Designer Elisa Otañez created a bright yellow, mobile toilet as a protest against the lack of public facilities for women in The Netherlands. "Men were peeing in public, in corners, in the streets, and they got rewarded with toilets. Do women have to start doing that as well to get their public toilets? I wanted to make a solution, something that worked and wasn't only as a protest."

While numbers in architecture schools are commonly equally split between male and female, a high drop-out rate of women results in much higher levels of male architects in the profession. The imbalance is the result of several factors, but is often blamed on the fact that the age when women are first establishing themselves in the profession – usually during their late 20s and 30s – also coincides with the time best suited to starting a family.

"Women are doing some of the most prestigious work in New York" but nobody knows who they are, according to architect and filmmaker Beverly Willis, who wants to change this with her new movie about the women who have shaped the city.Her aim is to raise awareness of women working in the architecture industry, as not enough gain the recognition they deserve, she told Dezeen. "One of the things that I like to do is ask people can they name five women architects," Willis said. "Usually, people can only name one or possibly two, maybe three because people like Maya Lin, Zaha Hadid and Julia Morgan are well known, but past that hardly anybody can name another woman architect."

"It is improving," agreed Jane Duncan, director at Jane Duncan Architects and past president of the RIBA. "There are more and more savvy young women architects coming into the workforce. Once some break through the glass ceiling they become role models for others on their way up. It's inevitable."

Royal College of Art tutor Harriet Harriss has created a list of over 300 notable architectural texts written by women, to show universities that there are no excuses for giving students male-dominated reading lists.