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?
Read the full article as originally posted in Forbes here
