In Charlotte Perriand’s 1998 autobiography A Life of Creation she recalls her first encounter with the legendary architect Le Corbusier: "Clutching a portfolio of drawings, I found myself face-to-face one October afternoon in 1927 with Le Corbusier's horn-rimmed spectacles. The austere office was somewhat intimidating, and his greeting rather frosty.

'What do you want?' he asked, his eyes hooded by his glasses. He glanced quickly through my drawings. 'We don't embroider cushions here,' he replied, and showed me the door."

Perriand, of course, went on to become one of the great architects and designers of her time and a longtime collaborator of Le Corbusier (though he regularly takes the credit for work—the LC4 lounge chair, the tubular steel revolving armchair—that they created in partnership). But despite her efforts to chip away at the ceiling, today’s design world suggests that, in almost a century, many things remain remarkably the same. “You walk into a machine shop it’s like ‘So is your boyfriend coming by in a minute to get his bench made?,’” explains lighting designer Lindsey Adelman. “They don’t expect a woman to start talking about the pitch of a screw.”

Now, as New York gears up for a month of design festivities—Collective ( May 3-7), Sight Unseen Offsite (May 19-22), ICFF (May 21-24), and everything in between, two shows answer the question that many have been asking for decades: Where are the women?

“The design world has had plenty of shows featuring work by men only,” says Matylda Krzykowski. For Room With Its Own Rules, the fourth and final show she’s curating for Chamber gallery (opening May 4), she’ll turn that standard on its head. “There are so many talented women who have established their own rules in a male-dominated market. They deserve to take up this space.” In her show, works by industry giants like Lindsey Adelman and Johanna Grawunder are shown alongside the creations of relative newcomers like Katie Stout and Ana Kras.

Down in SoHo, the founders of Egg Collective—a trio of female industrial designers—had a similar idea. “We wanted to call attention to the fact that women are still a minority in this industry,” says co-founder Crystal Ellis. The group's experience with entering the design world is a hopeful development; when they met in architecture school at Washington University in St. Louis, Ellis, Stephanie Beamer, and Hillary Petrie were part of the first class to have an equal percentage of men and women. And thanks to an inspiring female furniture design professor they were able to find their place in the design world fairly quickly after school, soon snapped up by DWR where they comprise three of the 28 living women designers on the retailer's roster (there are more than 100 men).

Still, women continue to ask them about how they scaled the hurdle of being a woman in a woodshop. “When you do hit the industry just because an equal number of men and women graduating doesn’t mean they’ll all be able to stay in that field,” Ellis explains. “We want to be able to mentor younger women as they’re coming out of school.”

In their Hudson Street showroom, they have assembled designs from 18 talented women in the community including textile maker Hiroko Takeda, wallcoverings genius Yolande Batteau and lighting designer Bec Brittain for a show called Designing Women (opening May 1). Twenty percent of sales from the show will benefit Girls, INC NYC.

Anna Karlin, part of the Egg Collective show, is quick to admit she’s “really upset with how few female designers are out there,” attributing the inequalities to everything from communication style to ego, but she says, insightfully: “You can’t change a conversation unless you participate in the conversation.” Inclusive shows like these are a necessary first step.