2024 saw an increase of women employed in the construction industry, according to a new report from NAHB. The number rose to 1.34 million, meaning that women now represent 11.2% of the construction workforce, the highest share of the last 20 years. As labor shortages continue to affect the industry, these results may prove to be a silver lining as women take on more roles in construction. These numbers also coincide with white-collar jobs becoming more prevalent in the industry.
While The Great Recession brought a 30% drop to the number of women working in construction down to 807,000 back in 2010, it slowly rose back to 970,000 from 2010 to 2017. Despite this rise not reaching the peak of pre-recession levels, growth has steadily accelerated in recent years.
Data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) shows that most women in the industry are working jobs such as office and administrative support, management, and business and financial operations. Sales and office occupations have seen the highest number of women employed, with 65.7% of these workers being women. Included in these numbers is 437,000 women in office and administrative support and 39,000 in sales and related occupations. Furthermore, there are 521,000 women serving management roles in the industry, although this only makes up 18% of all management positions.
While women representation is improving in some fields, others are still struggling for representation. Construction and maintenance occupations are only made up of 4% women (307,000) despite being the most populous branch of construction work and where additional labor is most needed. Other occupation groups including production, transportation, material moving occupations, and service occupations only have around 22,000 women employed.
