Dr Gill Matthewson has a longstanding interest in women in architecture, which has encompassed scholarly work, activism and advocacy from the 1980s onwards. She has a background as a practicing architect and educator in New Zealand and the UK and continues to design. She is a founding member of the XYX Lab Gender+Place at Monash University and a founding director of Parlour.
For many years she has been investigating the gendered substructure of the architecture profession, particularly as it manifests in the weakening participation of women. More recently, her research focus with the XYX Lab has been the impact of the gendering of space on how sex, gender and sexuality may limit who and what contributes to the production of, and participation in, the spatial culture of cities. She is particularly interested in data analysis and visualisation.
Gill's PhD thesis 'Dimensions of Gender: women's careers in the Australian architecture profession' was awarded at the University of Queensland and received a Dean’s award for outstanding thesis. This work led to the compilation and analysis of the comprehensive statistical map that is at the heart of much of Parlour’s advocacy work.