'We need to to do something to attract women engineers into the industry'

Attracting skilled workers throughout the past 20 years has been a significant challenge for the industry. When the economy goes into a down cycle there are a lot of redundancies and fewer recruitments.  

In the long term, we face a lot of experienced people going into retirement in the coming years, yet we need to have the best people in construction. I don’t think construction is the most fancy sector engineers want to go into, so we need to do things that will attract more people - and one key point is that we need to attract more women into construction. 

We are improving on this, although most of the staff in my company are men. We definitely need to do something to attract women engineers into the industry, because they represent half of the population and we have been extremely poor in attracting women.  

I think women can help embed a better risk culture and I feel comfortable when we have a female site manager on a complex project because then I know risks are handled in a proper way. Women look at risks in general in a more sober way - they are not so fixed in the traditional way of thinking, which men can be guilty of.  

This article was first published in StrategicRISK’s Construction Report, published in association with Zurich. To download a copy of the full report, click here