Women in construction
Image courtesy Melissa Whitehead
There is a dearth of empirical studies on women in the construction industry in South Africa. The data available only skims the surface and helps to scrutinise the important issues in relation to the entrepreneurial activities of South African women. The construction industry as a whole is facing a nationwide crisis with respect to the availability of qualified labour. With the demand for labour outstripping supply, construction employers need to expand their recruitment efforts to previously untapped labour sources, including women.
Historically, the construction industry is characteristically a male-dominated sector in terms of employment at all levels. The data gathered from 363 participants surveyed during a series of more than 40 national multi-stakeholder workshops and seminars1 indicate that the construction industry continues to be hostile towards, and uncommitted to, achieving workplace gender equity.
The construction industry has been overwhelmingly male-dominated for years, and on many worksites women construction workers are not welcome. Sex discrimination and anti-women attitudes are still prevalent on worksites, despite the fact that sex discrimination is illegal. Several studies have shown that female construction workers suffer from gender and sexual harassment, a factor associated with low job satisfaction as well as psychological and physiological health symptoms and workplace injuries.
Today, nearly 60% of women aged 16 and over participate in the workforce. While women have made some gains in occupations traditionally occupied by men, construction trades remain overwhelmingly male-dominated. In 1970, when the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA) was enacted, women made up less than one percent of workers in the construction trades. By 1995 that percentage had only grown to 2.3 percent. The growth over the coming years of the percentage of women involved in the construction industry will be slow if there is not a deliberate intervention.
Women entrepreneurs in South Africa remain on the periphery of the national economy. The concentration of activities of women in business is located in the areas of crafts, hawking, personal services and the retail sector. There are low participation levels of women entrepreneurs in value-adding business opportunities. Some of the chief barriers to promoting women in business include cultural and societal problems, the psychological impact of cultural norms, employment legislation and policy, lack of information, training, finance, markets, technology and business infrastructure, absence of vehicles for skills development and capacity-building, fragmented approaches to identifying issues and developing strategy to influence policy affecting business and government interventions. Accordingly, more and more women are taking the route to informal sector entrepreneurship.
There is a deep-rooted reluctance by the construction industry to transform itself and redress the gender disparities in employment, occupation and income within construction. While the industry continues to complain about the increasing skills shortage against the background of fewer and fewer young people considering construction as a viable career and the regular occurrence of accidents, injuries and fatalities on construction sites that perpetuate the negative image of the industry, it remains reluctant to attract women at all levels of employment. Lowering this untenable situation demands bold and visionary leadership from all sectors of the industry.
As increasing numbers of women enter the construction trades, concerns about their health and safety are growing. In addition to the primary safety and health hazards faced by all construction workers, there are safety and health issues specific to female construction workers. In turn, the small numbers of women workers on construction worksites foster an environment in which these safety and health problems arise or continue. The prevalence of a hostile workplace, restricted access to sanitary toilets, protective clothing and equipment in the wrong sizes, and poor on-the-job training —these are significant issues that adversely impact women's ability to perform their jobs safely.
Many of the identified problems are amenable to change through engineering, behavioural, or administrative intervention. Improving the work conditions for women in the construction trades will not only ensure their health and safety, it will also serve to attract and retain women as workers during a critical time of labour shortages in the construction industry.
Motivation for women entrepreneurs is linked to career selection. Key indicators include the level of education and training, individual desires, career-entry expectations and career self-sufficiency, academic ability and peer aspirations; socio-economic background and the ability to overcome cultural conditioning and learning experiences; differences in orientation and motivations; and race and culture.
Further, women generally lack the necessary resources for starting and developing their own businesses. Resources critical for success are the assets that women bring with them to the entrepreneurial process in the form of human capital (formal and occupational experiences) and the entrepreneur’s ability to access resources in the environment (e.g. capital, suppliers and customers). Human capital is derived through investment in education and training. Research supported the theory that women have been impeded from acquiring adequate levels of human capital because of social and cultural forces.
Image courtesy Melissa Whitehead
As women are an emerging sector in the global business environment, support is a potentially important means of raising the level of entrepreneurship in society overall. Support for women in the construction industry encompasses the following interventions:
General interventions
In acknowledging the cross-cutting nature of gender in all elements of BBBEE and its integral nature to transformation of the construction sector, the Strategic Agenda for Public Works in Gauteng sought to undertake the following:
- Identify barriers to black women advancement and design targeted programmes to increase the representivity and the empowerment of black women in the sector as outlined in all elements of this Strategic Agenda
- Enhance gender awareness in the workplace and promote a conducive and empowering environment for women in general
- Strengthen gender equality training, gender-based violence awareness and the dissemination of gender-disaggregated and gender-relevant information
- Target skills development and employment equity for women, particularly in areas that are presently male dominated
- Design targeted procurement and enterprise development programmes that increase the participation of women as owners of property assets and business in the sector
- Devise policies on gender that address the above objectives and submit the policies together with a report of progress in implementing the policies annually
- Foster willingness amongst women to enter the construction industry and for them to make a mark in the infrastructure delivery requirements facing South Africa, and in particular Gauteng
- Encourage and assist relevant business support initiatives, and provide opportunities to this sector of the industry
- Appropriate financial assistance to women entrepreneurs, constructors and professional service providers
- Enable access to general information and education programmes. The probability of a woman becoming an entrepreneur can be increased by exposure of the individual to formal learning experiences and to the tasks associated with owning a business. This exposure can be accomplished through mentors or role models in the workplace, home career guidance, internships, and co-operative education programmes
- Encourage mentoring programmes. Effective networking that aims to inform women entrepreneurs about policies may have secondary benefits in terms of encouraging women in business. Given the increasingly international nature of the business environment, there is a case for introducing specific measures to enable women entrepreneurs to communicate with their counterparts in other countries. Three types of support were evidenced: operational support represents the amount of support provided in the way of advice and or expertise. Emotional support considers the encouragement provided to the participants by others and financial support is the importance of the financial resources provided by others
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Support for networking structures, including initiating special programmes that assist women to advance in the construction industry. Support provisioning for women entrepreneurs in the construction industry therefore includes:
- Education from dependency and entitlement to self-sufficiency and economic growth
- Development/facilitation of information and communication technologies that bridge the gap between new enterprises and established businesses
- Establishment of networking links, international partnerships, community participation and access to national and global markets
- Development of partnerships between stakeholders (government, private sector, NGOs, trading partners)
- Provision of business skills training, facilitation of business incubation, mentoring and support services
Immediate/quick-win interventions
- Review or change regulatory frameworks that stifle women entrepreneurs and accelerate economic growth
- Encourage all youth contractors to register with the Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB) and then facilitate a process for registration and support by the Gauteng OnSite Construction Contact Centres. This will further ensure that they have equal opportunity to financial, administrative and construction-related support and capacitation initiatives
- Initiate a women-oriented construction month in August to coincide with Women’s Day, under the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) umbrella. It essentially ensures that all EPWP contracts that are awarded in the month of August will be awarded to women-owned and operated companies that have the appropriate registration
Gender stereotype in employment is of particular concern in public works projects. Different types of work are socially constructed as “men’s work” or “women’s work”. This might prevent women from presenting themselves for certain employment opportunities, or it might result in women being channelled into specific activities within employment programmes. Even when gender quotas are introduced on public works schemes, women often remain excluded from certain activities or face implicit wage discrimination, because infrastructure projects tend to involve physically-demanding manual labour, and equal payment for piecework favours men who can complete arduous tasks faster.
The case for gender targeting on public works programmes rests partly on empirical evidence that women have a higher propensity to spend incremental earned income on the nutrition of their children, than do their male partners. Targeting employment opportunities directly at women should both empower them economically and maximise the impact on their families.
Nonetheless, the case for gender quotas is not yet proven. In communities where a “traditional” patriarchal division of labour applies – women maintain the home, while men work for income outside the home – making women work for rations or low wages might give simply increase their workloads and undermine men’s responsibility for providing the family’s food. Instead of imposing gender quotas automatically, on the assumption that men are less responsible than women, this decision should be based on an understanding of the local socio-cultural context, in particular about how resources are managed and controlled at the intra-household level.
1This discussion is an extract from the documents titled Gauteng Infrastructure Renewal and Investment Plan (GIRIP) that was still at “work in progress” stage by the time I left the department.