Australian Bureau of Statistics labour-force data for 2024 placed women at approximately 3 per cent of the on-tools construction trades workforce (carpenters, electricians, plumbers). That number has moved very little in a decade. The construction industry overall, including the office, design and management layer, is closer to 13 per cent female. The on-tools figure is the one that matters for the Housing Accord.
Australia needs an additional 90,000 workers in the building trades by the end of 2025 and 130,000 by 2029 to hit the 1.2-million-homes target. The only substantial untapped labour pool is the 97 per cent of the on-tools workforce that is not currently female.
The initiatives, named
Four named organisations are doing the work to shift this number. Operators hiring in 2026 should know each of them by name.
NAWIC (the National Association of Women in Construction, founded 1995) runs chapters in every state. The annual NAWIC Awards for Excellence surface individual achievement; more importantly, the NAWIC-RMIT 2024 research surveyed more than 1,300 women on workplace culture, harassment and retention, providing the most comprehensive AU-specific dataset on why women leave trades (which is most of the attrition problem).
SALT (Supporting and Linking Tradeswomen), founded by Hacia Atherton after a workplace accident, runs structured mentoring and the national Women in Trades Awards. SALT’s Empowered Women in Trades training and placement pipeline partnered with Master Builders Victoria and the Victorian government in 2024.
Empowered Women in Trades has, under the SALT umbrella, graduated cohorts into live apprenticeships with partner employers across Melbourne and increasingly in regional Victoria.
The Commonwealth’s Building Women’s Careers programme (October 2024, $55.6 million) funds six industry consortia, including construction, to lift female participation. The New Energy Apprenticeships Programme offers up to $10,000 for women entering clean-energy trades.
The numbers underneath the numbers
NCVER apprenticeship commencement data for 2024 records female apprentice commencements in traditionally male-dominated trades at roughly 4 to 5 per cent of the cohort. That is a small improvement on a decade ago, but it is fragile. Female completion rates lag male rates by 6 to 8 percentage points.
The gap between commencement and completion is where the policy lever that works on the front end fails on the back. The NAWIC-RMIT research identified three recurring attrition causes: workplace culture, physical facility inadequacy (the site toilets literally being male-only at many projects), and the absence of a senior woman on site to whom harassment could be reported without the report going directly to the person being complained about.
None of those three is new. All of them are solvable at the individual-employer level.
What state programmes are doing
Victoria’s Women in Construction Strategy 2024-2030 targets 15 per cent female participation on the state’s major Big Build projects.
NSW Women in Construction has been extended to June 2026 with free apprenticeship support for female participants.
WA’s Building Women’s Careers fund allocated $5 million in 2024 for industry-led programmes.
Each of these programmes has moved the numbers on its own measure. None has moved the aggregate on-tools figure by more than a percentage point at the state level.
We have more women in construction than we had in 2014. We do not yet have more women on the tools than we had in 2014. The first number without the second is not the outcome we need.
The employer moves that work
The research is consistent on what works at the individual-business level. Three interventions repeatedly move the retention number for an individual employer.
- Hiring more than one woman per cohort. A single woman in an eight-person apprentice intake has no peer group. Two or three do. The retention differential between cohorts with one woman and cohorts with two or more is substantial.
- Auditing the physical site for basic adequacy. Women’s toilets on site, lockable changing facilities, PPE that fits. These are not optional and have been, on many Australian construction sites, poorly provided.
- Assigning a senior-woman mentor outside the direct reporting line. The NAWIC structure provides this externally; employers who replicate it internally, with a senior woman to whom apprentices can go without career consequence, see meaningfully better completion rates.
None of these is expensive. All of them require the business to treat the recruitment of women not as an HR exercise but as an operational change.
The business case, specifically
For a trades SMB in 2026, the business case for doing the three things above is not principally about gender equity. It is about access to labour in a market where labour is the binding constraint. The HIA’s Trades Availability Index is at -0.47 overall, with bricklaying at -1.02 (the worst reading in the twenty-year history of the index). A trades SMB in 2026 cannot meet its demand pipeline on the current labour pool. It has to widen the pool.
Widening the pool starts with the 97 per cent. The employers who understand this in 2026 will be the ones hiring, retaining, and winning the contracts that depend on having the workforce to deliver them.
The numbers are slow. The shift is real. And the businesses that move early will have the advantage for the next cycle of Australian construction, which is not small.