Catherine Guyot
Practice: ARVHA
Established: 1994
City: Paris
Country: France
www.arvha.asso.fr
[email protected]
Since January 1997 Catherine Guyot has been chairwoman of ARVHA, in charge of project policy and financial and technical management. Since 1995 she has been involved in the establishment and framing of 'Rehabilitation: A Job for Architects', a training programme for architects, and from 1998 'Rehabilitation and Public Markets', a government-supported course helping women architects to start their own businesses.
Catherine Guyot is a co-ordinator of the Leonardo and Culture 2000 programmes. She has realised exhibitions, a webiste and CD-ROM about women architects in Europe and contributed to various meetings and European conferences about women and achitecture. She manages a project called 'Women Architects in Euro-Méditerranée' with the the Anna Lindh Foundation with Moroccan and Algerian architects. She also co-ordinates projects concerned with disabilities and architecture.
ARVHA
Training
ARVHA promotes the employability of women architects in its 'Rehabilitation of Neighborhoods' course and as part of '"Architects and Designers Creating Businesses. This course is supported both by the Ministry of Labour, Employment and Solidarity and by the European Social Fund and helps more than 30 architects a year choose to set up their own architectural enterprise with the help of legal and financial tools.
| How does diversity of people reveal itself at work? | ARVHA is an association whose aims are research and training in the field of architecture. Its first training courses covered the rehabilitation and the inclusion of disability in the design of projects and it also supports and helps women architects to establish their own businesses. we set up our first European project in 1998. Currently one of our major themes is 'New Opportunities for Women' on women's place in architecture. |
| Do you think our profession is diverse enough? | The profession is diverse and more equal in the early years in schools of architecture, but the number of women running their own architectural practice is very low at only 9 per cent. Moreover, the salaries of women architects in France are generally lower than those of men - this is a real social problem. The average income of an architect is 30,838 € for a man and an 18,001 € for a woman. |
| If you could change one thing in our profession, what would it be? | I think it will be necessary to improve equality between women and men in architectural offices, proposing actions to promote women's inclusion and the ability to progress their careers within the agencies. That is why we offer help to French architectural firms to take voluntary action to obtain a 'label of equality'. |