Has the challenge of retaining women in construction really changed over the last 10 to 15 years?
The surface has changed — but the foundation has not. While corporate language and overt behaviour have improved noticeably over the past decade or so, the fundamental barriers to retaining women in construction remain exactly as they were. According to Vanessa Murray and Ceri Moyers of The Circle Partnership, that is because those barriers are not rooted in corporate policy — they are rooted in society itself.
Murray and Moyers describe the problem through a triangle of interconnected factors. At the societal level: unequal political and media representation. At the cultural level: the unequal distribution of childcare responsibilities and limited access to genuine flexible working. And at the personal level: women's own limiting self-beliefs and differing definitions of success — including, as Murray notes, a tendency for men to "fake it till they make it" far more readily than women. These three layers reinforce one another, and none of them has meaningfully shifted.
That assessment is not anecdotal. Research from organisations including McKinsey and Shape Talent has tracked these core issues over time and consistently finds them stable. The Circle Partnership has observed this directly across its now six to seven years of operating the Circle Academy programme, working with women aged 23 to 55 — all of whom self-identify as mid-level — and across its consultancy work inside construction organisations. The age window of greatest risk, women aged 28 to 40, has not changed either.
"If you fix the women in inverted commas, you're not doing anything. If they're going back into a culture which isn't changing, you're still going to have the same problem."
— Vanessa Murray, Co-founder, The Circle Partnership
About Vanessa Murray
Vanessa Murray co-founded The Circle Partnership alongside Ceri Moyers, bringing direct experience from the property side of the built environment sector. Together, they identified a specific and persistent gap: mid-level women were leaving construction at a significant rate, representing a costly loss of talent for organisations that had already invested in them. That observation became the founding premise of The Circle Partnership.
Now in its sixth or seventh year, The Circle Partnership operates two distinct arms: the Circle Academy, which directly supports women to advance their careers through mentoring and structured development, and a consultancy practice that works with businesses on organisational culture. Murray's authority on the question of whether things have changed stems from that accumulated experience — having worked with Circle Academy participants ranging from age 23 to 55, and having advised the organisations those women work within. Her position is clear: without genuine cultural change inside organisations, individual development programmes can only go so far.
See also
The Circle Partnership operates two distinct arms: the Circle Academy, which supports mid-level women directly to advance their careers through an extensive mentoring programme, and a consultancy arm that advises organisations on developing inclusive cultures within the built environment sector.
The Circle Partnership was founded to address the retention of mid-level women in the built environment sector, after both co-founders observed that women would enter the industry, reach a certain level, and then leave at a significant rate — representing a major loss of talent for organisations that had already invested in them.