Inspiring Women

A Q&A for International Women's Day 2023 (IWD 2023) with Nicky Rance, project director at Sir Robert McAlpine Can you outline your career and how you got to where you are today? When I settled on civil engineering at school, I wrote to many engineering and construction companies and was…

Roberta Downey is a partner and co-head of the international construction group at Vinson & Elkins LLP in London As people around the world celebrate International Women’s Day (IWD) today, it provides a welcome opportunity to focus on the importance of authentic leadership. Leadership isn’t easy, and it’s not a…

Chithra Marsh is national chair of Women in Property and associate director of Buttress Architects While International Women’s Day 2023 (IWD 2023) creates an annual talking point on gender issues, the conversation goes on 365 days a year – or should. And while there are still clear disparities for women…

Business leaders from Bam, Kier and flexible-working specialist TimeWise will join the panel for a free webinar on 8 March to look at how flexible working can help the sector address its skills crisis. The event is the first in the 2023 Inspiring Women in Construction and Engineering programme –…

Major gaps remain despite small steps on diversity and inclusion in the built environment workforce, according to the results of a new employee survey. The survey from the Sustainability Tool and the Supply Chain Sustainability School’s Fairness, Inclusion and Respect (FIR) Programme covered 339,912 employees working in 270 companies in…

Construction professionals are invited to join a free webinar in March on how moving to flexible working will help the sector tackle skills shortages – the first event in the 2023 programme for Inspiring Women in Construction and Engineering.  Following on from the success of last year's programme, Construction News and…

Louise Hardy has joined the board of builders merchant Travis Perkins, adding this to a string of non-executive directorships in the industry. These include Crest Nicholson Holdings, Severfield and Balfour Beatty. Hardy is also chair of Oriel, the joint initiative between Moorfields Eye Hospital, UCL and Moorfields Eye Charity for…

Women in the industry have welcomed the introduction of guidance requiring sanitary disposal bins for onsite toilets, but questioned why the move took so long. Earlier this week the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) published new guidance about welfare facilities on construction sites, advising site inspectors to check that disposal…

Melissa Barber is head of people and communications at Beard Construction If, like me, you’re a woman who’s been working in construction for a decade or so, your first experience of a building site was probably less about the job you were doing and more about a feeling of imposter…

Sarah Sidey is a director of Randstad’s construction division In the recent interim review into misconduct in the Metropolitan Police, author Baroness Casey identified the need for urgent reform from within the organisation. In a letter to Met commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, she wrote that the public “need to have…