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Women: Know your place could be in construction
Women in Construction Week (2 – 8 March 2025) highlights women’s valuable contribution to the building industry and showcases how those considering joining the sector can benefit from its increasingly equal opportunities culture.
The theme of this year’s campaign, ‘Together We Rise’, celebrates women’s strength and knowledge and their vital role in shaping the construction industry’s future.
Levelling the employment field
According to the Office for National Statistics, women account for 15% of professional roles, such as administrative or managerial positions, in UK Construction. This figure diminishes to 1% female representation in the manual workplace, which remains an almost exclusively male domain due to its labour-intensive environment.
Why is a levelling-up of construction’s gender imbalance so important? No sector, whether it be hospitality, the armed forces, police or entertainment services, should be a gender-based closed shop to potential employees. An inclusive, diverse workforce is not only fair, it’s crucial to progress. Women and recruits from different backgrounds and demographics bring new energy, ideas and perspectives to the workplace.
Wendy McFarlane, CPI’s Inclusion Network Finance Director and Chair, said CPI had come on ‘leaps and bounds’ in recent years as an inclusive workplace. Women account for 15.66% of CPI’s workforce, with Wendy affirming that the company was working hard to progress that figure. “We now proactively look to recruit flexible working or job share across our job roles,” she said. “In the workplace, our female facilities at each site have greatly improved, such as providing period products in all facilities. We’ve also worked closely with our PPE supplier to make sure female appropriate clothing and protective items are available.
“We know these initiatives are only the tip of the iceberg, and there is so much more we are looking to accelerate in areas including recruitment, facilities, and training for all colleagues.”
Embracing change
The building industry is often cited as being resistant to change, particularly in the embrace of smart practices and technologies. But the growing need to address its carbon footprint, along with stricter regulations designed to drastically cut emissions in new and old properties, have stirred the construction sector to greater proactivity. The establishing of BIM and digital twin technologies, and IoT integration’s advance of building energy-efficiency, security and automation, have shown how the industry can adapt to new challenges. Therefore, accruing new talent outside of traditional recruitment areas should not be a challenge too far. Indeed, it is vital to creating a built environment that meets the growing population’s needs without comprise to safety or sustainability.
It’s estimated that an additional 250,000 workers will be needed by 2027 to meet the UK’s building demand. This is why the shortage of women employed throughout construction significantly impacts. In 2023, the number of females working in the building industry reached 340,000, a record high for the sector. Yet, women remain a largely untapped talent source in crucial building areas.
Based on the Labour government’s five-year 1.5 million new homes target, the number of new workers required to fulfil it across individual trades is estimated as follows:
- 20,000 bricklayers
- 2,400 plumbers
- 8,000 carpenters
- 3,200 plasterers
- 20,000 groundworkers
- 1,200 tilers
- 2,400 electricians
- 2,400 roofers
- 480 engineers
Inspirational hires
Education is key to inspiring more women to embark on a career in construction. They need to know that building is no longer a ‘men-only’ trade and that from the ground upwards, job opportunities exist for the right candidate regardless of gender.
The building industry has been working hard to promote itself as an exciting and rewarding employment choice for women. The toil is paying off. Women are beginning to blaze a trail across all building strands, setting a path for others to follow in smashing a once impenetrable career glass ceiling.
There is still a long way to go – evidenced by the statistic that only 9.2% of women occupy construction’s highest paid roles – for the building industry to achieve true gender parity. But progress on that front continues at a refreshing pace for a sector deemed to be reluctant to change. So much so, building’s reputation as a ‘job for the boys’ now seems distinctly last century.
CPI
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