Female Developers Navigate Discrimination in a Male-Dominated Field

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.

Alicia Glen, a former deputy mayor of New York City, is the founder of MSquared, which invests in and develops mixed-income and mixed-use real estate projects. She said that she often provides a “sanity check” to other women in the development sector, validating their perceptions of bias.

Ms. Glen, 58, cited her own experience as evidence of bias against women. “Somebody with my résumé leaving government, and with all the sort of fancy titles I have, and education, and running a big business at Goldman Sachs, and being the deputy mayor, for all this, I had trouble raising money,” she said. “My male counterparts — takes them two phone calls, they can raise a billion dollars.”