As well as being home secretary in 2012, prime minister Theresa May held the minister for women and equality brief.
Often compared to Britain’s first female prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the then home secretary was ambitious and went on to fulfil her aim of becoming the UK’s second female PM in 2016.
It was in 2012, years before she would move into Number 10, that she established the Women’s Business Council, a government-backed initiative led by the business community with the aim to maximise women’s contribution to economic growth ( see box ).
At the time, a report revealed that the percentage of women on FTSE100 boards had increased from 12.5 per cent in 2011 to 15.6 per cent in 2012.
Despite being nearly six years ago, if you were to apply that calculation to the boards of construction companies, it is unlikely you would even reach 15 per cent.
In 2014, CN reported that the percentage of women working in the industry was just 12 per cent and there were only 21 women on the boards of the top 20 UK contractors .
By 2016, women formed 12.8 per cent of the construction workforce, but there were fewer women on the boards of the top 20 than there had been three years before.When the Women’s Business Council approached CN in February 2017 to explore what we could do to tackle this, it wasn’t hard to see why we should get involved.Having investigated the lack of gender diversity in construction leadership roles over many years, […]
Read the full post here CN launches ‘Inspire Me’ campaign
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