Monday 8th March marked International Women’s Day, which is a great opportunity to raise awareness about gender equality, celebrate women’s achievements and strive for gender parity.
According to research from GoConstruct, women make up around 14% of construction industry professionals. As a company, we take pride in empowering and encouraging women to join the industry and we aim to achieve a 50/50 gender parity across the group by 2030.
Female Leadership Programme
To start the week, we launched our involvement in the Female Leadership programme. This will be a 12-month programme that will help support the professional development of 17 high-potential female leaders from Willmott Dixon and our supply chain partners. The programme will be delivered through Cambridge Judge Business School and we will be working closely with CITB to share learning and best practise to benefit the industry for years to come. The internally led development programme includes:
- Dedicated mentoring from Willmott Dixon directors and other senior figures in the business
- Opportunities to gain insight and experiences through shadowing senior management and attending strategic meetings, including those at board level
- Opportunities to participate in task teams and project groups across different business disciplines, further enhancing cross-sector skills
- The building of a strong alumni of exceptional female leaders to mentor those entering the industry.
Our Women
To continue with the celebrations, we launched a campaign which aims to inspire more women into the industry titled “Our Women”. This campaign will run throughout the year, highlighting the experiences and backgrounds of our women, insights into their roles and agile working opportunities as well as bringing back to the focus of why it is important and beneficial to have a diverse workforce. The launch videos saw our inspiring female leaders speaking upon their previous careers paths, what their roles include, how to achieve a work/life balance and why women should join the industry. We look forward to continuing to develop this campaign throughout the year.
Construction Manager Magazine
Our Head of Social Value, Anna Koukoullis and Senior Build Manager, Mark Bennett, were featured in this month’s Construction Manager magazine as guest editors. In this issue, Anna discusses the topic of remote working and if remote working can fast track diversity. Other topics include; Women in the boardroom, and the gender gap, EDI in the supply chain, returning to work after a break and much more. Mark shares his thoughts on the need for period dignity across sites and our partnership with social enterprise, Hey Girls, which bring us closer to periods not being seen as a ‘taboo’ subject.
The Female Lead Research
We were pleased to see the Female Lead publish their findings from their research on women in the workplace. Our Principal Sales & Marketing Manager, Connie Robson Velaetis was one of the 66 women involved in the research, which has found that social conditioning means that women feel less deserving than men, creating a gap of entitlement that’s directly impacting women’s careers. Find out more information on the findings from this study on the Female Lead’s website: https://www.thefemalelead.com/research
We took Choose to Challenge selfies to show our support for gender parity.
