For the next 10 days, the Bluebeam Blog is celebrating Women in Construction Week, a celebration started in 1953 by the National Association of Women in Construction (NAWIC).
About 10.3% of the construction workforce is female, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Moreover, roughly 1 woman for every 100 construction employees work in the field.
In fact, women now make up the majority of the U.S. labor force, holding about half of all non-farm payroll positions as of December 2019, according to the Labor Department.
As advocates for industry progress, we at Bluebeam strongly believe that women have a major role to play in construction’s future—a future that, we believe, looks very bright.
While only 1% of the trades in the field are comprised of women, a far larger percentage of professional and management positions are held by women, according to NAWIC.
What’s more, gender pay equality in the construction industry is in far better shape than the national average. Women in construction are earning 99.1% of what their male counterparts in the industry are earning, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In other industries, women earn on average 88.1% compared to men.
Through stories of how women are advancing the industry, as well as stories of the systemic challenges women still face, our aim is to use this opportunity to spotlight and celebrate the contributions and successes that women are bringing to construction.
In addition to the new WIC Week stories we’ll be publishing throughout the week, we felt it was also important to highlight some of our favorite stories about women in construction from 2019.
Celebrating Women in Construction Week 2019 in Downtown L.A.: Los Angeles construction is booming, and the events held by the National Association of Women in Construction Los Angeles (NAWICLA) Chapter showcased some of the industry leaders responsible for that boom. NAWICLA held three events that inspired, recognized achievements and provided opportunities for networking to women from all over the L.A. region.
The Humanity in the Workers: Tara Garner spends her days on construction sites, her favorite tool always close at hand. She walks the site, inspects progress, greets the workers, chats with them, surveys the scene, takes it in from all angles. And then she shoots—beautiful, stunning and impactful pictures.
Hard Hatted Woman: For the past six years, filmmaker Lorien Barlow and cinematographer Autumn Eakin have traveled from jobsite to jobsite across the country to create a documentary about women in the trades.
Metricizing Markups With Bluebeam Revu: While projects are full of pages and pages of text-box markups, callout markups and measurements markups, data capture and insights aren’t always happening. “And why not?” asks Turner Construction engineer Katie Wood.
A Digital Dashboard for All Phases: Barton Malow Sr. VDC Engineer Steffanie Schrader breaks down the use of dashboards from pursuits to closeout.
The Archeologists Using Revu to Verify the Pharaohs: Lyndelle Webster, a Ph.D. student at Macquarie University and the University of Vienna, used Revu on a fascinating excavation project in Tel Lachish, Israel. A largely rural and unremarkable expanse of lowlands in South Central Israel called the Shephela, Tel Lachish is significant from an archeological perspective because it has helped researchers verify and dispel certain historical narratives.
Conserving Kahn’s Yale Center for British Art: As a graduate student at the Yale School of Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut, Daphne Kalomiris Petros was familiar with the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA)—a building on campus designed by master architect Louis Kahn. As part of Knight Architecture, Petros played an integral role in the company’s eight-year conservation project of the YCBA.