What is it REALLY like being a woman working in Australia’s Construction and Resources Sector?
On this International Women’s Day – I want to reflect on what it is really like to be a woman in Australia in 2024 working in the male dominated infrastructure development and natural resources sectors.
I own a community and stakeholder engagement consultancy and we work in infrastructure and natural resources. We have expanded our business to include wellness programs and training. I have been in the industry for nearly 30 years and owned my consultancy (which I started) for 15 years. On our last survey (2022), 92% of infrastructure and natural resource community engagement professionals were female but of the 4% who were at director, senior executive or business owner level 91% were male. We work in a wider industry that is predominantly male (depending on how you break down the figures – blue/white collar and which size of infrastructure projects you include) at best the industry has a 10% female participation rate.
Mid last year I sat down with a group of female colleagues in at our specialist conference. It was a casual chat between sessions and was preceded by a presentation on privilege and unconscious bias in engagement. Eight professional women aged between 30 and 60 were in the conversion. We all worked in community and stakeholder engagement on infrastructure and natural resource projects, and we are all mid to senior executives/professionals. All highly educated with strong understanding of governance and personal rights. So, you can understand how absolutely flabbergasted we were when we discovered every, single, one of us had experience sexual harassment, gender bias, workplace gendered bullying and discrimination in our profession. Half of us had experienced sexual assaults at work. Two of us had been hospitalised because the sexual assaults were that serious. To be clear these issues were in our work teams, not the communities we engaged with (that is another story).
We looked at each other aghast. With all the education, the media coverage, the training – we had still not realised how prevalent it was. I actually thought I was alone. Well not alone in the whole world of course, but alone in suffering a serious sexual assault at work. My dirty little secret, that horrific Friday afternoon wasn’t even the worst thing that had happened among the group of eight of us. We advise Government on the community’s feedback and needs for billions of dollars of projects, yet we hadn’t talked of the worst things that had happened to us as women in this industry. Until now.
Closing the gap, increasing female participation, showing a commitment to equality are all demanded (contractually, by Government) on the big infrastructure projects. Government has made progress in legislating equality practises but the reality on construction sites is clearly very different.
I chaired a panel discussion and webinar last International Women’s Day of women in our industry. We discussed equity and whether there had been progress. Many of the women at that conference table had been on that webinar. We had invited a wide cross section of panellists, but the consensus seemed to be that gender equality was on track and that there weren’t significant issues anymore. There was acknowledgment of past issues, some funny stories, but the group (maybe reluctantly) seem to agree much progress had been made. It seems that the conversation was highjacked by what we are told is our reality now, rather than what is our reality.
Was it the lack of diversity on the panel? (We had tried to get multi-cultural representation to no avail). Did privilege outplay reality? Was it the constructs from the corporations and organisations the women worked for? Or was it that they genuinely weren’t exposed to the what the rest of us have been? To be fair one panellist has since told me she didn’t realise how bad it was out there, but that conversation has played on my mind a lot in the last year. Especially since it was followed by that very revealing round table at our industry conference.
I knew how bad it was. I had my dirty little secret. Yet I focused on the more common stories – like the Christmas party that was held in a strip club and as the only female manager I was expected to attend and just “deal with” (I didn’t deal with it or attend), or the lack of facilities for females on site for the first ten years of my career, or the posters of topless women in the lunch rooms. Most of my colleagues had experienced this in the early years and it was fodder for watercooler conversation, but the subtext was that we were beyond that now. Except we are clearly not. We’re still unrepresented in the industry and at the senior level in our female dominated speciality, we’re paid less and there are still some dinosaurs perpetuating the “good old days”.
Late last year a young female engineer made (what should have been) a startling post on LinkedIn where she exposed some inbox messages from young males, she had met at work functions. The messages quickly disintegrated into sexualised messaging. Despite the fact she was a highly lauded and awarded young engineer, she was objectified and depreciated. Her looks were front and centre and this is what she was consistently experiencing on site. She had reached the point where she was considering leaving our industry.
Only recently a female wellbeing and engagement colleague was bullied quite emphatically by a senior manager from a large construction company. Ironically it was in relation to a wellbeing post she made on LinkedIn while connected to an organisation he worked with. After her retrenchment he had the audacity to order her to take down a post because he believed she had left so shouldn’t lay any claim to previous work. Clearly not his right or in anyway appropriate. He affected her so badly she took it down to avoid further conflict. Ironically his role was to oversee diversity and wellbeing on major infrastructure projects. It’s still happening people!
I did a podcast interview with a very brave Project Director recently – Tracy Wilcox – she told stories of being locked in buildings, belittled, stolen from, treated with contempt and severe bullying. This has been sustained over a long and very successful career. It wasn’t one person. It happened over and over again.
We still need to do better.
Yes, there are some amazing men out there who are genuinely committed to equality. There is progress and there is change afoot. Women are finding their voices and there is a precedent with the ’Me too’ movement but why is our industry one of the last bastions? Why do so many of us have similar stories to mine. Why has it not got better? I think part of it is that we were scared to tell our stories. Scared of the judgment on us, of the career repercussions, or being vulnerable.
I was. The man who pinned me against the wall in the stairwell late on that horrid Friday afternoon, the man who was caught on tape forcing himself on me, was simply relocated and a much younger, less courageous me was eased out the door and told they would quietly deal with it. I was categorically told my time in the industry would come to end if I made a fuss. He had a wife and children I was told, it should all be dealt with quietly to protect them. Besides I had fought him off and courtesy of my strong netball knees he was suffering some pain himself. So, all was ok. No harm done they said. Of course I had children too, but apparently that didn’t come into consideration. By the time I got to the lawyers they destroyed the tape, all I could demand was some retraining and monitoring of him, they refused to take any further action. They paid out my entitlements and I left the organisation. That was that. Except it wasn’t. It doesn’t leave you an experience like that. It colours everything. It changes everything. Forever. It changes you irrevocably.
So, on this International Women’s Day I beg of you, don’t just give us cupcakes. Give out real training, install policies that make a real difference, give women a platform to tell our stories. It is through telling our stories that you can understand what’s happened. I get it. Not all men do these things, and these stories will probably shock many. However, on this day and hopefully on every day after, please, please listen to our stories. Understand the barriers women have faced not just in this industry but as a collective gender and invest in women, so we can all progress.
