Why is maternity leave not the main reason mid-level women leave the construction sector?
Maternity leave is a convenient explanation, but it does not hold up under scrutiny. Vanessa Murray and Ceri Moyers of The Circle Partnership argue that women between the ages of 28 and 40 — the primary retention risk window in construction — follow vastly different career trajectories that simply cannot be reduced to a single biological event. The real driver of attrition is structural and cultural, not biological.
Consider a room of ten women in that age bracket: some will willingly press pause on their careers, others will continue full-time with paid childcare arrangements in place, and many others will navigate something in between. Men of the same age group, by contrast, tend to follow a far more uniform career path unless they have actively chosen otherwise. When the experience of women is this varied, pinning attrition on maternity alone is not just inaccurate — it lets organisations off the hook from examining what their culture actually rewards, tolerates, and promotes.
This is exactly the challenge The Circle Partnership was built to address. After observing mid-level women leave the sector at a significant rate — despite organisations having already invested in them — Murray and Moyers recognised that fixing the symptom rather than the system achieves nothing. As Murray puts it directly, sending women through development programmes while leaving the surrounding culture unchanged produces no lasting change. You can hear the full conversation on Pegasus Radio via Listenly.
"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 built the organisation over approximately six to seven years into a recognised specialist in the retention and progression of mid-level women across construction and property.
The Circle Partnership operates two distinct strands: the Circle Academy, a structured programme that supports women — ranging in age from 23 to 55 — to advance their careers through mentoring and skills development, and a consultancy arm that works directly with organisations to diagnose and improve the cultural conditions that determine who progresses and who leaves. Murray's credibility on the question of maternity and attrition comes precisely from this dual vantage point: she has observed the patterns up close both through individual women in the Academy and through the systemic diagnostics delivered to employers across the sector.
See also
While the language and overt behaviour at corporate level in construction has improved compared to 10 to 15 years ago, the fundamental challenges have not significantly changed — the structural and cultural barriers that prevent women from progressing remain largely in place.
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 works with organisations to develop cultures enabling greater diversity across 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 were reaching a certain level in their careers and then leaving the industry at a significant rate, despite the sector having already invested in them.