Are Women Underrepresented In the Construction Industry?

The other day, I was reading an interesting book from the construction industry. It was written by a veteran of the industry who was a rather well accomplished lady who went back to teach construction management in college and got her PhD. Things have changed a lot in the construction industry, and nowadays it's quite common to see women at the top of the food chain running these companies. Okay so let's talk about this for second shall we?

Back in the early 80s only about 7% of the people in the construction work were women, it was back then at least, predominantly a man's game. Still on the construction management side of things it was about 13%. Today, the numbers have drastically changed, and although men still outnumber women the door is wide open and the numbers have now more than tripled. Some have said that women do better than men in management due to their ability to build positive business relationships, and on the construction work side their attention to detail seems to suit them extremely well for quick upward advancement.

Let me recommend a very good book to you, where I had found this information; "Construction Management Jump Start - Construction Management Basics - The First Step toward a Career in Construction Management", by Barbara J Jackson PhD, DBIA. Not only does she predict this trend to continue, she expects that there will be a day sometime in the future that there will actually be more women than men doing construction management.

Personally, that wouldn't surprise me, especially what I've seen with today's woman entrepreneur charging ahead and leading the field of so many industry sectors. There will be of course the transition period, which we are going through now, where hardheaded men will have to give up their sexist perceptions and discriminatory thought processes. It appears that we're getting over that hump right now. After all, it doesn't take a construction worker who is a man working on very many projects being led by a woman with a favorable outcome to change his mind.

These women today who are working in construction management are getting the job done, they're doing it on time, and staying on budget, often better than the men, and that should be telling us something. Next time, you see a construction project don't assume that there is a man in charge of it, it could very well be a woman, and she's doing one hell of a job. Please consider all this and think on it.

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