December 21, 2018

Building A Career In Construction: The Challenges And Opportunities

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A career in construction probably isn’t on your radar, but maybe it should be. The industry offers some unique opportunities for women. First of all, there’s a massive labor shortage, and secondly, there are very few women. Currently, less than 9.1% of the workforce is made up of women, and many of these women do design or administrative work, resulting in women only holding 1.2% of construction trade jobs.

Eighty percent of U.S. construction firms are currently unable to fill open slots with qualified workers (AGC). As of June, there were 263,000 job openings in the industry (BLS). But here’s the exciting part. In construction, women make 95.7 cents for every dollar a man makes, compared to 80 cents on average (BLS)

With all this opportunity, why don’t more women enter the construction industry?

I reached out to Allison Scott, Head of Construction Integrated Marketing at Autodesk, and Jennifer Suerth, VP of Technical Services at Pepper Construction, to get a better idea of the challenges and opportunities for women in this field.

Bonnie Marcus: Why so you think there so few women in the construction industry?

Jennifer Suerth: In my opinion, the number one reason is lack of awareness of opportunities for women, with male dominant culture becoming a close second. I hear it from female laborers, as well as younger women. It pains me to hear girls wanting to go in to engineering or construction, but scared to try thinking their road will be hard.

Additionally, even when women join the industry, they don’t see a lot of women in leadership roles, so that also makes them feel there are less opportunities. Lastly, when people think of construction, they often think of traditional hard labor roles, when in fact, there are many other opportunities outside of that. Look at me, I lead our Virtual Construction group at Pepper, which isn’t a traditional role, but has huge impact on the project and our company. There are so many opportunities, and we need to educate people on that. Also, physical labor. I’ve talked to women in the field, and while initially that comes off as a struggle, it seems women have found ways to work better. One laborer told me that she realized she couldn’t carry a sheet of drywall like her male counterparts. She decided to cut the sheet in half and move quicker. The result was still the same, she just worked differently.

We also are seeing technology drastically impacting our work environment. While robots are still not the norm on a job site, there are tools and technology that can enhance the worker, making the physicality less of an obstacle. This will only grow and improve in the future. (Example: Screw Driver vs Drill vs Robot installing facade)

Keep reading on Forbes.com

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