Editor’s Comment | Why does gender balance matter for the civil engineering sector?

Claire Smith, NCE editor

Over the years, I have noticed that International Women’s Day is either something people love or feel uncomfortable with – and your gender does not seem to dictate whether you sit on one side or the other. It is very personal.

However, with women making up just 14% of the civil engineering workforce in the UK, we are still at a stage of needing to recognise the gender imbalance in our sector. International Women’s Day and International Women in Engineering Day on 23 June are good for keeping
the issue front and centre.

Addressing the imbalance matters because it is a key part of dealing with the skills crisis in the sector. It is not about having more women in the industry at the cost of their male counterparts; the imbalance means that we are failing to tap into a huge pool of people who could address the skills issue.

This month’s innovative thinker, Laing O’Rourke’s Abigail Brierley, suggests that we need more female role models to attract women into the sector. Most of the people in the industry that she spoke to when researching her degree dissertation had a male role model but few, if any, had female ones.

Our cover this month has a very visible female role model for the sector – the ICE’s new director general Janet Young is the first woman to hold that post. My interview with Young touches on her background and experience and the question about role models and family links with the construction sector was one that I put to her.

How do we get to the point where the decision to become a civil engineer is no longer a talking point and we do not need role models?

Young told me that her only family link to the industry is her grandfather, who died before she was born. He was a clerk of works for Bradford Council. Although she never met him, she talks with pride of a photograph of him on the top of Bradford Town Hall following a refurbishment project. Nonetheless, it was the industrial heritage of her home town of Bradford that led her into the construction sector rather than the influence of role models.

The conversation in the interview inevitably turned to issues the ICE needs to tackle in the future, the subject of skills soon came up.

When it comes to broadening the pool of talent in the civil engineering industry – and the construction industry in general – Young pointed to my question regarding family ties with the sector. She said that asking if someone has a family member in the industry is normal when it comes to construction, but you would rarely ask that of someone who was a doctor or lawyer.

So how do we get to the point where the decision to become a civil engineer is no longer a talking point and we do not need role models?

I believe that achieving gender balance and, as a result creating more female role models, is a big step in the right direction when it comes to getting more women into the sector and meeting the skills demand.

Nonetheless, what is damaging to anyone looking to join the construction sector is the news about project delays that have emerged in the last month. I nearly managed to write a whole editor’s comment without mentioning High Speed 2 but it is the elephant in the room here. We can talk about what a great career civil engineering offers and have many men and women going out and saying that, but when the headlines the public are reading are about project delays and cancellations, would you want a career in the sector delivering those projects?

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