What kinds of practical help are available to help women working in construction or looking to join?
Women and Manual Trades, with support from various funding agencies including ourselves, have worked on a project called Building Work for Women. A woman who perhaps has done a part-time course and a bit of construction, but then has had caring duties, isn’t ready to come back in or to go on a site on her own… [The programme] has bridged that gap. Funding for that has now ceased and I don’t know why. We’re looking at other ways to do a similar thing and the Olympic Park has given us an impetus to do that. The Women into Construction project – which is funded by the London Development Agency and ourselves – is based on all the information that we’ve got. We looked at it and thought ‘How could we best encourage women into the industry and encourage employers to work with the women when they’ve joined’. Do you think that today’s chilly economic climate could make a difference? I think what we might find – and I have no evidence of it yet – is that women who are perhaps on the admin or off
