Today we celebrate International Women’s Day at Vextrix and we have taken the opportunity to discuss female recruitment and retention within our business. We are proud that 26% of our workforce and 25% of our senior management team are females, much higher than the industry average. However, recent statistics have shown that through our recruitment campaigns for technical roles, including Quantity Surveyors and Project Managers, only 4% of applicants were female.
Ever since I joined the Construction industry back in 2004, attracting more women into the industry has been an ongoing initiative. Why? Because having a more diverse workforce gives access to a greater range of talent, and the opportunity to understand all of our clients.
Organisations have certainly come a long way, offering much more flexibility in the way females can work and how we promote women within the industry, however, the male:female ratio is certainly still disproportionate with only 12.8% of the construction workforce being made up of women.
We recently held an internal seminar to follow our company process of discovery. Questions were asked as to why we believe the percentage of female applicants was so low, and what we can do as a business to influence and change this.
We are on a path of discovery, and certainly have much more research to carry out, but it has certainly made us consider the role we can play to encourage more women in to not only our business, but the industry as a whole.
For 2021/2022, the Vextrix Board are committed to increasing the percentage of female applicants from 4% to 12% to move in line with the industry female average. We believe that our approach to flexible working, career progression and the commitment from the team to bring everyone together as one, makes us an excellent consultant to choose if someone is considering their next career step.
Written by Louise Ashton, Head of Strategic Engagement
Date:
8th March 2021
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