What’s stopping us from improving diversity?

When I look back on my experiences in secondary school, it always feels rather like I ended up doing engineering by accident. I was good at maths, so I figured that was what I should study, but things didn’t quite go to plan during my A Levels, and I knew I wasn’t going to get the grades for my first-choice university. In that long summer while I waited for my results, I thought about my choices a little bit more. I liked maths, but I also liked physics and graphic design. And I liked drawing. And buildings… but I’d never really given buildings much thought before. And so, on results day, I changed course to architectural engineering – perhaps one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

As I started that course, I discovered several things. I discovered Jägerbombs, I discovered Frank Lloyd Wright, and I discovered that in the real world there were things that you might not do because you were a girl. And honestly, the idea that I might not choose maths or physics or engineering (or that I might not voluntarily do sports) because of gender had never occurred to me up until that point.

Perhaps that’s because I attended an all-girls secondary school (something I have mixed feelings about), perhaps it’s because my mum was a maths teacher (and also taught PE), or perhaps it’s because in primary school I had a teacher who made maths seem like the best subject in the world – for everyone.

In the construction industry, we talk a lot about how to improve diversity, and when we talk about increasing the proportion of women, we often focus on improving participation in STEM subjects in secondary schools. But actually, we probably should be focusing on much younger children.

When I look at the teams around me, it’s clear that diversity of ideas leads to better outcomes

I recently read about a study that suggested gender stereotypes develop between the ages of four and six. Other studies suggest that by age ten, children have a well-formed idea about whether or not they might want to be a scientist. By the time they reach secondary school, it’s often too late to change those gender stereotypes.

Ensuring that secondary school students see STEM role models they can look up to is still important, but if their ideas about gender and science are formed at a much younger age, then it’s going to be far more difficult to persuade them that it’s even an option. And for the construction industry to improve and grow, we need it to be an option.

When I look at the teams around me, it’s clear that diversity of ideas leads to better outcomes. Variety in our experiences and skills means that we can not only offer a greater variety of solutions, but we can learn to explain our ideas better and propose options that we might not otherwise have thought of. We can design better buildings because we can far better understand the people who will use those buildings. But we can only build a diverse team when we have people with different backgrounds, different life experiences and different stories to tell.

So, this International Women’s Day, maybe we need to think more carefully about how our own biases might affect the children around us – especially the younger ones. We need to make sure that children as young as five feel confident about their STEM experiences and see role models that encourage them to pursue any career path, regardless of gender. And as an industry, we need to make sure that our outreach programmes include the youngest children too. After all, they’re the future.