Gender Equality Workshop

To promote sustainable employment, a Women’s Network was established to enable locally recruited women to discuss key issues such as health, gender equality and celebrate International Women’s Day.

The local women’s network provides the environment to enable women to not feel alone in a male dominated industry
A recent outcome has been the creation of an interactive gender equality workshop across the contractors sites with feedback being fed back into a gender equality strategy.

The areas of discussion in this are:

• Issues around inequality
• The hard facts and impacts
• Women in Construction
• Development of a strategy
• Unconscious bias
• Why diversity is important
• What the contractor is doing.

It is an opportunity to promote to colleagues and trade contractors that workforce diversity has lots of benefits such as improved responsiveness to employee and client needs as well as greater innovation and creativity.

Benefits to the wider industry of this are:

• Collaboration with trade contractors raises industry standards and accepted practices
• The workshop promotes the benefits of gender equality and highlights barriers such as unconscious bias, language and the importance of allyship with male colleagues
• Promoting more opportunities for women in construction by promoting wider flexible working.