New Data Study from Today’s Homeowners Highlights Continued Female Underrepresentation in Construction Industry

With a newly released data study, researchers at Today’s Homeowner ask: Why do so few women work in construction, and why aren’t more women considering joining the field? The team examined some of the challenges facing women in construction along with solutions for improving representation going forward.

Some of the main findings:

• Women make up nearly 9% of construction managers, but only about 3% of construction trade workers.
• The pay gap between female and male construction managers is roughly six percentage points smaller than the national average across all occupations (88.9% vs. 83%). The gap for construction trade workers is about 83.7%, or .7 percentage points better than the national average.
• Across construction trade jobs, women are most represented in the occupations of painters and paperhangers (10.2%) along with construction and building inspectors (8%).
• Seven of the 10 states with the highest percentages of female construction trade workers are in the South.
• Less than one in 100 construction trade workers are women in two states, namely, Delaware and South Dakota.

Data for the report comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau. To calculate the states with the most female construction trade workers, the report considered workers that fall in the construction and extraction industry, as defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.