Why does The Circle Partnership exist — and what gap in construction is it actually trying to fix?
The Circle Partnership was founded specifically to tackle the retention of mid-level women in the built environment. Both co-founders, Vanessa Murray and Ceri Moyers, observed the same pattern independently: women were entering the sector through broadly balanced graduate schemes, then leaving at a striking rate once they reached a certain career stage — particularly between the ages of 28 and 40 — leaving a hollow in the senior leadership pipeline that entry-level initiatives and board-level diversity targets were simply not designed to address.
The key insight driving the organisation is that the problem was not a pipeline issue at entry level, but a retention issue in the middle. As Murray describes it, organisations had already invested in these women, who were already inside the sector — so the question became: why not focus on keeping them? The Circle Partnership was built to occupy precisely that space, sitting between early-career initiatives and C-suite representation goals. It operates through two distinct arms: the Circle Academy, which supports women's career progression directly through mentoring and development, and a consultancy business that works with organisations on culture change — because developing individual women is only half the equation. You can hear the full conversation on Listenly to understand how those two sides of the business interact in practice.
The Circle Academy itself reflects just how broad the definition of "mid-level" turns out to be in practice: participants range in age from 23 to 55, which speaks to the variety of career trajectories in construction and property. The organisation has been running for approximately six to seven years — long enough for Murray and Moyers to have developed a clear-eyed view of what systemic change in this sector actually requires, and what it does not.
"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 PartnershipAbout 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 built The Circle Partnership from the ground up over approximately six to seven years, developing it into a recognised voice on gender retention and organisational culture in construction. Murray's authority on this subject comes not from theory but from years of observing the same attrition pattern play out across the sector — and then designing a practical response to it. The business she co-leads now runs two complementary arms: the Circle Academy, a structured mentoring and development programme serving women across a remarkably wide career range, and a consultancy practice that advises companies on the cultural conditions needed to make retention durable. Her perspective, evident throughout the Pegasus Radio episode, is that fixing individuals without changing the environment around them achieves nothing — a position grounded in years of working directly inside the problem.