“What is the most challenging thing about being a woman in construction?”
When this questions was posed during a recent live webinar, it brought out a LOT of ideas and reactions! Namely: Needing to be heard and prove yourself, and needing opportunities to learn.
Irene Walsh Garcia, Senior Project Manager at Broadway Electric, has seen it all: “Women are doing amazing. They’re detail oriented, they’re doing all the things. So why are they still not getting promoted?"
“Most of the people evaluating these new people are men,” Garcia says. “So even though women may be checking all the boxes, they’re not being recognized as leadership because the leadership qualities women have can sometimes look or be interpreted differently than the leadership qualities men have. The rulestick was not made for women.”
Women have to have those hard qualifications, Garcia says: “What is it going to take the promotion? Set a timeline, set expectations, and articulate what you want. It might be that the company is not the right fit, and women continue to get stuck in support roles.”
