42) His and her space.

There is not now, nor has there ever been in the whole of history, a single place in the world where women have equality with men. It hasn’t happened in the whole span of our evolution. This is a reality. We do this all the time even at home. Our domestic universe are designed as a sphere of significance to the construction of gender differences.

Homes has been a strategy for technical, functional, spacial and cultural reorganization. As soon as we look into stereotype about gender it gets us into all sort of uncomfortable areas. Instead of calling us into question the typical domestic design and encouraging us to subvert societal norms and differences that grades into discrimination.

We want to have lives that are animated by terrific relationships with each other without challenging oppressive power relations. And at the same time our design rarely moves us beyond the assumed and seemingly generic six-foot tall, able-bodied male. Architecture deal with anatomy, meaning the human body or does it rather deal with the concept of body meaning the way we think about what a body is? Absence of “women” body in our design seems less an oversight than a tacit exclusion. 

Living “like a man” only entrenches a masculine norm. Every cell in the human body has a sex which means that women and men are different right down to the cellular level. From our brain to our hearts, our lungs, our joints. Too often design ignores this insight. There is so little data on our sex differences and little knowledge how we can improve the life of women with design. There is so much more to learn and architecture could make a bigger investment in understanding how to bring gender equality. Bodies can challange the norms.

There are many ways for women and men to experience self-esteem, recognition, integrity. Are we overlooking these differences? The polarization of domestic space rapidly affects our culture, our relationship, our marriage. It also affects gender and women rights. The quality and integrity of architecture can help make women rights visible.

So imagine the momentum we could achieve in advancing women rights if we consider these sex differences at the very beginning of the design. Yet difference in itself is not the issue. The differences matter, but how we consider them and how we care about the people they affect matters more. It is less about the difference and more about how we care. Class and race and gender are not about other people. They are about all of us.