans de Waal and Beyond Re- venge by Michael E. McCullough were also pleasures to read, I felt Pinker’s book was more en- compassing and really brought home the context of violence in human history. There are numer- ous examples of male architects doing great sympa-thetic work without concern for ego and ide- ology. Most likely there are more examples of men doing this kind of work than females, but do not get the base rates confused. 

People who have a Ph.D. are more likely to read the New York Times, but what is more likely that the person reading the New York Times next to you on the sub- way has a Ph.D. or a high school diploma? Female architects might be more likely to understand and address the needs of the general population than male architects, but what is more likely that firms like Architecture for Hu-manity are founded by a female or male architect? Like the New York Times example, the base rates of females in the profession make it more likely that male ar- chitects head up firms like Architecture for Humanity. Update: (I was incorrect to say that Archi- tecture for Humanity was solely founded by a male architect. See the comment from below from Architecture for Humanity: “Architecture for Humanity was co-founded by a woman, we have over 50% of our staff and board are women (as has been the case for the past 12 years),” Camer- on Sin-clair. Apologies for the bad example.) I once heard Zaha Hadid speak at the University of Virginia. Her arrogance that permeated the room made me physically uncomfortable. 

So, it is not that any particular female will be more sympathetic and less egotistical than any particular male, but there is a general trend. Waite, Richard. “New RIBA stats show large drop in women archi- tects,” The Architects’ Journal. January 16, I cannot speculate wheth-er architecture is more or less narcissistic than other male dominated professions. Perhaps it attracts more com-passionate males than other professions, but there really isn’t anything, as far as I know, to suggest this is or is- n’t true As noted in Pinker’s book empathy and sympathy are not the only ways we have of relat- ing and under-standing the needs of others. In the some cases empathy/perspective-taking doesn’t help at all. The fact that a sports fan can take the perspective of an opposing sports fan doesn’t necessarily make him more likely to treat the other with more compassion when the other loses. How many Red Sox fans revel in knowing that a Yankee fan is upset that his team was just beat, and vices versa? Pinker points to other sources such as reason to sup-plant wayward wan- derings of empathy. Still, it doesn’t hurt that women tend to be more sympathetic than their male counter parts. Considering that architects, in general, hold more privileged positions in society than a ma-jority of people on earth, John Rawls must be rolling in his grave. A basic understanding of John Rawls’ work, i.e. the veil of ignorance is enough to make one realize how ridiculously juve- nile Peter Eisenman’s statement is. For architects’ socioeconomic status see Henry