A view on the future of construction
Washington, D.C.— From the stage of the Building Innovation Conference 2024, Amy Marks told the audience about the time she attended a panel on the future of construction. The panel consisted of “five white men over the age of 55,” she recalled.
“I raised my hand and said, ‘This is not it.’”
Fast forward to the D.C. conference on building innovation, hosted by the National Institute of Building Sciences, which was celebrating its 50th year. Marks was part of a general session titled “A Look Ahead: The Next 50 Years of the Built Environment.” And Marks, the executive vice president of global strategy for Symetri, a construction technology company, and a woman who has garnered many millions of viewers through the “Queen of PreFab” YouTube channel, was part of the panel. This time, female panelists outnumbered male panelists, three to one.
Not surprisingly, there was considerable discussion of materials, techniques and codes designed to mitigate increasingly violent storms and disasters. But there was also a vision for the future that included a more diverse workforce.
Early in her remarks, Marks pointed to the disconnect between some traditional terms and the effort toward diversity.
“While we're in D.C., just a hint here, if you want more women, stop calling it the Brotherhood of the Iron Workers, or the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. I’m just putting it out there. Because if you want us, [you should] really want us.”
Women make up less than 11% of jobs in construction and only 4% in skilled trades, according to government statistics. That’s far better than the 1970s, but still a glaring shortfall of diversity.
Work in Progress
Also on the “Look Ahead” panel was 84 Lumber’s Christi Powell. Powell, who heads the Women Business Enterprise Division and is an HBSDealer Top Women in Hardware & Building Supply honoree, described progress on the diversity front.
Female representation at companies in the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council in the Northeast has swelled from 6 percent two years ago, to 37 percent.
“That’s just happened in 24 months,” Powell said. “And it’s really going to make a huge difference on innovation, the creativity and the forward-thinking processes and systems and policies that we're going to be putting in place for the construction industry.”
“You know you need outspoken challengers,” she said. “What your organization needs to see next, you need to provide air cover for those agents of change.”
Changing mindsets will be a big part of the growth of construction over the next 50 years. And there’s a need for a new generation of tech savvy workers. And she used a pizza-delivery analogy to make her point.
“We also need challengers about technology,” she said. For instance: “I could order pizza right now from my Apple watch. For it to get here, there would be 70 different types of technology. But on a job site, I'm just calling somebody to call somebody to call somebody to see if my $500,000 piece of equipment is going to show up.”
To wrap up the panel, moderator Monika Serrano, resilience program manager for Turner Construction, asked panelists, “What makes you angry?”
Marks, herself a competitive rugby player, shared a personal story about her daughter’s rugby experience.
“What makes me angry is that we have a lot of people that talk about that they want diversity in the construction space,” she said. “And then every weekend I get to watch my daughter and all of her friends and the girls who are on her team. And I watch these thousands of girls on the field, where girls are wearing cleats and they know how to use the core of their body, and they're strong, and they don't need exoskeletons to be on job sites.“
“And then I look around, and there's not one sponsorship sign for Turner or Skanska or Bechtel, or any of these construction companies that say they want women. And I think to myself, they don't really want us. Because if they really wanted us, they’d stop talking. And they’d write a check.”
