Women in Construction:
adding our voices to the choir
“There are more people on our Board called Geoff than there are women.” This remark provides a good picture of construction company boards’ position on gender equality.1
Figures about “women in Construction” in the UK speak for themselves: women account for only 12% of the construction workforce and just 2% in manual trades. Female workers are outnumbered at every level: from the Boards to the building sites. Recent research carried out by Randstad2 in 2016 shows improvements both in the numbers and in the working conditions of women employed in the industry but we are still very far from reaching a balance with male workers.
What are the reasons?
The underrepresentation of women within the UK construction industry is attributable to the sector’s image and reputation, the lack of female role models and the scarce efforts to propose this industry as an available career path to female pupils in schools: “Girls are not up to it”.
Creating a more inclusive environment, clearing the image from misconceptions, more female role models and better support, networking and mentoring opportunities seem to be the ingredients for a cultural shift.
Perhaps at Walker Management we could add to the discussion by presenting our women and their stories.
Walker Management is a construction consultancy company. Since its foundation in 1947, the practice has come a long way. Something we have always been proud of is our working environment, reflected by the extremely low turnover of staff and their level of satisfaction on the job.
We have strived to ensure that women are represented across the business, having senior technical women within the business for many years.
Today, almost 50% of our staff are women; they are passionate about their jobs and willing to make the industry a more welcoming place for fellow colleagues who wish to join. Of them, 54.5% have technical roles.
So why did these women choose a career in Construction?
Here is what some of them said:
Susanna Morales, experienced Project Manager/Employer’s Agent and Business Development Manager, “fell into Construction” after finishing her degree. Susanna likes the variety of her job and she finds the sense of accomplishment at project completion extremely rewarding. The fact that the company’s core business is affordable housing adds to it because you feel you are contributing, together with your Clients, to really make a difference.
Kat Hurworth has instead always been attracted to the industry since she was a child watching her dad studying drawings and estimating. Her experience in construction started when she was only 20 and she applied for a work placement position whilst in her first year of University. Kat is now an experienced Quantity Surveyor.
Emily Beaven joined Walker Management in December 2016 as a Building Surveyor. After having worked for six years as a Stone Conservator, carving and restoring decorative architectural elements and sculptures, often on site on scaffolding in all weather conditions. She retrained as a Surveyor to fully understand how construction and architectural restoration projects are procured and managed.
Erica Carras is CDM Health and Safety Consultant at Walker Management. She has technical knowledge of the construction industry, working on new construction, refurbishment, repairs and maintenance contracts. She has been instrumental in setting up Walker Management's strategy for delivering compliance on behalf of clients and designers for CDM 2015.
Erica has recently been appointed as the new Chair of WISH London (Women in Social Housing). WISH is supports women working in all aspects of affordable Housing to create opportunities to network with other women at all stages of their careers and across a whole range of services operating in the sector. We are proud of her achievement and sure she is going to do a great job.
For our administrative staff, Walker Management has been recruiting for several years through Women Like Us, an organisation aiming to help women back into work, many having taken time out of their career to have children. Without forgetting what remains for this industry to become a more inclusive environment, we thought it useful to add our voices to the choir of all the other “women in construction” of the past, present and future.
Erika Porquier
Bid Manager
2017
1 Construction Magazine - http://www.constructionmanagermagazine.com
2 https://www.randstad.co.uk/women-in-work/women-in-the-uk-construction-industry-in-2016.pdf