Moving On Up is a programme which is designed to support construction companies in retaining and progressing women in their businesses. The programme aims to support companies’ ambitions to improve their gender diversity through direct support of women and supervisors in their employment and to create company-wide gender diversity action plans for change.

We were delighted to start the new year by welcoming back the participants from Cohort 2 for their sixth session. In this session, the participants presented on their experiences and learnings from being part of the programme. The women were amazing – they shared some very powerful experiences and offered great suggestions on how to improve both the industry’s support of women and their own career progression. The companies represented were Lendlease, Acconia, Openreach, Wilson & Scott, Briggs & Forrester, Bryne Bros, Powerday and Tilbury Douglas and we would like to thank them all for their support.

The presentations really did show how, as a result of this programme, the women have all gained a huge amount of confidence both professionally and personally. A theme which ran through the session was the importance and value of peer support, everyone agreed that it can help you push yourself, motivate you and help you overcome something you never thought you could overcome in the past – including presenting! Peer support was certainly evident within the presentations and it was great to see everyone working together with their heads held high and big smiles on their faces.

At the end of January we will be meeting again to put all of the knowledge from the programme workshops into practice, as the participants start to create their company’s Action Plans for Change. As part of this we will use WiC’s Gender Diversity Tool which has been created to support construction and engineering companies to improve their performance and strategic approach to Gender Equality and Diversity within the workplace. This tool will help the participating companies to:

• Evaluate your gender equality and diversity current practice and establish a baseline;
• Reflect on existing gender, equality and diversity measures and their effectiveness; and
• Develop activities in support of the recruitment, retention and progression of female staff and colleagues; and thus
• Develop an inclusive culture benefitting all

Look out for further posts about the programme soon and if you would like to know more about Moving on Up please visit our dedicated page here.