Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
When disruption is the norm and you’re surrounded by complexity, you need clarity. Osborne Clarke's straight-talking legal experts will give you the insights and advice you need to get the right result.
Osborne Clarke is an international legal practice with over 270 Partners and more than 900 lawyers in 26 locations*. We help clients tackle the issues they’re facing today, and prepare for the ones they will face tomorrow.
*Services in India are provided by a relationship firm
Hello, and welcome to this month's episode of Building Woman. On this episode, Building Woman meets Building Woman. Same name, shared mission. Our guest this time is Faye Allen, a chartered quantity surveyor, an expert witness and a thirty year veteran of disputes across construction, energy and infrastructure worldwide and reveals some really hard truths. Thirty percent reported sexual assault, sixty four percent saw men paid more for the same role and sixty one percent said gender specific policies can alienate men and men in construction are almost four times more likely to die by suicide than The UK average.
Speaker 1:Here's why I love this book though. Part one lays out systemic issues with clarity but it doesn't stop there. Part two then amplifies lived experience and offers practical tools to navigate bullying, harassment, inadequate facilities and ill fitting PPE. Part three is a genuine rallying call with concrete steps for allyship, sponsorship and leadership so we can all build a fairer culture together. And its blueprint travels.
Speaker 1:That lessons apply far beyond the construction industry to every business and practice globally. So join us this month on Building Women with the woman behind the book Building Women. Hi Faye, thank you so much for joining us for this episode.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:I have just finished your book Building Woman, so I think most of our discussion is probably going be around that because you open up lots for discussion. And I have to say I've read quite a few of these types of books in, you know, Caroline Crieta Perez, her Invisible Women book and things. The difference with yours was it left me feeling optimistic because I think with a lot of these things, they start with like stats and all the bad stuff and everything, you know, all of the inequality that's out there. But then what I loved about your book is that you go on to the solutions and practical ways for allies to help, you know, all the kind of advice you've got from senior women in here, sports people, etc. I just thought it was brilliant.
Speaker 1:So it left me feeling optimistic about the future and that if we, as you say in the book, if we can work together, then can do this and we can make the landscape much more equitable. So going straight in, do you want to just introduce yourself before we before we kind of start and just give us a rough sort of journey, career journey, so where you kind of started and then where you are now?
Speaker 2:I started in the industry officially at 18. I did an apprenticeship for quantity surveying but I'd been in the industry because of my dad being an estimator for well since I was a little girl really. I remember going to the yard with him when I was little and you know just when he started his own business from the kitchen table you know various trips out on a Sunday delivering tenders and the drives around London where he'd be like 'that's one that I built!' So, yeah, I feel like it's sort of always been in my blood. So, I started with my apprenticeship officially at 18. I did HNC Bridge course, did a Quantity Surveying degree, later did a postgraduate in Law, worked for quite a few contractors for the first sort of twenty odd years of my career and then decided to move into the consulting sort of side of the industry.
Speaker 2:So I worked for Mace in aviation doing lots of bid management and contract problems and then later decided to move into expert witness and dispute resolution and avoidance. Really picking up on the interest I had in the legal side of the industry and also while I hadn't had disputes on the jobs that I ran as a QS I'd seen lots of issues on other jobs and in other companies and it just sort of always interested me I suppose so I thought why not get into that.
Speaker 1:Nice and so you're at Rimecast now right? What's your role there? You've got a sort of team?
Speaker 2:Yeah so heading up the Quantum team which is really interesting because you're making sure that everybody's working and you've got quite a lot of scope to do things in the company. We've got Quantum, Delay, Technical, so we can offer expertise in various areas. We've also got a project services division so people that work on actual jobs so we can mentor them through as well. It's just really good scope for growing people, growing the business and really offering our clients the best that we can.
Speaker 1:Great, thank you for that. I think we should just dive straight into this book because I'm just dying to ask you loads of questions from everything I read. And I was quite sad because as I was going through, I was turning down the top page for where I'd got to and then every time I came across something interesting that I wanted to ask you I turned down the bottom page corner. So yeah, in your book you cite some, well lots of statistics actually, but in particular I'm thinking about the ones from the RICS research which say that women stay members of the RICS on average for sixteen years compared to twenty eight And years for then you also say the average age of leaving was 47 for women versus 61 for men, which I'm guessing is basically retirement, right? So they're staying in profession until they actually retire.
Speaker 1:And you talk about the leaky pipeline and why we're losing women along the way. Can you talk us through the reasons for this that you identified in the book as much as it's possible to summarise that? And in your view, what you currently see the profession is doing about that and do you think that things are improving?
Speaker 2:I mean currently I don't think the profession is doing enough. Obviously the RICS research, you know, that age of 47, it's not when people might think so. It's not when women go and start a family. So I think people have obviously traditionally thought oh you know it would be women in their 30s or whatever or their late 20s when they start having a family' and it's obviously not. From the research that I've done and from the women I've spoken to, because I've obviously spoken to over a thousand women and I did a survey as well, it's really a combination of things are too difficult for women.
Speaker 2:Particularly, yes, when they've got care and responsibilities and it's not necessarily just children, but that flexibility to be able to cope with the issues that women face. It can be, I say caring responsibilities, it could be dealing with menopause at that sort of stage because many women are going through perimenopause, the lack of flexibility where people just want to have a different work life balance now. And I think with contractors particularly they can lose women because they don't want to be on-site from 07:30 till six. And you see this particularly with women who may have started out in trades or like crane operators for example. They don't want to be doing twelve hour days where they don't get to see their family or they don't get to see their partner or they're just knackered at the end of the day.
Speaker 2:Know So women want to succeed and they can do such brilliant things but I also think we have to be realistic and we have to offer them what they need. And you sort of touched on the fact that I do look at not just the problems but obviously what some of the solutions will be later on. I think some of the RICS research obviously hit on the flexibility thing as being a key point. But again the age shows it's not just necessarily to do with being a parent, it could also be looking after aged parents for example or friends. And I think this is the thing we have to remember, it's not necessarily just women who are mothers who have caring responsibilities and you know unfortunately those responsibilities do often fall on to women regardless of what it is.
Speaker 2:That's something I also talk about in the book that I think we need to sort of collectively, not just as an industry but I think as humanity full stop, change because I think that narrative is putting too much responsibility of everything onto women.
Speaker 1:Yeah thank you. One phrase in the book that really resonated with me and actually was quite surprising because there's a lot of chat about imposter syndrome and imposter phenomenon and we discussed it earlier in one of the earlier episodes with Sam Kay actually at KIA. But one of the phrases in your book was stop telling women they have imposter syndrome. Yeah. And I find that really interesting because we do that so much.
Speaker 1:And kind of a lot of the sentimentality in your book was around we keep telling women that women are the problem. And it's not for us to fix women. It's for the I think you say the privileged majority to fix the system for the underprivileged minority. And I have quoted that so many times to people because I just think it captures it exactly. You say, you know, we don't ask people of colour to resolve racism because it just sounds ridiculous to even say that out loud.
Speaker 1:So why do we keep turning to women to fix gender inequity when it's the issue that's affecting them but they're not creating it? Why do we need to flip the narrative do you think and work with men to help them be good allies?
Speaker 2:I'll touch first on the imposter syndrome thing because that obviously is where this started. I went down a really big rabbit hole with that partly because of the amount of times in my career I've been told you've obviously got imposter syndrome. When you look it up and I do cover this in the book it was based on a really small study of people years ago, a really small study, that even said it needed to be looked at in more depth. Everybody has those thoughts and I liken it to the little gremlin on your shoulder that's just trying to keep you safe. So that impostor is nonsense.
Speaker 2:It's not a woman problem. Everyone has it. And anyone who says they don't is lying as far as I'm concerned. Because I've spoken to men and women and they have all said that they feel that. The problem is it's been thrust down women's throats so many times and you hear women repeat it all the time Oh, you know, I've got dreadful imposter syndrome.
Speaker 2:No you haven't. You've just got that natural it's like back from when we were sort of cavemen and women it's just trying to keep you safe. So I have a real issue with saying that women need fixing because we don't. Women do not need fixing. You can send them on leadership courses, can send them on all these courses and they'll have a great time but then if you chuck them back into a situation where it's really bad culture which is the issue it won't matter what you've sent them on.
Speaker 2:And it's not to do with impostor syndrome, it's not to do with confidence, it's to do with culture. Which is why I then got on the bandwagon of right how do we fix the culture? And the only way to do that is to work together but a big part of that is men getting involved. That then feeds into so much of the research that I did because although some of the issues that happen to women in the industry happen because of men, it's not all men. 99.9% of men are really good.
Speaker 2:They just don't know what the issues are which is part of the reason I wanted the book to be so in-depth and to make sure that I covered enough research and statistics and stuff so that men could understand the issues. Let's face it women read the book and we're like oh god yeah I know tick has done that had that. It validates how women feel because we've been there done it got the t shirt. But for men they don't really understand what's going on because women don't traditionally tell all of our problems to men around us. Know we tend to talk to women.
Speaker 2:We might have like women's groups. We might have you know some really good networks that we talk to. But men don't know. So the men that have read the book have all sort of come out of it with a like, Oh my God, I didn't realise that was the problems. And then like you say, because I don't just cover the problems, I then talk about what they can do, They've almost then taken the baton and gone right I now know I can go out and I can make a difference and I can make this better.
Speaker 2:And I think that was what was really important for me because like you say there's loads of books out there and they just list out all the problems and say how awful everything is. And that doesn't actually solve the issue. So for me, it isn't women that need fixing, it's the system that needs fixing. And the only way to do that is to work together. And when I talk about allyship and I do say that men need to be allies to women, I also do say in the book that women need to be allies to men as well because I know men don't have it easy in the industry either.
Speaker 2:And I think that's something that I was really really passionate about getting across because we know that we lose men four times the national average to suicide in construction. So it just shows it's a cultural issue that needs to be fixed and I think that is the drum that I will keep banging. It's not women who need fixing, they don't have imposter syndrome, it's natural thing that we all have that keeps us safe and you can use that to actually help you succeed. That little voice that's there telling you you're not good enough. Use it.
Speaker 2:Prove it wrong.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. No, I really liked that. I'm glad you touched on the statistics that you've got in the book around male suicide in the industry as well. Because, and that's another thing I felt the book was really balanced and it wasn't, think I sometimes when we talk about feminism generally, but also when you get a group of women in the room to talk about inequity, it can come across as a bit of a man bashing exercise. That isn't at all.
Speaker 1:Don't think that is ever the case necessarily, but it's not constructive. But actually this book really is and it's not biased in that way and it's not kind of judgmental. It's genuine. It comes, I can tell it comes from the heart. It comes from what you know, well researched topics that you give real practical solutions.
Speaker 1:One of the things I was going to ask you is you talk about and I think this might be a barrier to men actually being good allies of they because I suppose they come from the perspective that they are kind of the privileged majority. Are they sometimes afraid to get involved because they don't want to be seen to be coming in and like saving the day or saving women or kind of talking for them etc. So maybe you can just talk about some of the practical solutions or the things that they can do that you know it it won't come across in that way that might actually be preventing men from being good allies.
Speaker 2:Yeah and I think that I spoke to men about this and one of the biggest things that can stop men from becoming an ally is that fear. And it's a genuine fear because if they put a foot wrong are they going to get loads of grief? They don't want to come in and be like the knight in shining armour and women don't want that at the end of the day either. So there is a fear but a lot of that fear came from not knowing what to do. So one of the things that I really wanted to make easy for men was giving them examples of exactly what they could do.
Speaker 2:And one really easy example that every man who's read the book has done is they've then gone and had conversations with people and been like I've just read this book. These are some of the things that she's spoken about in this book has this happened to you? And just opening the conversation up. Think the biggest thing with allyship that men need to know is it's not a quiet role it's an active role but it can be done in many different ways. So like one of the easy examples would be like you know we're often the only woman in a meeting as a great example women do traditionally get spoken over more than men in meetings.
Speaker 2:There's actually an app called Women Interrupted that you can use that will measure how many times women are interrupted and it does show that the percentage is quite large. If there's a man in the room and they're seeing that happen they can go hold on a minute favour speaking. Or if there's a woman that's not speaking and she's just being very quiet they can go hold on a minute favour is the expert in why don't we hear what she's got to say? So you're opening the door for a woman to speak or you're stopping men from speaking over her. It's funny unfortunately there's rude people.
Speaker 2:There's been a thing Nigel Farage really speaking over someone, really derogatory, Oi love basically. If you're a man being an ally in that room you'd have gone hold on a minute Nigel that's not respectful to say that. So there's really easy things that you can do. But also allies do it when they're not in the room. So you don't have to have a woman in the room for you to be an ally.
Speaker 2:So it could be a group of men talking. Someone I had an example recently where he was at a course, the course leader made a really inappropriate comment about women's nipples and he felt really uncomfortable about it. And he went and actually spoke to that course leader, told him he was not happy with how that had come across. The course leader then went away and sort of took that on board and actually sent him an email about two weeks later because he also gave him a copy of my book which was rather good. He actually said thank you for doing that.
Speaker 2:I didn't realise how I'd come across and I will make sure I never do that in the future. That was in a course full of men. There wasn't one woman in the room. Now that man could have just stayed silent and said nothing and the course leader in the end of the course actually apologised to all the men for his behaviour and said that it was inappropriate. So that is the sponsorship side of doing it when women aren't in the room.
Speaker 2:Speaking her up, saying she'd be really good for this promotion, she'd be really great for the pay rise. It doesn't have to be aggressive. It doesn't have to be pausing around with other men but it does have to be an active role.
Speaker 1:Yeah okay thank you. And do you think for men worried about saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing do you think it's around is the intent behind it right? It's that you've got good intentions. Don't know where I'm going with
Speaker 2:this. You're right. What I'm saying is the women that I interviewed all said the same. Like the percentage it was in the high 60s. Women know men are going to make mistakes and if they do it with the right intention women don't have a problem.
Speaker 2:And one of the things I think it was Richard Whitehead from A Com said so he interviewed him for the book and I was on a panel with him and he was saying when he first entered this arena of trying to be an ally to women, he actually said to people around him If I do something wrong, just give me the feedback. If people know that they're in a safe place to get that feedback they're more likely to make change happen. So I think as women we also have to remember this is something new that a lot of people are going to do and they are going to make mistakes. We're all human and that's okay. So if someone makes a mistake, do what you'd do if you had a trainee.
Speaker 2:Go to them, tell them why it was a mistake and what they could do in the future. And then we're just giving them the confidence to continue on that path of being an ally to women. But also it means that we aren't scaring them off so that they're not going to do something in the future because it would be really easy to go Oh you shouldn't have said that and have a go at someone. Whereas if you say it in another way like The reason that I thought that was a bit inappropriate inappropriate is because it then gets a conversation going, it gets understanding going and then people are much more likely to keep on that path.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And in the book you've got some brilliant practical advice from senior women across all industries actually in Chapter six. I was going to ask you and I was interested to know which advice in there, is there any particular bit of advice that specifically resonates with you or really kind of stayed with you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean there's two actually. So Kerry Evans, she talks about red lines and I think they're really important. For women particularly, we're not traditionally very good about laying out our boundaries and I think that advice is really really important. If we lay our boundaries out very straight in the first place it makes it a lot easier. And it makes it easier for others around us to also have boundaries.
Speaker 2:And I think you can use on a Friday everyone knows that I'm going to finish early because I've got a personal training session. That's the boundary I've got. I will probably break it maybe once or twice a year if I have to But generally everyone knows on a Friday you're not going get hold of me after that time. And I think as a leader it's your responsibility to also show people it's okay to have boundaries as well. So I love Kerry's red line advice.
Speaker 2:I think also some of the advice from think it was Eugenie Brooks. So she was a firearms officer in the police. And she was talking about you know when you're being bullied and harassed it's really easy for us women to sort of lose ourselves in those moments and sometimes actually the strongest thing you can do is leave. I think sometimes we stay in a situation and I've done it myself in my career we've stayed in a situation so so long because you feel like better the devil you know. You don't want to jump out the chip pan into the fire.
Speaker 2:But actually when you get out of that situation even if it's a mistake and you move again it's still better than having your confidence eroded to the stage that you end up really feeling like you're going to break down. Because that isn't good for anyone. And that's why people leave the industry. They stay in situations or they complain to companies about what happening and they're not taken seriously. That was a big issue in the research that came out.
Speaker 2:So if you're not being treated well and you're not getting what you need, leave.
Speaker 1:Yeah and do you think that's what it was the research that you did? People stayed put because they didn't have the confidence to leave so they just put up with it for far
Speaker 2:too long? Like I say I've done it myself. Think it's very easy and I think if I'm honest I moved quicker earlier in my career because I probably had a bit more I think as you get older there's probably a little bit of change is a little bit more difficult so it can be a lot more scary. But actually change is never a bad thing. And I think that's sort of something that I've probably had to remember in my getting older.
Speaker 2:And I had a bit of coaching to help me get back on that because none of us are perfect and we can all regress and be frightened and that's okay. But change is actually really good for us. Stretches us and actually even if it's a mistake you learn from it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can we talk about the Barbie film? Because you talk about that in the book. And I love that film and I've got two little girls and we have watched it a couple of times already even though they're probably too young to watch it. My littlest is only just turned six but I just thought the kind of the messaging will be lost on her.
Speaker 1:But yeah I mean I loved that you referenced that in the book because it took a really big impact on me.
Speaker 2:I mean I really enjoyed the film but I hated the ending because the ending to me it did the opposite of what it could have done. Like for me and I think that's why the book is Building Women How Everyone in Construction Can Win. We can't go from patriarchal society to matriarchal. That's not going to solve So the I thought it was excellently done. It showed the patriarchy completely flipped with Ken being the submissive, trying to get Barbie's attention and do everything and then how he went horrible the other way.
Speaker 2:It showed it all so brilliantly but I think they missed a trick at the end where they could have actually had everyone working together and actually have created a better Barbie land. I do remember I did a LinkedIn post about it that blew up as well. I was so disappointed with that ending because the film is so good, so cleverly done. But I felt like that little bit at the end really sort of missed a trick.
Speaker 1:Yeah and as you say that's what's great about your book and I will keep going back to it because it is how everyone in construction can win and how if we work together we can do this. Messaging and I think that's quite unique. And other things I've read have not really kind of come at it from that perspective and concluded in that way. So yeah, thanks. I really enjoyed the book.
Speaker 1:Finally, other than your own obviously fantastic book, Building Woman, What book or podcast would you recommend for those listening and why?
Speaker 2:I really like Mary Anne Segarth's The Authority Gap. I absolutely love that book and I mean She's part of what inspired me to actually interview some trans people for my book because she'd done that process and I was like oh I wonder what's that like?' know? Hers is very heavily research backed as well but it really shows the authority gap between men and women and it shows in many respects that it isn't just one industry. We know it is a global issue and I know I talk about that in quite a lot of depth in my book. I think her book is absolutely excellent.
Speaker 2:And anybody who reads it again has a big impact from it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay, thank you. Thank you so much. I've absolutely loved chatting to you. And as I say, I really enjoyed the book.
Speaker 1:I've brought it into the office because I've finished it now and I'm going to leave it in the office library. And I'm to point all my male allies in the direction of the book so they can have a little read. And I will be banging on about it to all my clients as well.
Speaker 2:Thank you
Speaker 1:so much. Yeah,
Speaker 2:sort of makes the four years log worthwhile really. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. I hope you have a great rest of the day and yeah thanks again for your time and for speaking to us today.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me.