Posted by This Friday, 8th March, is International Women’s Day. I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s a worthwhile, and vital day: I have 4 daughters and it’s really important to me that they have every chance to get where they want in life, regardless of their gender.
With that said, I realised that I work in a very male-dominated sector. According to Go Construct, women make up only about 14% of the construction industry (although that number is slowly rising). But why is that? Will there ever be equality in the construction sector?
A bit of background
I think it’s important to get some historical information to give the argument some context. In The Guilty Feminist Handbook*, Deborah Frances-White says that hunter-gatherer societies were far more equal in the day-to-day running of things. Labour was divided equally between men and women, and leadership would change, depending on which person was best for the task at hand.
Parenting and childcare was equally shared, and it wouldn’t only be the men that were going out doing the hunting, leaving the women back at the cave to gather berries! Some tribes would see women hunting in groups, where they would have a 31% success rate of coming back with food, whereas men would only have a 17% success rate.
Changing times
So where did that all change? It’s all to do with the plough.
When farming developed and people were able to start growing crops for food, women lacked the strength to push early-model ploughs (especially whilst pregnant). At the same time, the tribes started staying in one place rather than roaming, and so building structures to live in. It’s at this point that women began to be the primary caregivers for the children, whilst the men went out and worked the land… and so began the idea of ‘man’s work’ vs ‘women’s work’.
Challenges and Barriers
Of course, nowadays the idea of women staying at home to mind the children is an outdated concept, yet gender disparity prevails in several industries, including construction.
I spoke to The Apprentice finalist Michaela Wain, who is an ambassador for women in construction and owns five construction-related companies, on Episode 164 of the podcast, asking why we weren’t seeing more people like her rising through the ranks.
Her take on things is that there’s a distinct lack of female role models for girls to look up to in the sector. Her family all worked in the trade and so it was part of her world from a young age, but without that influence, it’s something of a chicken and egg scenario. A lot of young men might go into construction because a family influence, but without a mother or an aunt (or other female role model), young women may not realise there are opportunities open to them.
Similarly, women of Michaela’s age may not want to encourage their girls to pursue careers in the trade, because it was drilled into them (no pun intended) from an early age that a building site is no place for a woman, not to mention their own experiences of what it used to be like walking past worksites, with the cliched concept of the wolf-whistling builder – why would they encourage that kind of place to work for their daughters?
(Not) a nice place to work
By “that kind of place”, I’m talking about the workplace culture itself. There’s no denying that a working on a building site is certainly dirty, but it can be toxic too. Building sites are often perceived to be inhospitable and unwelcoming for woman.
During our conversation, Michaela told me that she’d often struggled on site visit and was often ignored, with people thinking she was there just to take notes, and if she asked a question, the answers being directed at the men in her team rather than to her!
Adding to that of course, we come back to the point about children. There’s a distinct lack of flexibility when it comes to having and raising kids, and as Michaela said to me, ‘building a wall when you’re eight and a half months pregnant is more difficult for you than it is for a man!’. Issues that exist in other industries can be magnified in construction, such as tight timescales and when people have to be on site.
Breaking walls and smashing ceilings
So, if those are the challenges, what can we do to mitigate them and bring more women into the industry? How can we open up what looks like it’s a closed shop?
It all comes down to education. Firstly, construction isn’t just the dirty, physical graft that we’ve been brought up thinking it is. There are so many other roles available that aren’t gender specific (and no, I don’t mean making the tea!): think about your quantity surveyors, your project managers, or your architects.
Very few of these things are mentioned to kids at school-age level, and without many public-facing women talking about what they do, then there’s a real lack of knowledge about how broad the career opportunities really are. It also wouldn’t hurt to have a little more female representation when it comes to things like Lego and Minecraft, or to stop teaching girls how to sew buttons and arrange flowers at Brownies: show them how to build walls and bridges instead.
That’s the long-term solution, but of course it’s going to take time to filter through. For a faster fix, it’s vital for constructions to consider hiring women with transferable skills, or even better, to invite them into the board room!
If you’d like to hear more of my conversation with Michaela Wain about the role of women in construction, head to episode 164 of the podcast, (or you can watch it on YouTube here). If you’re thinking about a career in property (female or male!), then why not sign up for my Foundations program, taking you from uncertainty to confidence and freedom in 6 key training module.
https://www.elitepropertyaccelerator.com/foundations
*The Guilty Feminist Handbook, Deborah Frances-White, 2018