Two weeks after gender pay gap results hit the headlines, the construction industry is still coming to terms with being outed as the worst sector in the UK in terms of how little it pays women on average compared with men. We had always known that with barely 14% of the workforce being female, and even less when only construction roles are considered, there was a need to redress an imbalance. But now that we can view the disparity through the lens of pay, it appears even more shocking. 

High-profile public reactions to the results of the pay gap reporting exercise have ranged from Theresa May’s description of “a burning injustice”, to the view that the data is essentially “meaningless” and even worse “misleading”, expressed by Kate Andrews of the Institute of Economic Affairs.

But despite the controversy over the usefulness of the data, at least we have some hard figures at last, and this being an annual event they will act as a benchmark to assess progress in the years ahead. 

Here, we delve deeper into the numbers from the top construction firms to find out just how male-dominated they are across all levels of seniority, and we ask: how can the industry as a whole improve the gap – and its image – from such a lowly starting point?

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