Increasing women's participation within the built environment ?

Diversity is a strategy and a source of competitive advantage, not an issue – Amanda Clack, RICS President Elect.

Despite clear and growing evidence that workforce diversity can underpin business success, the real estate and construction industries lag behind many others when it comes to gender diversity.

The property and construction profession is in desperate need to attract a broader base of entrants – or quite simply by 2019 Britain stops building, as currently around 400,000 people join and leave the industry every year.

RICS is working to drive change in a global real estate sector where, today, only 13% of professionals are women. Our campaign, Surveying the Future seeks to identify barriers to greater diversity and to demonstrate the breadth and range of careers available.

Clearly the cyclical nature of the industry doesn’t help in the recruitment and retention of talent. Professions like RICS are doing as much as they can to help in this regard. But it’s the areas of diversity and inclusion where we are currently hoping to also make a real difference.

Redressing the gender balance

Diversity and inclusivity are key areas RICS is looking to address. We have an aging workforce and have to do something to redress the balance for the reasons I have stated earlier. As an industry we have improving statistics on gender – for example 3% of the profession were female 20 years ago, 10 years ago it was 6% and today its 13% globally (or 15% in the UK).

Some areas of the profession are doing better than others, so rural has 31% female membership but quantity surveying is just 11%. We need more women in the profession, but we also need greater diversity and need to get data to help us start to tackle what needs to be done.

Attracting and retaining talents

Our #RICSFutures report – Our Changing World: Let’s Be Ready – identified a call to action on the war for talent in the profession and our industry. So, to help this, RICS launched the Quality Mark for Employers in June 2015, which will start to consider the wider aspects of diversity in the profession. This focuses on six key principles to be assessed, namely:

• Leadership and Vision – commitment to increasing the diversity of the workforce
• Recruitment – engage and attract new people to the industry from under-represented groups; best practice recruitment methods
• Staff development – training/promotion policies that offer equal opportunities for career progression
• Staff retention – flexible working arrangements/adaptive working practices
• Staff engagement – an inclusive culture where all staff engage with developing, delivering, monitoring and assessing the diversity and inclusivity policies
• Continuous improvement – continually refreshing and renewing the firm’s commitment to being the best employer; sharing and learning from best practice across the industry

A diverse approach starts at the top, and for many of our major firms these are still predominantly male – but what leader in business can afford to ignore talent in the workplace and that comes from embracing the diversity and inclusion agenda head on?

Diversity is a strategy and a source of competitive advantage in the industry, not an issue

People often come at tackling diversity from the perspective of it is an issue to be addressed. I come at it from the other way round, that diversity has to be embedded as part of your business strategy because you simply cannot afford to not have a diverse workforce today and for the future.

I work closely with the National Equality Standard (NES) run from within EY. Here we are working with business leaders and organisations to help them understand and improve their business perspectives by having a better understanding of diversity in their organisations.

For the property industry, there is a great EY Report published with the Property Council of Australia entitled The next big deal is on. Property Industry where are you on gender diversity?. It’s not a great read for the industry speaking of the fact we are at a critical juncture, but does highlight the fact that gender diversity in the workforce absolutely makes compelling business sense!

Personally I love this report – it talks about changing coming from the top through leadership and also how gender diversity on boards can have a profound effect stating that REITS [Real Estate Investment Trusts] who had a female board member for three years or more experienced higher shareholder returns. So, if that doesn’t make perfect business sense I am not sure what does!