| NAWIC in the news |
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As part of their look at women in construction worldwide, NAWIC United States recently published a report by committee member Emma Keyte on the activities of our own UK association as part of their regular magazine ‘The NAWIC Image’. The full article follows: In October 2003, we'll be celebrating the first birthday of NAWIC in the UK - and in September, committee member Emma Sturges will be signing our official affiliation to NAWIC in the United States. With several hundred members and five regional groups, NAWIC seems to have fulfilled a vital need for women in the UK construction industry to come together, share experiences and improve our careers. Most women I meet in construction are just like me - we find it an incredibly exciting and rewarding industry to work in, and find that in general, being a woman is a positive asset. So why do we need NAWIC? While women are comparatively well represented in the design disciplines in the UK (19% of architects are women, for example), there are much larger discrepancies in other areas. A massive 92% of all professional staff employed by contractors, engineers and quantity surveyors are men. And while male professionals still outnumber females in the industry by about 10 to 1, the ratio of female administration and support staff to men is 3 to 2. It is for this reason that NAWIC in the UK has positioned itself primarily to target female professionals in the industry, and that one of our key aims is to redress this imbalance. A recent article in UK's 'Building' magazine claimed that the building profession in Britain is now 'bigger than the Beatles', contributing more to our GNP than the fashion, music, radio and film industries combined. Despite widespread concern about recession, construction consultants contribute more than £12bn to the economy. With construction reasonably buoyant, we’re concerned that more women aren’t entering our exciting industry. One likely explanation is that school and college leavers simply aren't aware of the full range of professions available to them. One of our goals therefore is to raise the number of young women entering the industry - we want girls to aspire to the 'glamour' of becoming architects, engineers, construction lawyers or project managers in the same way that many currently aspire to be actors, filmmakers, musicians or models. And then there’s the issue of sustaining the careers of women in construction once they’re in. New research by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has revealed that women fall out of the profession due to the long hours, child-unfriendly culture and lack of women role models. Patterns of career progression in other construction disciplines are similar. NAWIC UK hopes to achieve 'career sustainability' through mentoring schemes and mutual support. We like to emphasise that we're not simply a networking group. While we recognise the importance of sharing our experiences, change is one of our key objectives. We’re very optimistic that we can start to redress the balance between the genders in UK construction and become a genuine force for progress. Finally, we feel it's important to achieve all of these objectives on our terms. Our success should be based on our own unique strengths as women, rather than us trying to simply be equal to men, or worse still, anti-men! After all, we recognise that in the construction industry men’s roles can often be as inhibiting and stereotyped as our own. Emma Keyte is one of NAWIC UK's founding committee members, with particular responsibility for marketing and website development. She is Business Development Manager at RMJM, one of the world's leading architectural practices, and can be reached by email at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it |