LESS GENDER STEREOTYPING AND MORE MERITOCRACY – GIRLS!

When Tesco’s Chief Executive, John Allan, recently courted controversy by stating that white men are becoming an ‘endangered species’ because the ‘pendulum has swung too far the other way’ and Sir Roger Gale, MP’s comment about ‘the girls in his office' on Radio 4’s Today’s programme last week women across the country were outraged that a man who sits on a board consisting of 8 (white) men and just three women and a male MP could be so out of touch with the continuing gender gap in business. What a furor these two men caused!

Nowhere is the gender gap more evident than in the construction sector. The recent special edition ‘Women’s Issue’ published by Construction News on 8 March (http://bit.ly/2mEKltv) , highlighted that the number of women on the boards of the UK’s top 20 contractors has actually declined in the past three years, with women making up just 12.3 per cent of the 154 board members of these companies.

In a world where the Prime Minister is a woman, the Scottish First Minister and leader of Plaid Cymru are both women, we have a female monarch, Germany has a female chancellor and there is a woman at the head of the IMF, why is there such an imbalance in senior construction roles?

Many of the answers are contained within the excellent editorial in that issue of Construction News. While my first reaction on seeing it was surely ability and meritocracy, and boy do we have an over abundance of those qualities in the female sector(!), should be the priority not gender.  The frustration is that the gender topic is still a topic of debate reading that just 12.8 per cent of the sector’s workforce are women was a real eye opener.  After all, it’s inevitable that only a small proportion of that small number will rise to the top.

But this is much more than a matter of emancipation, education or ambition.  This is about culture. As global head of rail at Bechtel, Ailie MacAdam points out in her interview with Construction News, “It’s rare to find a woman engineer whose dad, uncle or brother wasn’t an engineer.” She also points to the huge influence of parents and peers in determining the career paths and goals of young women.

And that influence goes further than parents and peers, it’s embedded in our society.  I don’t see a problem if women want to be referred to as a girl. And, like Roger Gale’s 47 year old secretary said, “It makes me feel young being called a girl”. However I’m a firm believer that success should be driven by talent, ambition and hard work; for me, the whole concept of positive discrimination and diversity targets undermines a meritocracy. But if we are going to continue to see more women enrich the construction sector and contribute to more diverse teams we need to look beyond the figureheads of female achievement like May and Merkel and look at the stats.

As Barratt Homes’ Megan Robinson is quoted as saying in Construction News: “The construction industry isn’t sexist; there just aren’t enough women in it.” We can only make that change happen if we accept that change is needed.