Schade and Bolender Architects

It is not quite news that there are women architects, but it's not far from it. The profession is still mostly male- mostly white male, in fact. The stereotype of guys in bow ties hunched over drafting tables isn't far off the mark.
   Rachel Simmons Schade, who is an architect, can't figure out why this is so. When she was studying architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1980s, about half of her class was female.
   Maybe, she theorizes, they got wiped out in the recession that, for architects, began in the late 1980s. That economic downturn was to the profession what the plague was to 14th-century Europe. Whole firms were leveled.
   Maybe they got chewed up in architects' rough apprenticeship system, which- like many such professional initiation rites- can be inimical to family and motherhood.

   "It traditionally has been a male profession, and that has been slow to change." said Sandra Garz, executive director of the local American Institute of Architects chapter. Nationally, only 30 percent of the students in architecture school are female, Garz said.
   After serving her apprenticeship, Schade struck out on her own. It would be nice to say that the commissions poured in, that today the skyline is dotted with Schade-designed buildings. But life isn't like that. What Schade did- what so many architects do- is stitch together a career by doing a number of things: a renovation here, a design job there, teaching at Drexel, doing research. Not to mention raising two children.
   She is a cofounder of the Young Architects Forum, a group whose name describes it perfectly. She also is chair of the