Recruitment drive boosts number of women working on railways.

By Catherine Fox

When the Australian Rail Track Corporation (ARTC) decided to tackle the lack of women in male-dominated jobs in the Hunter Valley last year, it didn’t waste any time getting the message out to the community.

Instead of trying to recruit candidates individually, the company targeted a group of women for entry-level jobs by holding an open day in Muswellbrook, setting up a Facebook page and getting the local media involved.

In the end, the Mayor made a speech, a total of 900 women applied for six roles, and 11 strong applicants were eventually given jobs.

The recruitment drive was deliberately aimed at getting women into non-traditional roles such as signal installers, and was part of the company’s effort to improve diversity and capability by drawing from a wider pool of candidates.

The wave of women recruits has been so successful — with many progressing twice as fast as men — that there are now all-women teams and other depots are asking for women, ARTC executive general manager of people Jenny McAuliffe told a seminar on women in construction in Sydney recently.

Plenty of men objected to the campaign

Working on the railways may not have been regarded as an option for many women in the past, but the ARTC campaign helped boost the total number of women in the workforce in just over a year from 17 per cent to nearly 20 per cent in December 2016.

And, while women comprised just 1.1 per cent of workers in non-traditional jobs in the Hunter Valley before the campaign, now, in 2016, they account for 9.6 per cent.

Predictably, there were plenty of men at the company who objected to the recruitment drive, says Ms McAuliffe. Some told her having women around was a safety concern because they would distract men, but that hasn’t seemed to occur.

The ARTC experience was a positive example at the forum on women in construction, but there was also plenty of sobering data on the barriers still faced by women in the sector.

For example, ABS data cited in the UNSW report, Construction Industry: Demolishing gender structures, revealed women made up just 12 per cent of the construction workforce in 2016, down from 17 per cent in 2006.

For the study, which was supported by Loughborough University and the Diversity Council Australia, researchers collected data from interviews with 61 professionals, observations of 14 company events, and visits to six construction project sites, between 2014-2015.

They found that while men dominated senior technical operational careers, women were concentrated in junior support roles, were employed in just 2 per cent of trades jobs, and faced inequality in pay and progression.

Women leave construction 39pc faster than men

UNSW researcher Adam Rogan said women were also more likely to be recruited through formal processes, whereas men tended to rely on networks, such as family and friends in the sector, to get jobs.

“Women don’t have access to those [network] channels,” Mr Rogan told the forum. “There’s a strong incentive around recruiting people who were seen as a fit with the values of the company. But it maintains a monoculture and reduces diversity, not encourages it.”

Male sponsorship of other men also perpetuates the exclusion of women and prevents the development of a pipeline of women candidates for promotions, the study found.

There are three reasons why women leave the construction profession 39 per cent faster than their male peers, said UNSW Built Environment researcher Natalie Galea: rigid practices, poor parental leave policies, and sexism.

The ARTC’s Hunter Valley exercise used formal recruitment processes as well as community and media initiatives to optimise its campaign, and deliberately targeted a group rather than individuals.

This was only possible after an exemption was granted by the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board to advertise for 14 entry level jobs specifically for women.

The successful group of candidates were then sent to four centres so they were not the only women employees in their workplace, Ms McAuliffe explained.

On a practical level, this meant the women had a support network and could share experiences, but it also showed staff that the company was serious about improving diversity.

Many of the women appointed had previously been working in casual jobs with low pay.

“We are just booming with these women at the moment,” Ms McAuliffe told the seminar.

“Now all of a sudden we have this pool of highly educated, competent women and they have experience and they can’t believe what they are being paid. Men have a sense of entitlement and we don’t have automatic pay increments.”

The ARTC’s board and executive believes that a more diverse workforce makes sense purely from a business perspective, and gives a competitive advantage — it would be silly not to grasp that opportunity, Ms McAuliffe said.

It’s a message the researchers are hoping will rapidly spread to other employers in the construction sector.

This post originally appeared on ABC News.