Feminist Acts

One in ten Australians work in construction. But it has the worst gender equity in the country. 

Only 13% of construction workers are women. Just 2.5% of tradespeople are women. Two-thirds of construction firms have zero women on their boards. 

The toxic culture that follows produces some of the worst rates of mental ill-health and suicide in any sector. On most building sites, there isn't a single bathroom for a woman to use.

So how do you change an industry that hasn't moved in thirty years? 

In this episode, you'll learn:
  • Why hiring on "merit" in construction means hiring mates, and what happens when the mates are all blokes
  • How the industry loses $8.3 billion every year by keeping women out
  • What construction culture actually looks like for women (and why "you must be the stripper" is the opening line of this episode)
Guests:
  • Professor Paula Gerber, Faculty of Law, Monash University
  • Rebecca Dickson, PhD Candidate, Faculty of Law, Monash University
  • Dr Valerie Francis, Founder, Constructing Equity
Hosts:
  • Becky Batagol, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Monash University
  • Kate Seear, Professor, Deakin Law School, Deakin University
Mentioned in this Episode:

Take action today:

The book is free! The provisions are drafted. Take them to your parliament. Adapt them for another jurisdiction. Or start your own feminist legislation project.

Download the full book for free (open access):
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003372462/feminist-legislation-project-becky-batagol-heli-askola-jamie-walvisch-kate-seear

The Feminist Legislation Project: Rewriting Laws for Gender-Based Justice 
Edited By Becky Batagol, Kate Seear, Heli Askola, Jamie Walvisch
Published by Routledge
Copyright 2025

This podcast was funded by Monash University through the Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Enterprise).

Produced by Miniature

Creators and Guests

Host
Becky Batagol
Host
Kate Seear

What is Feminist Acts?

A how-to guide for MPs and policymakers to change the law to improve women’s lives.

Paula Gerber:

I was working as a junior solicitor in London, and the biggest construction project going on was Canary Wharf. And I was sent down to get a witness statement from one of the men who was working on that project. And I turned up at the gate in my suit with big shoulder pads and a briefcase, and the security guard at the gate looked at me and said, you must be the stripper.

Kate Seear:

Welcome to Feminist Acts. That's Paula Gerber. Paula is a professor of human rights and construction law at the Monash Law School. But long before she ended up in a university, Paula donned a hard hat and worked as a construction lawyer in many different parts of the world. Today, we're gonna hear more about Paula's story and how it is that human rights and construction law as well as gender are all connected. So opponents often talk about gender equality as a zero sum game.

Kate Seear:

That is the elevation of women in one area of life will come at the expense of men who've traditionally dominated there, and this view has been called a backlash. This episode is going to challenge this binary view. We're gonna show how making workplace more inclusive for women and gender diverse people can also make things better for men. And to do this in today's episode, we focus on one of our most important sectors, the construction industry. And we consider the best ways to use law to achieve better gender equality for all.

Kate Seear:

To kick off the discussion, we're going to hear from Rebecca Dickson, a PhD student at Monash University, who together with Paula Gerber, has been undertaking research into construction law reform. Rebecca and Paula have put together a proposal for how we can make construction law better in Australia. And later on, we're going to hear from Valerie Francis. She's got her own very interesting story to tell about what it's like to work in this sector. Valerie is the principal of the consultancy, constructing equity.

Kate Seear:

We're now gonna throw to Rebecca, who's standing in the Commonwealth Parliament.

Rebecca Dickson:

We rise to speak in support of the model construction gender equity increasing female participation bill. This bill forms a crucial part of the Commonwealth's commitment to increasing female participation and ensuring gender equity in Australia's construction industry. The Australian building and construction industries generate 7.3% of Australia's gross domestic product and employ 9.4% of Australia's workers. Public infrastructure and construction projects receive $9,600,000,000 of funding by this government. Yet while this sector makes a significant contribution to our economy, it has one of the worst rates of gender equity in the country.

Rebecca Dickson:

Shame.

Becky Batagol:

Shame.

Rebecca Dickson:

This is a blight on the Australian construction industry. A paltry 13.6% of those working in the construction industry are women as well as only 2.5% of tradespeople. 2.5%. According to the Women's Gender Equality Agency, two thirds of firms in the construction sector have zero female representation on their boards. Australia prides itself on being the country where everyone gets a fair go, but women do not get a fair go in the construction industry.

Rebecca Dickson:

The low level of female participation creates an industry that is sexist and macho, feeling a toxic culture which is responsible for poor construction worker mental health. We can no longer ignore this appalling situation. We can no longer make excuses for the industry's lack of female participation, and we can no longer assume that achieving gender equity is inevitable. The first important element of this bill is the introduction of mandatory quotas for the number of women and gender diverse persons employed or engaged on public construction projects. 50% of the leadership team for the project must be women or gender diverse persons, and 50% of all individuals engaged on the project must be women or gender diverse persons.

Rebecca Dickson:

These quotas are ambitious because quotas work. We call on all parties to support this bill.

Kate Seear:

That was fantastic, Bec. Thank you so much for sharing that with us, and thank you for joining us today, Bec Dickson and Paula Gerber, to talk about construction law as a feminist issue, which might surprise some of our listeners, and we're gonna dig into it in a moment. But before we go any further in talking about your proposal, I wonder if you can tell our listeners a bit about your backgrounds, your areas of work, what you work on and why and what your passions are? Paula, I'll come to you first.

Paula Gerber:

Well, I really fell into construction law as a junior solicitor in London. And there's an expression once you get the dirt under your fingernails, you're stuck with it. And it's true, once I found this area of law, previously I'd been doing banking litigation, I just fell in love with it. The people in the industry are so real, it's pardon the pun, but a very concrete area of law. And I had a career that blossomed.

Paula Gerber:

It took me to The US where I practiced for five years as a construction attorney and then back to Australia. And then I decided to move from private practice into academia and I fell in love with human rights law as well. And people think that's just the weirdest combination, construction law and human rights, what the hell? And I say there are actually lots of intersection. It started early on.

Paula Gerber:

I was doing a bit of work around access to buildings for people with disabilities because we've got the Disability Discrimination Act and we've got the Building Code of Australia and they don't talk to each other. And then really building on that I became very passionate about the gender inequality in the construction industry. And so I've been on a campaign for decades to increase the number of women in construction and I think discrimination is Human Rights Law 101. So I very happily now work as an academic in both construction law and human rights law.

Kate Seear:

Fantastic. That's such an interesting and unexpected combo, but it makes perfect sense when you describe it in that way. Paula Beck, can you tell us a little bit about your work and background and and what you've been doing over the years?

Rebecca Dickson:

Of course. Like Paula, I fell into construction law. I undertook my article clerkship. In the last year of article clerks in Victoria, they were they're now graduate lawyers at a law firm called Maddox. I had three rotations but stayed in the construction team because I thought the team were wonderful.

Rebecca Dickson:

They were energized and enthusiastic, and certainly that's been the experience of everyone that I've worked in throughout my my almost twenty year career. I've worked in law firms for construction contractors and supporting the completion of construction projects throughout Victoria and internationally. And it's exciting, exciting work because I can drive over the West Gate Bridge and point to a project that I supported the delivery of. I've stood on Melbourne Airport through 3rd Runway having been the project council for that project too. And I can walk around my office building and point to projects in Melbourne that I've worked on, and it's and it's fantastic.

Rebecca Dickson:

But that work and being one of the only women in construction project teams and experiencing the working environment and culture in construction teams made me want to understand how my work, the law, could drive positive change. So separate to my legal practice, I've embarked upon a three year research project to understand how law and construction culture collide. And my PhD, which Paula is very kindly supervising, will make recommendations for law reform consistent with positive and productive construction culture, including a much greater presence of women working in construction.

Becky Batagol:

Can you tell us

Becky Batagol:

what the construction industry actually

Rebecca Dickson:

is? Well, it's this wonderful sector that captures all manner of work. So in my practice, I focused on infrastructure. What's infrastructure? It's hospitals, it's trains, it's roads, it's planes, it's ports, the hard, heavy, big stuff that you see about town that makes our cities tick.

Rebecca Dickson:

It's construction projects. It's offices and warehouses, industrial facilities. It's domestic building work. The homes that we live in, the apartments that we live in, it's parks, it's landscaping, it's utilities work on pipelines. Anything where you pick up a hammer or a drill, that's for us what is captured in construction.

Paula Gerber:

And I'd add to that by saying it is an incredibly diverse and siloed industry. So it's made up of architects, of builders, of engineers, of quantity surveyors, of financiers, of tradies. And the sector operates in a very solid way. So there's the Master Builders Association for Builders, as the Institute of Architects for Architects, as the Institute of Engineers for Engineers. So what the National Association of Women in Construction does is it is the only organization which spans the whole industry.

Paula Gerber:

It is there to encourage more women to come into the industry and also to support the women who are there. Because one of the problems that the construction industry has is an incredibly high attrition rate. So these days, more than 50% of architecture students are women. You look at architectural practices three years post graduation, many of them have left. That again is a huge economic cost to our country that we are spending all this money educating people to join the industry and then just watch them leave.

Paula Gerber:

So we need to try and hold on to the people that we do recruit into the industry, and that's what women in construction is all about.

Kate Seear:

Fantastic. Well, this dovetails very nicely into the conversation that we're going to have today with Becky as well, of course, and that is your proposal for law reform for our feminist legislation project. Now when we think about feminist law reform and feminist legal issues, I think for our listeners, there are a range of issues that will undoubtedly come immediately to mind. Issues like violence against women, family law, surrogacy, sexual violence, and and so on. And we have contributions to our collection from all of those areas.

Kate Seear:

Your contribution in a sense might feel like it comes a little bit from left to field because it is about construction law. So can you help take our listeners on a bit of a journey? Why it is that you see construction law as a feminist issue?

Paula Gerber:

So I think I would start by telling a story about when the gender light bulb went off for me in relation to construction. That was when I was working as a junior solicitor in London and the biggest construction project going on was Canary Wharf. I was sent down to get a witness statement from one of the men who was working on that project and I turned up at the gate in my suit with big shoulder pads and a briefcase and the security guard at the gate looked at me and said, You must be the stripper. And it turned out that they were having a farewell for one of the workers and had organised a stripper to come to the site. And the only reason the security guard could think that a woman would be on the site was the stripper.

Paula Gerber:

I didn't know whether to be flattered or offended or both. But that really sort of showed to me how completely male dominated this industry is. That they could not think of women having any role other than that sort of sexualised role. And that was my experience in all the years that I worked as a construction lawyer. I had, I remember distinctly, a lawyer on the other side of a case when I was in LA who the case was about whether concrete had reached the required strength in the required number of days.

Paula Gerber:

He said, Look, love, it's like making a cake. Sometimes you need to add a bit more water to the mix in order to get the right consistency. Still to this day, it fills me with joy that I beat him in that case and won for my client, But there was either a condescending patriarchal attitude or a you don't know what you're doing, you're a dumb blonde attitude. I was never treated as an equal. And that was me coming as a lawyer.

Paula Gerber:

So imagine women actually on the tools on-site and how much worse it is for them. So one of the things that I did when I came back to Australia was set up the National Association of Women in Construction because that was my lifesaver in California. The firm I worked for was all men. They had never had a female lawyer before. And I needed to find my tribe and NAWIC, the National Association of Women in Construction, was that for me.

Paula Gerber:

So I came back to Australia. There was nothing like NAWIC. I set it up, and that was thirty years ago. And I am shocked at how little progress we made in thirty years. And so that's why I think the time for talking is over.

Paula Gerber:

We need action. And this proposed legislation that Rebecca and I have developed is the answer that I think the construction industry needs.

Kate Seear:

We'll come to the proposal in just a moment and sort of unpack it and pick it apart and talk it through. But Beck, from your perspective, having worked in the sector for twenty years as you mentioned earlier, what are some of the issues that you've encountered? Is it stuff along the lines of description? Are there other issues that you've encountered that have galvanized you to think about this area through a feminist lens?

Rebecca Dickson:

Yeah. Well, I've I've never been asked if I'm the stripper, and I'm not sure whether to be offended or flattered by that either, really. But I feel a huge sense of injustice that women don't work in construction in the the numbers that men do. Our second reading speech points to the huge contribution that the construction industry makes to Australia's GDP, how much funding the construction industry gets from state and commonwealth governments, and how many people, like the percentage of people who work in Australia find themselves working in construction. That sector thrives, and it thrives notwithstanding disruptors like the COVID nineteen pandemic.

Rebecca Dickson:

You know, the the money still flooded in from government during that massive global disruptor. It's not fair, and it's not just that women are excluded from an industry that provides such vast employment opportunities, in some cases, very generous pay packets and the opportunities to develop professionally. Also, the the culture that the construction industry produces is terrible for productivity. In Australia, we are slow and expensive to build construction projects, and that's becoming a real problem, particularly in Victoria where huge infrastructure projects like the suburban rail loop and the Westgate Tunnel and Melbourne Metro are in the news for all the wrong reasons. They're slow, they're late, and they're well over budget.

Rebecca Dickson:

The lack of gender diversity and gender inclusive practices in construction just drives a terrible working environment. There's a quote from George and Luce Moore, and I'm gonna read a little bit of it. The presence of the overwhelming presence of men creates working environments that are characterized by high levels of workplace conflict and bullying, poor safety, poor mental health, stress, anxiety, depression, and suicide, poor work life balance, and long hours of work, presenteeism, and total availability, high levels of attrition, and stalled career progression for women, a career model that requires personal sacrifice and the strict separation of work and private family responsibilities, high levels of sexism, racism, discrimination, and the marginalization of minority groups, and a workplace culture that allows men to foster behaviors and actions which would otherwise be offensive unacceptable in normal workplace environments such as excessive alcohol consumption, horseplay, misogyny, swearing, pornographic imagery, and making inappropriate sexual comments. That's a really long quote, but that's how many issues exist in construction. And the really damning thing, I think, is that a culture characterized by those things is bad for women and it's bad for men.

Rebecca Dickson:

So for all of that investment that we make in construction, it's driving poor productivity culture, That kind of thing makes me cross.

Becky Batagol:

Paula, given your expertise working with LGBTIQ communities and working in construction law, I think about workplaces which are characterised by misogyny are often pretty hostile places if you're a gender minority, if you're trans, if your sexuality is anything other than hetero. So what's it like for LGBTIQ people working in the construction industry and what do we know?

Paula Gerber:

It's a hostile and unsafe place. And honestly I could not, with my hand on my heart, encourage LGBTIQA plus people to consider a career in construction at this point in time. It is changing, but it's changing way too slowly. So we now have an organisation, Building Pride, which is for LGBTIQA plus people in the construction sector. For the first time this year, they participated and were part of the Mardi Gras parade in Sydney and they're doing that again this year.

Paula Gerber:

What's incredibly important for people going into this sector is to see others who are like them. And visibility is essential. And it's mostly gay men, let's be honest, because there are not many women in the industry, let alone trans women, they don't feel safe coming out. They feel like they're going to be subjected to homophobic bullying, that they're going to be driven out of the industry. And many of these have spent years of their lives at university doing degrees in construction or engineering or project management and then they get into the sector and they don't last very long.

Paula Gerber:

And it's the same for women. And that is a huge economic cost but it's also just a huge personal cost. The industry is missing out on really valuable people who could make an important contribution and really contribute to the improvement of sector, and the individuals are leaving damaged and broken people in many instances.

Rebecca Dickson:

There's a wonderful report by the Electrical Trades Union called Nowhere to Go. Wonderful name because it's a report about the fact that on most construction sites, there aren't even toilets for women. So if you need to go to the bathroom, you have to leave the construction site. And, ideally, there'll be a local McDonald's, and you can use their toilet. And if they can't even put a bathroom for women, how do you extend your mind to put in bathrooms for people who are of other genders?

Rebecca Dickson:

And I think I mean, what's worse is that when female toilets are provided, they're seen as an an additional cost. Like, it's not the cost the same as the cost of the male bathrooms. It's an additional cost. So you start to see this cumulative impact of women. It's it's expensive to have women on construction sites.

Rebecca Dickson:

We don't want women on construction sites. They cost more. We've gotta do these extra things, and it's, I mean, it's a compounding silly situation, which is so discouraging for women. And I think often the toilets are the

Paula Gerber:

distraction. When we think about the arguments that are being leveled at trans women, and it seems people think it's easy to just go it's all about the bathrooms. It's like people use all gender bathrooms in their home. There's nothing unique about a toilet being for for men or for women. So I think it becomes a bit of this, we can justify our arguments in this way.

Paula Gerber:

It's actually step back and look at do some reflection on the way you're thinking about othering women and othering gender diverse people and adopt an expansive, expand the pie, inclusive mindset and everyone will be the winners.

Becky Batagol:

So we've heard from you about why it might be good to have a more inclusive construction industry. So what do you propose in your law reform, and and why is it important?

Rebecca Dickson:

We propose a pretty heavy hitting approach, actually. We decided that we would take the opportunity of the Feminist Legislation Project to be bold and brave. So we've proposed hard quotas which are mandatory. The construction industry hasn't seen this yet, but our legislation and one of the clever things that we think we've done with our legislation is draw on legislation that already exists in Victoria. So there are two pieces of legislation that we've borrowed from.

Rebecca Dickson:

The first is the Local Jobs First Act. This piece of legislation codified policies that require the presence of apprentices and trainees and local supplies and labor in construction projects. So we said, well, if you can require those things, why can't you require women? So we've borrowed from the framework in the Local Jobs First Act. The other piece of legislation is the Gender Equality Act, which requires gender reporting and a gender equality plan with certain government businesses.

Rebecca Dickson:

And we've said, well, if you can do it there, then we can do it in construction too. You'll see from the commentary in the Feminist Legislation version, you'll hear from Valerie Francis that she's got some concerns about the approach that we've taken. And they're legitimate. We think they're very sensible because, as I say, we have been bold and brave, but we think, well, we had this chance to write the legislation that we think is necessary and send the message that we think needs to be sent and that that is that giving opportunities to women and making sure that they have a presence in the construction industry on construction projects is not an option anymore. It's that important that it has to happen, and you've gotta make it happen.

Paula Gerber:

And what I'd say too is that, yes we're being bold and brave but also we're not reinventing the wheel. I take a lot of inspiration from the Scandinavian countries who do gender equality very well and one of the things that Norway has done well is to mandate the number of women that must be on boards. And they said 40%. And they came up with that figure after doing a lot of research that said culture doesn't change if you've only got one or two women on the board. 37% was a magic number, so they put it at 40.

Paula Gerber:

So there are examples in Victoria where the government has mandated 3% for trades, 7% for construction workers, and 30 or 35% for people in management. And I just think that's incredibly unambitious. And so we wanted to actually raise the bar. There's the theory that people will achieve what you expect of them. If you expect very little, you'll get very little.

Paula Gerber:

If you expect a lot, you'll get a lot. And so we are expecting a lot. We've said 50% and let's see if the industry can do that.

Kate Seear:

How much money is involved in construction in Australia annually? How profitable are the companies that benefit from these government contracts that, as you say, women and gender diverse people are often missing out on?

Rebecca Dickson:

Well, I don't know that I've got the most recent figures for the Westgate Tunnel project in Victoria, but it's, I think, now up at 7,000,000,000. The original contract price was, I think, about 3,000,000,000. And COVID nineteen, I'll admit, hasn't helped that. But there's a wonderful report that was produced by the Australian Constructors Association. It's an association of the major construction contractors in Australia, well, most of whom now are internationally owned.

Rebecca Dickson:

And it talks about the cost of the productivity loss in construction. That alone is $8,300,000,000 annually. So that's the amount of money we're losing. The amount of money that goes into the industry, I wanna say obscene, but I say obscene only because it's in the billions and billions and billions. It's a lot of money.

Rebecca Dickson:

I mean, when one project alone can cost $7,000,000,000 and we've got, you know, five of those projects going on just in Victoria, Queensland's about to develop for the Brisbane Olympics. Billions of dollars will be spent in Brisbane alone. And, I mean, we've we've talked a lot about public projects. They're a focus here because there's much more information available about public projects, but we're not talking about the mining sector, which is almost wholly private. We're not talking about the renewable energy sector, which is almost wholly private.

Rebecca Dickson:

So the money that is spent and the the data that we have available is what's been spent on public projects. I think one of the statistics that we've included in our second reading speech is that $9,600,000,000 of funding comes from the Commonwealth government for those projects. Those projects are more often than not delivered by the state governments in Victoria. So to get Commonwealth government funding in that volume is likely matched, if not, you know, dwarfed by state government funding. So it's a lot.

Becky Batagol:

So let's get down to TIN tax. You've you've talked about gender quotas, and you proposed in your law that 50% of the leadership team for any project must be women or gender diverse people and 50% of individuals engaged in the project must be women or gender diverse people. So how is this going to make a difference and what are construction companies going to have to do that's different?

Paula Gerber:

Well they're going to have to make a concerted effort to recruit these women. And we've been trying for years to attract school leavers, university graduates to come into the construction sector without a great deal of success or if they do come, they don't stay long. So it's about adopting new approaches like, for example, looking for mature workers and mature women who can join the sector. And we've seen the police force try and do that and enjoy some success. So we need to be looking at the 50% of the population that we're not looking at at the moment.

Paula Gerber:

And what we're seeing is a lot of construction companies would rather spend their recruitment dollars looking overseas and bringing in migrant workers rather than employing women. It's like it's just not even on their radar. So by forcing them to do this, they want to win government projects, they've got to have 50% women, they've got to report on it, there's got to be transparency, then they're going to kick and scream for a while. But they want the government work, they will do everything they can. They'll actually put time and effort into it because suddenly it's an economic imperative that they do it rather than just because it's the right thing to do.

Kate Seear:

Debates about quotas in not just construction, but in many areas of public policy and public life are ongoing. We often hear debates about the number of women on boards of companies and in parliament and political parties, so many areas of life where this is an issue and a challenge. And what we often hear from people who are opposed to those kind of reforms is that people need to be hired on the basis of merit. You know? I can see you're rolling your eyes, Beck, and I understand.

Kate Seear:

But I want to put this question to you because it is something that's so often said in these contexts. What would you say to that kind of response? Because it might be part of that kicking and screaming response that you mentioned, Paula, that people may say, well, people must be hired on merit. Also, the expertise or the workforce just simply doesn't exist at all or yet. And so I want to give you an opportunity to respond to that because I think it so often comes to people's minds.

Rebecca Dickson:

Well, and it does. And, I mean, quotas are an interesting thing, aren't they? Because I think people worry about them because they think that they're permanent. But if they're used to promote change, which is what we're advocating for, then they needn't be a permanent measure. But they're there to to force an outcome and to bring it about much more quickly than the sort of glacial pace of cultural change that we're seeing.

Rebecca Dickson:

If I can answer your question with a story, because who doesn't love a story, I remember sitting in a meeting. I was the only woman as it happens. That's not the that's not the part of the answer to the question, but we had a problem on a construction project. And we were talking about how we needed to resolve the problem. And one of the very, very senior, very smart, seasoned construction worker, on the call said, you need this bloke.

Rebecca Dickson:

And we kept talking. You need this other bloke. We kept talking. Well, you need this other bloke. And we kept talking.

Rebecca Dickson:

You need this other bloke. And I thought, my god. Do you know any women? And that's how jobs are given in construction. They're given to people's mates.

Rebecca Dickson:

I remember speaking to the general counsel of a construction contractor who works for a business that was started by a family. She said, yeah. They just picked up the phone. Hey. We're gonna start a construction company.

Rebecca Dickson:

Do wanna come work for us? Hey. Hey. We're gonna start a construction company. Come and work for us.

Rebecca Dickson:

They phoned all their friends, and that's how people got jobs. And, unfortunately, women aren't friends with the blokes in construction. I wonder why if you think about the culture, but that's what we're trying to change. Like, women yes. I mean, merit is a very interesting term.

Rebecca Dickson:

I think I've heard it described as it means people like me. And when all of the people that are doing the hiring and the leaders in the construction industry this is one of the reasons why we've separated and required quotas at the leadership level and the worker level. But when all the leaders are men and they're ringing their mates, there's no space for women to go and work. So these quotas are intended

Paula Gerber:

to redress that situation because merit in construction isn't merit. It's we're hiring people like us, and the people who are doing the hiring are blokes. And the construction industry has many reputations. One of them is that they are dinosaurs. They are very slow and very resistant to change.

Paula Gerber:

The standard form contract that people are using on construction sites, AS 4,000, was published in 1997. It has only been updated this year to introduce things like GST, which came in after this standard form contract, and a few other modernizing things, but they said you can't change the risk allocation. The construction sector doesn't like change, and so this is about forcing them to change and as Rebecca said, I think it's going to be in a few years' time, it's no longer going to be a new story. They're going to have got used to having women around, recruiting on basis of merit rather than on the basis of sex.

Becky Batagol:

So I'm going to jump in here Kate. As the ministers for the big build in the governments that you're part of, what would you do alongside these laws that would make a difference? What what kind of programs or processes would you bring in?

Rebecca Dickson:

Well, this is really interesting. And I I was gonna add to Paula's comment that you I mean, you can do law in a lot of different ways, can't you? What we've seen already is particularly again, Victoria's sort of leading the charge on this, so I talk about Victoria a lot, but they've got social procurement policy. The construction industry has the building equality policy, so they've got their own policy to increase the number of women who work in construction. So the again, that's been floating around for a while.

Rebecca Dickson:

We've seen the National Association of Women in Construction who has been out and about campaigning for better work practices for women in construction and high levels of recruitment and retention of women, and they've been doing that for thirty years. A lot of other professional associations in the construction sector, including the property council, Roads Australia, and even the Australian Constructors Association have practices and policies that support women, but we're not seeing it change the data. So the statistics that we've talked about today, they're not changing. And if they're changing, they're changing so slow despite that mammoth effort. So one of the things that gave us the confidence to write the legislation that we did was that we need to up the ante on the law because policy is not working.

Rebecca Dickson:

The involvement of professional associations encouraging their members to do better isn't working. We need to turn the volume up on one of those pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to make it serious. You know? This isn't optional now. It's mandatory.

Kate Seear:

How do you both feel about the language of corporate social responsibility and also a term that I hear increasingly used to talk about industries of all kind and their responsibilities to the broader public, that is the language of social license. Are these kinds of framings relevant to how we think about the problem of diversity in construction? Whether it's that companies have a social responsibility to be more inclusive or that companies that take government tenders in order to have a social license for the work they do need to embrace and include everyone.

Paula Gerber:

My view is that sort of language is not going to resonate. In human rights, often we don't use the language of human rights because we realize it's not going to work. I think what really works for the construction sector is to think in terms of dollars and cents. So social license, corporate social responsibility, I think they think that that's just a lot of, you know, wishy washy language. But if if you're gonna punish them financially for not doing the right thing or if you're going to reward them financially for doing the right thing, that's where we're gonna see the rubber hit the road.

Rebecca Dickson:

And we are seeing that now, I think, with, again, social procurement policies that prioritize increasing the number of indigenous Australians working on construction sites, increasing the number of apprentices and trainees, and increasing the use of local supply and labor. And it just befuddles me that and maybe the positive news, is that women aren't a minority anymore. I don't think that that's what's going on, but it befuddles me that we're not doing the same with women, especially because the research shows that if you fix the reasons that women can't work effectively in construction, you fix the whole industry for men too. You know, women can be moms and men can be dads. You know, a pre start meeting that starts at 07:00 that interferes with school drop off time, and then your works you know, your day wraps up at exactly the time you need to be picking your kids up from school.

Rebecca Dickson:

Like, that's a mom and dad two parents responsibility. You So gotta make it possible for people to be who they are. And, again, you can do that. We've we're seeing that done with other groups of people in society, but we're not seeing it done with women. And I I I couldn't agree with you more, Paula, about dollars and cents, but a biz Oxford Economics report, the cost of doing nothing.

Rebecca Dickson:

That's the report that said that this is the lack of diversity inclusion is an $8,300,000,000 problem. Even that isn't bringing about change. So, you know, what's it gonna take?

Paula Gerber:

Yeah. Yeah.

Rebecca Dickson:

We answered that question with our bill.

Becky Batagol:

Thank you very much for joining us, Professor Paula Gerber of Monash University and Rebecca Dixon. Rebecca is not long left in her time at being a PhD student at Monash University. Thanks very guest spent her career trying to understand one of the most stubbornly male dominated industries in the country and what it would actually take to change it. Doctor Valerie Francis is the founder of Constructing Equity, a consultancy dedicated to gender inclusion in the building and construction industry. Before that, she was a professor and chair in construction at the University of Melbourne.

Becky Batagol:

There, she spent years in academia researching who gets into construction, who gets to lead and what the barriers look like from the inside. We're talking about Rebecca and Paula's bill which proposes mandatory quotas for women and gender diverse people across the construction workforce, not just in leadership, but at every level. Valerie has some strong views on how quotas should work. Valerie, welcome to the show. Thank you very much.

Becky Batagol:

Valerie, do want to tell

Becky Batagol:

us a little bit about you and your work?

Valerie Francis:

Thank you very much. Well, I guess one thing of note is my background is in civil engineering. I started engineering in the late 1970s, and I finished in the early '80s. And when I went into engineering, I had no idea whatsoever that it was male dominated.

Valerie Francis:

It was pre internet. I went into a job center. I read a book which told me about civil engineers and I thought, Oh, that sounds like me. I'll do that. It was only on my first lecture that I realized that maybe this was a different career than I imagined.

Valerie Francis:

I walked in through the front entrance to the lecture theatre, a mistake I never made again. There was a lot of noise when I walked in. I assumed that the lecturers coming in behind me, but it wasn't. It was just me. That's

Becky Batagol:

because they because they made noise or because they shut up?

Valerie Francis:

No. Because I come into the room and there was a lot of catcalling and all sorts of things. I come from a, a girls' school. I mean, I didn't have any civil engineers in my family. I made this decision sort of slowly based on what this book said.

Valerie Francis:

My pig headedness probably is what got me through the rest of the degree. When I finished, was the first female laborer to work in the private sector in South Australia as an engineer. And I started a women in engineering group soon after that, just to see if there was maybe one other or a couple of other people like me. And with the sole view of that that group disbanding as soon as possible. And it's still going strong today, you know, forty something years later.

Becky Batagol:

So what did it feel like studying engineering at that time as one of presumably only very few women in the degree?

Valerie Francis:

Yeah. I was the eleventh female to graduate from civil engineering, whereas the first one came through post second world war. I don't feel I'm that ancient, but obviously, I'm possibly a little bit ancient. And so the it was really interesting because I didn't have any concept that it was going to be so male dominated, as male dominated as it was. I was the only female in my class.

Valerie Francis:

And there were just certain things that happened, like they used to post up our results onto a board and we would toggle down there to have a look at our results before they arrived in the post. Your name was there, not your student numbers you'd have this day. And I realized after a while that when I was standing there that people were checking their names to find out what they got. And then they would go down and they would check mine. It was almost like I was a benchmark, very poor benchmark probably, but I was some benchmark for that.

Valerie Francis:

So it was just those small things that really intrigued me because I could see nothing about engineering that really said it needed to be male. So it a different experience than I'd expected.

Becky Batagol:

Were there any particular moments where you felt like you didn't belong when you were studying?

Valerie Francis:

I think there were quite a few. The engineering student group would put on pornos quite regularly throughout semester time in a lecture theatre that was booked for this specific purpose. What did you do? I'd go along. Because what else could I do?

Valerie Francis:

So I'd go along and I'd be laughing my head off at this, that and the other. I mean, pornos in those days were probably not as raunchy as they are now. I've got no idea what pornographic material looks like. What would Valerie today do about that? Look.

Valerie Francis:

I wouldn't put up with it. I would be straight to the university. I would be saying this is inappropriate. I'd be calling out my classmates. I just felt I had no power.

Valerie Francis:

I didn't even have a toilet. There were no female toilets. So everything around me said you don't belong and I was just trying to survive as a 17 year old and doing my best to just keep going.

Becky Batagol:

And so here you are approximately half a century later working on gender equality. Was it that experience that made you think about this issue or other experiences? I think it was those issues. It was then

Valerie Francis:

what occurred in industry. I was in industry for quite a number of years. I joined academia during University of Melbourne in 2000. And I think it was just a combination of all of those things. And also when I look at my family background, my family background is my mother was very encouraging of us all to go to university, not necessarily to do engineering.

Valerie Francis:

I think she was a bit surprised at that. And his father had actually died and his mother basically took over the running of the farm. So he was very aware that women could do anything. So that was a really good background to come from to make me and they also were both working in the social justice space. So I didn't really have any other option but to look at where the inequities occurred in the world.

Becky Batagol:

Fantastic. Well, how lucky are we that you turned your mind to the construction industry. Tell us about your research and your work in gender equality in the construction industry.

Valerie Francis:

I sort of changed over from industry to academia. And the first project I ever worked on was as a research fellow was looking at inefficiencies in the industry. And the more I looked at this topic, the more I realized that actually you could put all sorts of systems in place, you could do all sorts of things. But at the end of the day, the key to the success of any project really was the people. So I switched my to be looking at people and started doing some work on work life balance back in the early 2000s, but really looking at men and work life balance in construction because that was the biggest sample.

Valerie Francis:

So my interest was always in efficiency, how can we improve things. So I've done a little bit of research looking at technological improvements to the industry, but also through people. And in particular, I've had a lifelong interest in the gender equity. I guess I'm proudest probably of two studies I've done, one which is the largest study internationally of career advancement for professional women, and the other is the first and only longitudinal study of women entering into the construction trades.

Becky Batagol:

And what did you find in those studies?

Valerie Francis:

Oh boy, we've got time here. Look, those studies were they were pretty groundbreaking. Looking at the career advancement, I found that a pattern of advancement was different for women than it was for men. And it really demonstrated that although organizational support, which is always touted to be the thing that would help you get on, was really the thing that kept you in the industry. And actually, whether or not you had support or no support, there were other factors that really affected your advancement.

Valerie Francis:

And they were more the human capital variables. So the longer hours you worked, the more education you had, and the longer you were in the industry, the more you advanced.

Becky Batagol:

Let's turn to Rebecca and Paula's proposal for law reform and they propose quotas, fiftyfifty quotas for women and gender diverse people both in leadership and in the core body of workers who do the work. What do you

Valerie Francis:

think about their proposal? Look, I think it's a really welcome contribution to this long term issue. If we have a look at it and we look at the statistics, we can see that the percentage of women going into construction has been low historically. We saw a slight turn up after the Second World War, particularly into professions like architecture and engineering. But really if we have a look at the other roles that are related to the construction industry, we see that about 11% of the workforce are women in about the early 1980s.

Valerie Francis:

But by 2016, we're at the dizzying heights of 13%. Now the last census, 2021, came out as a surprising jump to fourteen point five percent. But there's some concerns about how that census, the accuracy of some of the data in that census because it was done during COVID and there wasn't necessarily as much compliance as there has been in previous census. I'm hopeful that maybe things are slightly changing but it will be really useful to see what the 2026 census data says and whether we have actually had that change and that slight increase. But if we look at the number of the actual women who work in the industry, sixty-seventy percent of them work in traditionally female occupations.

Valerie Francis:

And we've got a very small percentage of them doing more male dominated things. So is like the trades. So if we look at a construction site, that's what's dominating the construction site of the trades. If we look at the percentage of women in construction trades, it's about 1.2%. And that really hasn't changed in the last fifteen, twenty years.

Valerie Francis:

So in some occupations, Europe got a higher percentage and in some occupations, it's got a lower percentage. So that's sort of interesting.

Becky Batagol:

So what are the kind of roles on a construction site or in that industry that women would traditionally hold?

Valerie Francis:

Women would often be in more support roles but when we get out onto a construction site itself, women will be junior construction management roles, middle management roles, You could have people that would be classified in construction labor, they would be lollipop people or traffic management. A really important role that basically keeps the public safe. So it's an important role but it's sort of a different role. And we do see that that's a career that has emerged in relatively recent time and there's been an uptake of women. But it's not necessarily the translation of the women who are in those traffic management roles into other roles in the industry.

Valerie Francis:

But if we look in construction firms, can say, well, who are the managers? If we have a look, we'd say a higher rate of managers in construction firms would be in finance or HR versus being construction directors.

Becky Batagol:

Do you think gender quotas work in the construction industry, Valerie?

Valerie Francis:

In an ideal world, I'd love it that we didn't have to have quotas. But in a way, this industry has not changed. It is not looking to change. So we have to do something to encourage it to change.

Becky Batagol:

So it sounds like what you think a quota is a bit of a bomb or an incendiary device.

Valerie Francis:

I think it draws people's attention to a particular issue, which is good. I think some of the negative consequences of it are that it can sometimes backfire a little bit on women. We've been talking to women who are in the trades, who are now being encouraged onto domestic sites because we've got certain targets on government projects. And what we're finding is that they're sort of there for the numbers but not actually being trained properly. So their long term career is not being considered.

Valerie Francis:

They're there to tick a box rather than to actually do a job and be there, a long term member of that industry.

Becky Batagol:

Rebecca and Paula's bill proposes a headcount approach to quotas, but you prefer an equal work hours approach. Can you explain the difference and why you prefer an equal work hours approach?

Valerie Francis:

I think in an ideal world, they would probably actually mean exactly the same. But if you think about it, if you're doing a headcount approach, if you've got a person who's on a construction project, they can be moved from project to project. So in other words, one person could be on five different projects throughout the week. And it may look like that company is complying reasonably well with whatever the requirements are. However, if you do an equal work hours, that's actually looking at the work hours that are being carried out on that particular project during that week.

Valerie Francis:

How many hours are associated with female labour? How many hours are associated with male labour?

Becky Batagol:

So it sounds like different versions of equality kind of I guess in legal language I'd say formal equality which kind of looks okay if you just look at the surface of it, but you're talking about something different which is substantive equality.

Valerie Francis:

I think you've got to be quite specific with the construction industry because they'll often look for ways around certain things. So they will look for ways of complying that may not be how it's intended by the people drafting the legislation. So I think the equal work hours approach would be very specific. It would be very clear to them that this is actually what's required. Within the industry, we've got lots of really compliant builders, but you could have a builder who is less compliant, is slightly cutting corners, and maybe they would be looking at moving women from site to site.

Valerie Francis:

Now I don't see that as good for that person's career. So that's why I think the total work hours approach would be more appropriate.

Becky Batagol:

Rebecca and Paula's bill requires quotas for women and gender diverse people in both leadership and the rest of the workforce. So do you think

Valerie Francis:

the fiftyfifty quota will work? Look, I've got a few concerns. I want to be upbeat and I want the industry to change because I do think that women can provide the industry with well needed workforce participation. Women are clever, they're smart, they're strong, they can do all of these jobs. So why shouldn't those opportunities be open to women?

Valerie Francis:

So I want to be positive about it. But if we have a look at it, the issues are if we did this immediately, there could be problems. The 50% target could be problematic. So if we think about a construction site, it's dominated by the construction trades. 90% of the people on a construction site would be in those roles, those trade roles.

Valerie Francis:

90%, yet they're only about 1% female. So 90% of the workforce on the site come from the trades and 99% of that is male. So getting to that 50% target across a construction site could be quite difficult. So in some of the other roles, there's a higher percentage of women there already. So I think there could be an issue with applying it immediately because basically how does the industry get that number of women in to start with to carry out the work?

Valerie Francis:

We need time to actually train them up. So even if we've got them, we've still got to train them up. And so the immediacy issue is there. And then the other thing is really the 50% target. Is that achievable?

Valerie Francis:

It would be wonderful to think it was, but it may be very hard in certain parts of it. Now the other thing is that my understanding is that you'd also require a legislative impact assessment for such a bill to go through. And I think companies could probably quite rightly indicate that there's a significant business barrier to such a legislation. So I think the immediacy of it and the level of it might be problematic. Would you then propose a staged approach or?

Valerie Francis:

So my feeling is that that percentage of women is ambitious and maybe a longer transition period is required. So there could be that there's a certain time frame to allow companies to get ready for this change. So and maybe short and then medium term targets could be appropriate at different levels for different sections of the industry. So things like the trades, you'd probably start with a lower target but show some ambition going forward. I think trade should be identified separately in the bill.

Valerie Francis:

They are a very specific category of workers within the construction industry. That category is very well understood and it's one that's very poorly represented at the moment. So it would be good if they were specified specifically. I think one of the issues is also about in a way, and we're seeing this already with the quotas that are in place, is it's pushing women into certain directions. So it's putting them onto government projects and not onto other projects that maybe they would prefer to work on.

Valerie Francis:

I sometimes think if you're a female tradesperson, you might like a domestic construction site, maybe that's a little bit closer to where living. You don't have so much commuting time.

Becky Batagol:

So it is pushing people onto sort of government projects. Is there a particular responsibility for governments to promote gender equality though? Isn't it important to show that government projects are looking better and demonstrating what other construction sites could look like?

Valerie Francis:

Well I think it is and it's also probably the only mechanism that they can use to make change. So government projects are often the projects that trial out different procurement methods, different ways of working. So I can see the reason why you would attract it to a government project. But the unintended consequences, it puts women working in particular roles. I would actually like to see the bill change to actually have it that the companies have to be compliant in all of the work that they do.

Valerie Francis:

They do this with some So not just government work. Yes. So if they're not compliant in other work that they're doing, they're not eligible to be tendering for projects. And that means that all of their work, it gives them a greater encouragement to be more gender diverse and it gives them a greater reason to be spreading women across different projects that they may prefer to work on, they may prefer to get particular skills on a particular project. We're already seeing women commenting on the fact that they would like to be working off-site now, maybe in the head office doing different roles, but in a way they're being encouraged to stay on-site.

Valerie Francis:

So there's all sorts of these unintended consequences of quotas that we sort of have to work through, particularly in this period where companies are just getting used to employing more women. When it becomes more common every day, I think they'll probably work themselves out. But until that time, I think that we could actually say in terms of this legislation that if we made it that the companies had to be compliant in all their work, that could actually help. It's quite nice for women to be working in different jobs where they're getting different experiences.

Becky Batagol:

One of the focuses of Rebecca and Paula's bill is the leadership and quotas for leadership. What do we know about the effects of having more women in leadership in the construction industry?

Valerie Francis:

Well, look, I think it's a really good idea to identify the leaders separately. And I think because I'm just thinking back to my own research, the study that I looked at career advancement, I identified amongst these nearly 500 women that really the industry is not all about exclusion. There's actually a group of women who are working really well in the industry, they feel like they belong, etcetera. And when you have a look at that, I sort of identified that we had this cultural inclusivity continuum. In other words, we're sort of going from exclusion to inclusion, but through this middle part, which is called assimilation.

Valerie Francis:

So in other words, there's a group of women in the middle who feel like they belong as long as they work within the norms of the industry. And if they work against that, they often will end up feeling more like they're excluded. So if we look at inclusion, if that's where we're heading, that's what we want for women to be truly included. There's two elements. They need to feel like they belong and they need to feel valued for the unique contribution.

Valerie Francis:

So there's two cultural shifts that need to occur. The first from exclusion to inclusion is actually supporting women in the industry. And we do know that if we've got more women leaders, we also typically will have more women in those organisations. We tend to have less turnover. We have lower work family conflict.

Valerie Francis:

All these good predictors of good work practices are there. So we do know that if companies have got more women, they tend to be nicer places for those women to work.

Becky Batagol:

That sounds like bottom line to me.

Valerie Francis:

To me that's bottom line. You should at least feel like you belong at work. There was a group who were excluded. There was a group who were assimilated. I think they were really they just felt a sense of belonging.

Valerie Francis:

The next group really is to be truly included. So you've got to have that sense of belonging, but you've also got to be valued for your unique contribution. And this is a really hard thing to describe, but I look at it and I talk to a lot of women and they talk about when they go for things like promotions, etcetera, people talk to them and when they're looking at what pay rise you maybe should get, what promotion you should get. It's always reflected back on certain norms. How many projects did you do?

Valerie Francis:

Very hard metrics. How many problems you solved? Now a lot of these women say, But I didn't have problems on my site because I looked ahead and I saw that was going to happen so I basically did things to avoid those problems. So these are sort of these hard to measure things that women are actually doing. I know one woman project manager who reorganized her whole site office so that different people were sitting next to each other so that lines of communication were improved.

Valerie Francis:

There's all sorts of things that women do and women inherently have more of a transformational leadership style. Men often are considered to have either a laissez faire leadership style or transactional. In order to get cultural change, you actually need transformational leaders. The very people who are the transformational leaders are not in the industry. So this is why we need more female leaders in the industry.

Valerie Francis:

The only thing I'd say about the bill is that it needs to be very careful how we describe leaders and probably defining them so that companies don't suddenly identify a lot of women as being leaders when actually they're doing other sorts of roles in the in the company. But I do think that more true leaders in the industry will drive a cultural change. And we've already seen that the improvements that have been made to companies because of having more women in them, but whether we get to the next step, whether any industry gets to the next step is sort of hard to answer.

Becky Batagol:

Do you call yourself a feminist, Valerie?

Valerie Francis:

I do. I do quite proudly. I think if I look back, my grandmother who was born in the 1800s was a feminist. She was frustrated. She was a teacher.

Valerie Francis:

She had to give up work when she got married. My mother was a feminist. She fought for good causes for women. And my father was a feminist. So I don't feel I had any other choice.

Valerie Francis:

I feel like everybody should be a feminist. I think I we are all feminists. And I'm always perplexed by how younger women don't call themselves feminists. But I think about it and I think to a certain extent, I've lived through the enactment of the Sex Discrimination Act. They are born into a world that has that in place already.

Valerie Francis:

They take gender equity for granted and they take it as a given and something that will be there. And they don't know a world that wasn't like that for them. And I think it's quite interesting when you look at what's happening around the world, you can see how feminism can be very easily undermined. And I think it's more important than ever probably to call yourself a feminist.

Becky Batagol:

So would you walk into the boardroom of a very male dominated construction company and call yourself a feminist?

Valerie Francis:

I wouldn't publicly say I'm a feminist, but I'm only I'm answering this because I'm a feminist. I they look at me and they go, She's a woman, she's in engineering, and she does work on gender equity. I think they probably assumed it already.

Becky Batagol:

So why wouldn't you say you're a feminist there then?

Valerie Francis:

I think it's implied, so I don't need to necessarily say it. I think it could potentially in certain circumstances get people on the wrong foot. So it may not be helpful to actually articulate it. I'm not quite sure why I don't say it, but I think that anybody who would know me if they said is she

Kate Seear:

a feminist or not a feminist, think they'd say oh yeah, she's a feminist, that's for sure.

Becky Batagol:

This is a total aside, but I did some work on a project a few years ago working with engineers and my job was to do work on gender equity and disability and social inclusion. And how I described what I was doing to them was feminism without using the feminist word, without using the F word, because it scared them. So instead what I would do is just do all the feminist stuff, all the feminist principles but never use the F word. Got the job done.

Valerie Francis:

I think that's the thing, you want to get the job done and you've got to look at what the end goal is and if that's a useful term to use, use it. If it's not a useful term but I mean, what is feminism? Equal rights. Equal access. I don't think there's anything to argue or discuss.

Valerie Francis:

Thanks so much for joining us, Valerie. Absolute pleasure, Becky. Thanks.

Becky Batagol:

That was Doctor Valerie Francis, the founder of Constructing Equity, a consultancy dedicated to gender inclusion. Today's episode inspired you, take a look at our book, The Feminist Legislation Project. Kate, we've been working in law reform, both of us, for some time, but I think there's still more to find out. What can we find out from this book?

Kate Seear:

Well, the book itself, which you can find in the show notes, free to download, completely open access, available to all, contains detailed law reform proposals across a range of different areas of law from construction law to migration, family law. And each proposal has been really carefully refined and developed over time. It sets out why law reform is needed and then how to actually go about it. And so it's a bit of a template, if you like. And if you're interested in these areas of law, they're there for you to look at.

Kate Seear:

But, also, we hope to inspire all of our listeners to think about having a crack at law reform themselves in other areas that we didn't think about, that we haven't yet looked at, but are there and ripe for the picking. This podcast was recorded on the lands of the Boon Wurrung and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin nations. The Boon Wurrung people have lived in areas stretching from Werribee in the West Of Melbourne, down the Peninsula, and across to Wilson's Promontory over many thousands of years. Construction has been central to their existence here. They built canoes from bark and used them to travel, to hunt, and to fish, and to go to nearby islands.

Kate Seear:

And they constructed their homes from bark and trees using sustainable methods for over forty thousand years. As we record this podcast series, we're conscious that every aspect of the built environment in Australia is constructed on lands that have long been occupied by First Nations people. Although Australia's laws recognise the importance of attending to cultural heritage in these processes of construction, those laws operate to varying degrees of effectiveness. Having First Nations expertise in the stewardship of land as well as construction is therefore a vital component of decolonization and our future. In today's episode, we heard that women make up a minority of those involved in Australia's construction industry, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are a minority within this minority.

Kate Seear:

That's an issue that we need to work hard to address. We pay our respects to elders past and present, and we extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, including those who are listening along to this series. You've been listening to Feminist Acts. This podcast was produced by Miniature and funded by the Monash University Office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor Research and Enterprise.