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This study into gender in the workplace investigates the reasons for a lack of women in the engineering and construction industry. The study specifically seeks to understand reasons that women fail to enter or be retained within the industry including questioning contributing factors both prior to entering the industry and once employed within it, including education, careers advice, industry culture and embedded ideologies of whether or not women are suited to the engineering industry. Although in more recent years, there has been a significant increase in literature produced around the topic, there is still comparatively little written on the female experience of this previously male dominated industry.
A series of 15 semi-structured interviews were carried out in a large multi-national, privately owned Construction Company with its head offices based in the UK during which individual women discussed their experiences whilst being employed within the industry. Themes discussed included, but were not limited to education and work experience prior to entering the industry, attitudes they had experienced within the industry and general discussion around embedded workplace cultures and ideologies.
From these interviews, three key themes were identified and broken down into subcategories describing the reasons that women continued to be deterred from the industry alongside the benefits that the industry was missing out from deterring a gender diverse workforce. Many of the opinions expressed by the interviewees mirror common themes in previous literature discussed in the literature review which demonstrate instances where women have been alienated from certain positions in the workplace based on their gender.
With such little research being carried out into the engineering industry across different sectors, companies and countries, it is difficult to estimate how typical the date within this study is of the whole industry. In order to establish whether this study is representative of the industry, further research must be carried out. |
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