Inspiring Women

While the industry tries to improve women’s PPE, other minority groups’ needs remain overlooked It took several months for Leena Begum to even visit a construction site. The apprentice feared she would have to compromise her Muslim faith by wearing the personal protective equipment (PPE) provided. Islam requires women to…

The nominees for the Inspiring Women In Construction and Engineering (IWICE) Awards 2024 have been revealed.  The award ceremony hosted by Construction News and sister titles New Civil Engineer and Ground Engineering takes place on 17 September and celebrates women and companies promoting gender diversity across the built environment sector. …

Two of the UK’s biggest construction contractors have won plaudits for promoting gender equality within their businesses. Costain and Willmott Dixon, which placed 12th and 19th respectively in the most recent CN100 list, were both named in The Times’ annual Top 50 Employers for Gender Equality list. The list recognises…

More women than men have left construction careers over the past year, according to the latest official figures. The proportion of women in construction careers has steadily declined over the past year, leading an overall downward trend in the number of people employed in the sector, as recorded by the…

A construction recruitment firm’s decision to cancel its charity golf event due to concerns about inclusivity has caused an online stir. Writing on the social media platform on Friday, The Shore Group’s co-founder Lewis Yorke-Johnson said his firm’s next charity golf day would be its last. Since then, the post…

Lewis Yorke-Johnson is co-founder of construction recruitment firm The Shore Group. On Friday (3 May) he announced on LinkedIn that his firm was ending corporate golf days due to the sport’s lack of diversity. The post caused a huge stir, with more than 125,000 views and dozens of comments. Below,…

Women make up only one in nine of top positions at major construction firms, according to the latest gender equality data. Across 13 top contractors, women occupied a median of 11 per cent of the highest-paid positions. That was, however, a slight improvement from last year’s median of 9.3 per…

Sandi Rhys Jones is president of the Chartered Institute of Building Having launched the Chartered Institute of Building’s (CIOB’s) #PPEthatfits campaign last summer, it was really encouraging to hear the subject raised in Parliament by Labour MP Emma Hardy recently. “Women’s bodies, including our feet, aren’t simply smaller versions of…

Sue Hunter is a director at Bentley I joined the construction industry in the late 90s, and it was clear from the outset that there was more onus on women to prove themselves in terms of skills and competence, whereas male peers were treated with an immediate level of trust…

Kate Morement is head of risk and compliance at Assent I took a very non-traditional route into the world of construction. Having begun my working life as a shelf-stacker with a supermarket chain and rising through the management ranks before I realised that retail wasn’t for me, I took a…