Women professionals’ participation in the nigerian construction industry: finding voice for the voiceless

Abstract

Abstract:The construction industry is a male-dominated industry globally, with poor women representation in every facet of the construction profession and the involved jobs. In this context, this study investigated the current level of women participation, challenges faced by professional women, factors that influence them in the course of developing careers in construction and the criteria that can be used to encourage women participation in the Nigerian construction industry. This was done through self-administration of 145 structured questionnaires to 93 women professionals in the built environment and 52 employers of built environment labour in Abuja, Nigeria. The analyses showed that the construction industry is largely dominated by men, with women having a lot of challenges ranging from lack of self-confidence to compete with their male counterparts to insecurity in the midst of men to execute their work as professionals. Therefore, the study recommends that making young women aware of construction industry opportunities is needed to encourage them to build their careers in construction from the school stage in order to increase the number of professional women participating in the future. In addition to this, professional women should be given equal job opportunities as their male counterparts to ensure better representation of women so that the impact of women professionals in the construction industry can be extended.

Gender Discrimination in Building Construction Industry in Nigeria: Threat to Achieving Goal-5 of Vision 2030

“…95%, and 78% respectively according to [15] the author stressed that, most of the Women employed in the construction sites in Asia are engaged as labourers or helpers and managers of building material sites, see Figure 2, where as in the Western countries, women are employed in administrative, technical and professional work. In some of these Asian countries, the place of women in the hierarchy of job is low, in fact, they are considered as people who can only do unskilled job and as head-load carriers [4]. They carry out some of the hardest and most difficult tasks and are paid less than men doing similar tasks.…”

“…Due to culture, tradition, and religious believes, women are rarely being found in the employment of building construction work. [4] observed that most of the women found in the construction workforce are engaged in carrying out managerial, secretarial, messengers, helpers or labourers work with little or none involve in carrying out specialized and other professional work.…”

Balancing the Female Identity in the Construction Industry

“…In Australia, as of February 2015, only 11.1% of the workforces in the construction industry are female, with 5.3% employed full time and the remaining 5.8% part-time (Australian Government Department of Employment, 2016). A breakdown of some developed and developing countries show that women employed in construction are stratified as follows: 2% in Canada (Statistics Canada, 2007), 9% in the United States (United States Bureau of Labour Statistics, 2013), 7% in Turkey (Arslan and Kivrak, 2004), 0.2% in Nigeria (Jimoh et al, 2016) and an average of 10% across majority of the European Union countries (Aulin and Jingmond, 2011). This means construction continues to be a most male-dominated industry.…”

“…Balancing the female identity could also act as a way of retaining role models and mentors for women considering construction careers in the future (Sang and Powell, 2012). It is worthy to note the claims in Jimoh et al (2016) that women are detail oriented and this skill is required in project control/management in the construction process. Furthermore, Jimoh et al (2016) stated that from experience, women executives are better communicators, more effective in decision-making and seek less personal glory than their male counterpart.…”

Nigerian Professional Female Construction Workers in Vocational Occupations: Diversification or Deviation?

“…It is not a Nigerian problem only. A research report by The Smith Institute (2016) agrees that the construction industry in the UK is one of the largest employers of labor, yet 7% of the engineers are female, while the industrial classification of workers in Nigeria, as of 2008, according to the Japan International Cooperation Agency Report (2011) and Jimoh et al (2016), states that only 0.2% of the population are female, as shown in Table 1. They are employed in unskilled, administrative, and professional work, similar to that in the UK, majorly as administrators (Michielsens 2004).…”