Women in Infrastructure: Sharing best practice to accelerate gender diversity

Our Women in Infrastructure initiative was born from our Transforming Infrastructure Delivery report, which was launched in December 2022. In it, one of our featured speakers Heidi Alexander, who is a Transport for London Board Member, former Deputy Mayor for Transport, and a former London MP,  highlighted the need to attract more women into the infrastructure sector. This is something that reflected our own observations over the years and her words inspired us to develop this initiative to see what we could do to help fast-track progress towards gender diversity.

The representation of women remains significantly low within the UK infrastructure sector, with only 22% occupying junior roles, 13% in mid-level positions, 9% in senior roles and a mere 2% holding CEO roles globally. We need collective action to attract more women into the sector and foster an environment that retains and uplifts female colleagues and empowers their career progression.

Our Women in Infrastructure Report is a culmination of work, written in collaboration with industry leaders to understand the shared challenges and opportunities required to drive positive change for gender diversity within our sector. Through engagement with the industry, we found that although significant challenges for better representation remain, there are a range of great initiatives taking place within organisations that had previously not been shared more broadly.

Our report seeks to showcase best practice in the industry and is intended to empower organisations to consider different programmes or approaches that could be implemented to drive change. Being uniquely placed, Infrastructure Matters (IM) was able to bring together a range of partners within the industry to contribute towards the report including Costain, University College London, Arcadis, Tideway, WSP, COWI, Amazon, the Institution of Civil Engineers, Jacobs, AECOM, Snowy Hydro and more. Through industry case studies and supporting resources, this report presents a range of best practice examples which show the current challenges faced in areas such as education, recruitment and workplace culture, and successful solutions that have overcome them.