SIMIAN Set to Celebrate International Women’s Day
2nd March 2021
The 8th March 2021 will mark International Women’s Day, a day to celebrate the achievements of women across the world, raise awareness of women’s equality and promote accelerated gender parity.
As a business operating within the construction industry, we’re fully committed to promoting the benefits that a diverse workforce can bring, in a sector that is currently only made up of an estimated 13% women!
For a number of years, we have been actively highlighting the amazing opportunities available to women in the construction industry, challenging the perception of the industry as male dominated. We are very excited to see the progress in this area, with more and more women choosing scaffolding as their career.
We recently wrote about Vicky Welch, the UK’s first female Advanced Scaffolder who had completed her CISRS Advanced Scaffolding course at SIMIAN’s Waltham Forest training centre. Vicky herself has been active in promoting diversity within the industry, with her ‘females in scaffolding’ initiative.
Jess Hollowell, Support Services Manager at SIMIAN has said:
‘I joined SIMIAN in 2016, as an administrative Apprentice. In that time, I have worked across most departments in the business, including consultancy, training and accounts.
The opportunities I have been given to progress have been fantastic and gender certainly isn’t a barrier at Simian. For the past two years, I have been sitting accounts qualifications, but an opportunity arose for a promotion to oversee all elements of business support across the whole business and I felt that was too good an opportunity not to take!
There has always been bias in the construction industry with regards to gender diversity, however I look forward to the day when the imbalance in construction is rectified, which I am beginning to see more and more.’
Commercial Director at SIMIAN, Jackie Thomason has said:
‘In my opinion the right person for a job is the right person, and gender should in no way be a factor. I believe that some may be hesitant of working in construction due to the misconception that it is a male dominated environment. However, I strongly disagree. The opportunities for women in this industry are fantastic, I cannot identify one reason why a woman should not seek a career in construction and more specifically in scaffolding’
How is your business celebrating women in construction this International Women’s Day? What more do you think the industry could be doing to encourage gender parity? We’d love to hear from you on Twitter or Facebook.