As a coda to our recent stories about Weld Coxe and SMPS, let us all celebrate the tremendous evolution that has occurred within our professional over the past four decades. In a 1973 survey of more than half of ENR’s Top 200 firms, only six companies reported having full-time marketers on staff. Today, SMPS is the network for more than 7,000 marketing and business development professionals representing 3,250 firms in the architecture, engineering, planning, interior design, construction, and specialty consulting business throughout the USA and Canada.

In celebration of #WomensHistoryMonth — What makes an exceptional pair, especially in business? We’ve been working on this story for more than 30 years.

As part of #WomensHistoryMonth, I’m shining a spotlight on a constellation of women in leadership roles in architecture and design. Kudos to Alan Chimacoff and his photograph, Light Game 7.

To celebrate #WomensHistoryMonth, I am shining the spotlight on one of my dearest friends, Ruth Gless FAIA, who I have known for more than 30 years. By her own definition, she is an architect who paints.

In December 2018, in the New York Times Opinion Section, Allison Arieff asked, “Where Are All the Female Architects?” In The Architect’s Newspaper, Julia Gamolina said, “We’re right here.”

When I first started working in the office of the Joint Venture Architects for the Bank of America Headquarters Building in San Francisco, I found myself in the midst of 50 architects and interior designers, located in an office on the 20th Floor of the still-under-construction high-rise.