Female Developers Navigate Discrimination in a Male-Dominated Field

Jan 3, 2025

New York Times

In Portland, Ore., two women who own a development firm could not get a real estate broker to consider an offer they made to buy some land. But when they got a male developer friend to call the broker and put in the same offer, it was immediately accepted.

In Durham, N.C., a Jamaican American woman who is an interior designer and a small residential builder discovered that a tradesman was quoting her $7 more per square foot compared with her white male peers — a meaningful increase when working on properties with thousands of square feet.

The real estate development industry remains dominated by white men, and many female developers say they often feel that they’re being treated differently in their work because of their gender. Women own just 2.8 percent of real estate firms and occupy 9 percent of the C-suite in commercial real estate. Black and Hispanic women are in an even smaller minority, given that Black people represent just 0.4 percent of developers and Hispanic people 0.16 percent. Only 1.8 percent of real estate firms are minority-owned.

According to a 2020 study from the Commercial Real Estate Women (CREW) Network, there is also a gap in men’s and women’s compensation in the industry, and especially in their commissions and bonuses. White women earn 51 percent less than men in commissions and bonuses, Black women 71 percent less, Asian women 73 percent less and Hispanic women 74 percent less.

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The bar is simply higher for women, said Anyeley Hallová, 48, who founded Adre development firm in Portland in 2020.

She has degrees from Cornell, Harvard and M.I.T., along with accolades and a governor appointment. “I have to do all that education, I have to get all that P.R., I have to get all the awards, I have to get all this validation, just to be like, I’m a real estate developer,” she said. People often think she is an architect, unable to fathom that a Black woman could be a developer, she said. As one architect-turned-developer put it in an interview, architects get the smallest seat at the table, while developers decide how big the table is and who’s invited to it.

Over the 12 years that Ms. Hallová was a partner with two men at a real estate development firm, people regularly failed to acknowledge her leadership role, she said. “It was always like, ‘What do you do here?’ I was never recognized for literally just the work I was doing.”

Ms. Hallová argued that diversity is an asset the industry could be missing out on. She cited the residential treatment facility for teenage boys she is currently building, informed by her experience as the mother of a boy around the same age.

Female developers tend to think more about safety in public spaces and consider their own experiences, she said. “At a lot of public facilities, when you’re a woman standing in a line for a bathroom, you know a woman wasn’t a part of this.”