For years, Nell Clerkin thought she’d become a lawyer. Excelling in subjects like English and History, her school careers advisors felt law was a natural fit. Now, aged 26, she’s been in the construction industry for five years.
“Going into construction was definitely never something I saw for me, particularly infrastructure – we’re working with pipes, we’re digging holes – but it has honestly been the best decision I’ve ever made,” says Manchester-based Clerkin.
Clerkin is head of business performance at United Infrastructure, which builds infrastructure networks across energy, water, telecoms and for social developments. Her career began as a graduate bid writer, before going on to do a Master’s in quantity surveying and commercial management.
In her current role, she was recently asked to take on an interim role as head of bids, and has been selected to take part in the company’s future leaders programme. “I’ve come on leaps and bounds [here],” she says.
Women on the rise
The number of women in the construction industry is steadily growing. Female employment within small to medium construction businesses is up 8.7 per cent quarter on quarter, according to recent data from Employment Hero, a HR and payroll platform that has been tracking trends from its 140,000 construction clients over the past year.
Meanwhile, 13 percent of women say they want to move into construction and trades generally as they feel it’s a sector that’s less at risk of AI reducing jobs. That’s according to a June survey by Fix Radio.
But like Clerkin, women are not necessarily joining the construction industry in manual roles, as the number of management and corporate roles is rising thanks to a sector boom.
“We’re in a period of national transformation comparable only to Victorian industrialisation or the post‑war rebuild. To deliver it, the sector needs all hands on deck, and that includes women entering careers across construction and utilities. These don’t necessarily involve physical labour, but strategy, planning, innovation, and more,” outlines Catherine O’Brien, United Infrastructure’s group head of marketing and communications.
O’Brien says the pipeline of women entering early-career roles is growing year on year. “Female talent is entering design and construction management, project controls, quantity surveying, environmental advisory, innovation engineering, finance, HR, business administration, and water operations.”
But could this create a two-tier industry – office roles for the women and site roles for the men? O’Brien disagrees. “These aren’t token roles, but critical ones that influence how infrastructure is designed, delivered and improved,” she argues.
Yet roles like Clerkin’s are going under the radar when it comes to attracting women, who still largely see construction as a male industry. “It’s historically been a fairly hidden industry. But we’re seeing a shift in that perception” says O’Brien.
Clerkin certainly found her career path serendipitously. Her gut feeling was to keep her options open, so she chose to study English at university. She thought she could do a law conversion course – or follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a teacher.
“I thought, is it really something that I want to do, or am I just saying it because everybody’s telling me that that’s what I should go into?” says Clerkin.
Come graduation time, and she was still not convinced. Her dad, who worked on a gas site, offered her some admin work – opening her eyes to an entire industry she’d previously never considered. “I’d gone from reading Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, to being on a gas site, which is not one of the nicest places in the world, but I completely fell in love with it.
“Previously I’d just been ‘book, book, book’, but, now, I’d gone on to something that was much more practical,” she says.
“I’d been in predominantly female environments my whole life, and then obviously going out on site was a completely male environment, and it was just a laugh. The banter was really good.
“Everyone worked hard, and encouraged me, too. As soon as you got out there, they’d be high fiving you. It was all really interesting.”
‘During my apprenticeship, I was the only girl on site. I did get stick, but… we ended up getting on really well,’ says Claire Brittain (Photo: Skills for Life)From bricklayer to bachelor’s degree
Claire Brittain, on the other hand, did start out “on the tools” – during a time when there were still hardly any women in the industry.
Now 36, Brittain began as a bricklaying apprentice aged 17, after bucking the trend of taking hair and beauty courses at college, and going for construction modules instead.
She’d been inspired by the extension her parents were doing on their house, with her dad encouraging her to take up a construction career for the financial stability and job opportunities. But it wasn’t always easy.
“I was the only girl that was doing it, and I did get a bit of stick from people at school saying, ‘you only want to do it to be with the boys’. But my college lecturers told me I was better than the boys at the bricklaying, so that was a confidence boost,” says Birmingham-based Brittain.
“During my apprenticeship, I was the only girl on site. I did get stick again, but once the bricklayers that I worked with could see that I could actually do it, and I was keen, we ended up getting on really well.”
When Brittain fell pregnant at 19, she worked right up until a week before giving birth, completing her apprenticeship. She later took on a trainee site manager role with BAM Construction UK, who paid for her to do a construction management degree. She’s now a senior site manager there.
While Brittain recalls uncomfortable moments early in her career – like her site manager telling her to take down all the page three posters in the canteen – she believes times have changed.
“On the last three or four sites I’ve been on, I’ve had assistant site managers, quantity surveyors and design managers that have been female. On my last site, I think there were more women on the management side than men,” she says.
“There are a lot of men out there that are very happy to have women in managerial roles.”
Brittain has since gone on to have two more children, and now works four days a week around her youngest, who is two. She thinks women don’t necessarily realise that flexible working options like this can be negotiated in the construction industry. Now, she sees herself progressing into project management after her youngest starts school.
It’s the reason Brittain decided to become one of the faces of the government’s Skills for Life campaign, showcasing female role models from across the construction industry, and raising awareness of the careers resources available.
Likewise, Clerkin sees it as her duty to encourage other women into the construction industry. “It’s my responsibility to get that word out to say there are other opportunities out there,” she says. “It’s not just about digging holes. We have a whole business to run.”
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