Skills as important as meeting gender numbers

Diversity targets should guide where we look, not determine who we value.

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Over the past few months, I've been contacted by women in construction who have been made redundant.

Highly capable women. Women who were doing good work. Women who want to stay in construction and yet, when work slowed or projects wrapped up, they were the first to go.

What's confronting is not the volume of redundancies, but the pattern. Too often, these women were hired to meet a gender target, not because their skills were genuinely embedded into workforce planning, but because a number needed to be hit.

When pressure comes, targets are easy to undo.

I'm a strong advocate for improving gender representation in construction. Representation matters. It always has, and it always will.

I've dedicated a big part of my work to supporting women into this industry. But what I'm seeing now forces us to pause and be honest about the way we're going about it.