At The Women In Construction Event, in London in 2017
I have a superpower. It’s not actually one that I like to talk about, because I wasn’t aware that I had it until one morning in 2017, when I decided to attend my first Women in Construction Networking event at the London Build Exhibition. A small section had been set aside for women to congregate network and to take part in a panel discussion. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I’d been out for drinks with a group of these women, who had been invited to an informal gathering, a few days or weeks before the main event. The marketing assistant had met with me face to face.
There was a good mix of us from the various disciplines. I won’t go into the detail but you could liken the construction industry to the much less sexy version of the film industry. The full cast list including the extras and the production crew are on a par with the number of different disciplines, which are involved in getting a modern building designed and built. We were gathered around the central theme of being female in one of the most sexist, at the very least and misogynist at worst, sectors of industry, not to mention recession-prone, but that’s another story.
That morning , I found out that the handful of the other black women in my corner of the room, also share this superpower. We stood and listened while being spoken to by a…
