The construction industry offers rewarding careers to women. Jobs in construction are projected to grow at all levels and apprenticeships offer well-established pathways to skilled, well-rewarded jobs in the trades. Healthy and safe worksites are a prerequisite if the industry wants to attract and retain women. Yet, too often women face hostile work environments or harassment and find themselves on worksites without decent or safe sanitary facilities, protective clothing and equipment in the wrong sizes, and sufficient on-the-job training, reducing their ability to perform their work safely, and making it less likely that they will stay and thrive in the industry.
This webinar, co-hosted by the National Association for Women in Construction (NAWIC), the National Center for Women’s Equity in Apprenticeship and Employment, and the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) to mark 2018 NAWIC Women in Construction Week, will discuss health and safety on work sites from a gender perspective. It will address issues such as:
- sanitary facilities
- personal protective equipment
- reproductive hazards
- ergonomics
- workplace culture and harassment
and will provide examples of policies and practices that will ensure a welcoming, safe, and healthy work environment- for women and men. The webinar will conclude with questions from the audience.
About the author
Ariane Hegewisch is Program Director of Employment and Earnings at IWPR and Scholar in Residence at American University; prior to that she spent two years at IWPR as a scholar-in-residence. She came to IWPR from the Center for WorkLife Law at UC Hastings. She is responsible for IWPR’s research on workplace discrimination and is a specialist in comparative human resource management, with a focus on policies and legislative approaches to facilitate greater work life reconciliation and gender equality, in the US and internationally. Prior to coming to the USA she taught comparative European human resource management at Cranfield School of Management in the UK where she was a founding researcher of the Cranet Survey of International HRM, the largest independent survey of human resource management policies and practices, covering 25 countries worldwide. She started her career in local economic development, developing strategies for greater gender equality in employment and training in local government in the UK. She has published many papers and articles and co-edited several books, including ‘Women, work and inequality: The challenge of equal pay in a deregulated labour market”. She is German and has a BSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and an MPhil in Development Studies from the IDS, Sussex.
