The material difference

I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves

I had a longish journey the other day, so downloaded a few podcasts to keep me going. As you do. One of them was an episode of BBC’s Women’s Hour. I picked this particular episode because it featured everyone’s new favourite goalie, Hannah Hampton, and a piece about getting more women into the construction industry.

Well that’ll be interesting I thought. There’s bound to be something on there about my industry, about building materials, about merchants, about the very, very many options that this sector has, not all of which require a hard hat and big boots.

How silly of me. Oh there was plenty of chat about how ‘construction’ employs 1.4million people in the UK, only 15% of them women, how there is a  recruitment crisis, and that the industry needs to bring in 220,000 new workers over the next two years. There was plenty of noise about how working in the construction industry doesn’t have to mean being out on site in all weathers, involved in heavy, muddy, manual work.

There was a list of the sorts of roles that women might be able to work in, if only they knew that they existed: “You could work in the office, you could be a QS, which stands for quantity surveyor, you could do any number of AEC roles – architecture, engineering and contracting”.

The guests stressed that these are the sorts of roles which could be done by someone who wants to go to university, maybe even studying while they were working at the same time. “There are some really good roles for women in construction, especially on the tech side.” Even when the piece got onto talking about the 2% of on-the-tools workers who are women, it majored on estimating on building sites, on the management side of contracting, and on the legal aspects, on the possibility of studying a law degree and then using that to work in managing disputes between contractors and clients.

The presenter asked one of the guests to describe how the industry works. Great, I thought, we can start to talk about materials, about manufacturing, about merchanting, about making, selling, distributing the products that are used. Nope. Not one word about building materials. Not one word about merchanting. Not even about allied sectors like IT or logistics or finance and business. Apparently, the industry is made up of Tier One contractors, then slightly smaller Tier Two contractors, and then SMEs who are “the ones who do the actual work on site”.

Yet no-one working in Tier One, Two or with Bob The Builder is going to have much to do with their day if they don’t have any products. Products that have been designed, engineered, made, financed, sold, delivered, stocked, sold again and delivered to site, when they are needed, at a price that makes everyone in the chain a bit of profit.

This is a failure of the programme researchers of course, who probably put the term ‘Construction’ into ChatGPT and came up with half an answer. It’s really irritating that, when the building materials sector employs over 200,000 people, in companies  collectively turning over around £50bn a year, it’s ignored in favour of a focus on a very specific element, simply because that seems to fit the narrative.

This happens all the time in mainstream media, nevertheless, it strikes me as a real missed opportunity to show the listeners that there is a huge sector with a myriad of careers that will appeal, not just to women, not just to men, but to everyone.  The BMF spent the last few years building the Building Materials Careers initiative, and a great deal of the industry has got behind it. But there’s clearly still a long way to go, and we need to be making even more noise.