Did you know only 14% of the construction industry are women?
BY YASMIN VINCE
On a plot of land in Suffolk, there is an all-female team building a house. It shouldn’t be remarkable but it is, especially as only 14% of the construction industry are women. Kat Parsons and her wife, Fi, are the brains behind All Female Design and Build.
We caught up with Kat to learn more about the project.
How did All Female Design and Build get started?
My wife and I bought a house three years ago. It was a shack of a house and the guy who had lived in it for the past 70 years had retro carpets and pink, thin, flowery wallpaper everywhere. We love a DIY project so we did the initial flip ourselves. We knew we wanted to do a big bit of work on it and when we had our Sky connected, they sent a female Sky engineer unprompted. This engineer turned up and I had never seen a female Sky engineer, so I was rattling off questions about how she finds her industry. That was the first moment when I started to think about this project.
Our house flip got bigger and Fi and I were chatting one day and thought it’d be good to get some female tradies involved and we saw a female plumber van go past us. It’s usually me that comes up with these ridiculously ambitious ideas but it was actually Fi who said we should do this. It was in 2023 when we came up with this. She said, “In 2023, do you reckon we could build a house with an all-female team?” So we started to look into it.
Why did you want to do this?
I was in the construction industry for about 16 years, working on oil and gas sites, property, house builds and so on. I’m used to being on a site. How you are treated sometimes when you turn up to site – you can see this sort of like “Oh no, they’ve sent a woman!” There’s this lack of respect, you’re underestimated. It was a really challenging space to work in and I worked my way up to quite a senior position in the organisations I was in and then I decided I’d had enough. I had a complete career change but my wife is still in the construction industry. She’s been in it for 30 years and had similar experiences. You must have to work twice as hard. You can’t be seen to fail and you need to be invincible.
How did you go about putting your team together?
Because of our construction backgrounds, we’re connected with a lot of design people. We knew geotechnical engineers, structural engineers, architects. We started to reach out to a few people and then that network just grew and grew because they knew other women and were recommending each other. So the design side wasn’t too bad.
There were a few things we struggled with – things like building surveyors. I had to go to eight companies locally and no one had a building surveyor who was female. We did a podcast and a case study with the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors to say we wanted to find female surveyors for this project and had to go through eight different companies before the ninth one had a female surveyor. That’s not good enough.
When it came to construction that was the bit we really struggled with because there’s only 1% of women working on the tools. We were on the verge of giving up but through the power of Instagram, we found a carpenter. She then linked us in with our main builders. We’ve got three female bricklayers, female scaffolders coming from Sheffield. It’s snowballed because of their trading network.
That 1% statistic is so shocking. Why do you think it’s such a male-dominated field?
I think because it’s a tough environment most of the time. The team have been saying they’re constantly underestimated physically, technically, professionally. Having to be absolutely bulletproof so that you know everything about everything. Even on this project, they’re so above and beyond to make sure that they’re bulletproof.
Some guys are brilliant and not an issue. But all of us have been on a site where the men make jokes about asking us to make brews instead. We have to be very secure in ourselves to be able to put up with this.
What’s the environment like on site?
When everyone’s been on site I ask if they have ever worked with other female
tradies before. They always say, “Never, I’ve never bumped into another female tradie.” It’s a different vibe on site. It’s really nice that everyone says good morning. It’s a different level of respect and they’re so curious about what each other do as well. Sometimes they’re not even focusing on their own job because they’re too busy helping someone else.
What’s really interesting, and I don’t know if there’s any sort of research into this, but a lot of our construction team is queer. That’s not what we’ve been advertising so it was so interesting. We’ve got one person who’s straight and we were all talking about her boyfriend like it was a novelty to talk about a straight relationship.
How should the industry change to better support women who want to enter this field?
There’s a couple of things. One is around the culture that you have on site and that’s almost easy to do when you’re a big building company. That culture is easier to influence because you’ve got leaders and heads of diversity inclusion. You can almost mandate the culture of your organisation. What we’ve found is those smaller construction teams tend to have a culture around stereotyping women as physically incapable of doing this.
There’s a practical point too. The PPE and the workwear that’s provided for women is only just starting to come out which is ridiculous in 2025. Having to work on contaminated land sites when you have to wear men’s overalls and the crotch is around your knees and your high-vis jacket is always like six inches too long does not make you look professional when you turn up on site. And it’s not safe. You’re almost being set up to fail in the first place. As part of the project, we partnered with a company called Work Boutique and they only provide female PPE.
And pay. Women are not paid as much as men, especially on tools. Our main builder said when she got started, she started at the same time as a guy and he was being paid £25 a day more than her because he was a guy and she was a girl. She brought it up and they said their hands are tied.
What has been the best thing about the project?
I think the highlight is being able to open the caravan door everyday and the team are just beaming. To be able to have our two kids be part of this as well. They come home from school and the girls are teaching them how to drive the dumper and the brickie was teaching them how to lay bricks yesterday. To be able to show them that this is possible.
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Some years ago I needed to get a boiler changed. I heard of a woman who had been made redundant from British-Leyland and retrained as a gas plumber (technician, NOT engineer!) but had given up. She said one customer even slammed the door in her face when she arrived. And that customer was a woman.