In 2020, as the general manager of Kane Constructions ACT, Joanne Farrell founded Build Like A Girl to match women with pre-apprenticeship and entry-level training to mentors in the construction industry. Video via The Australian of the Year.
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00:00 "Build like a girl" was an insult that was levelled at me multiple times on site early on in my career
00:07 and it was a derogatory kind of thing to say that was somehow making the work that I was doing less than what the guys were doing.
00:15 For a long time in my career I was the only female on sites, whether they were small housing sites or whether they were sites in cities that had several hundred people on them.
00:26 It was always a mission even just to find a bathroom that you could use and just basic kind of things so it could often be a really lonely journey.
00:35 I was lucky enough to work with some exceptional men and women through my career that really helped me through that
00:40 and now I want to change that so when women do enter the industry that they don't feel so alone.
00:45 So I established "Build like a girl" in 2020 and that was really as a result of having a number of women approach me
00:54 after I became the general manager of Kane Constructions, telling me stories about how they tried to enter the industry
01:00 and get apprenticeship roles and different jobs and were rejected purely for the fact that they were female candidates
01:06 and so I wanted to finally do something to change this.
01:10 We are there to facilitate the conversation not only with those people and those young women and gender diverse folk
01:15 but also with the employers as well and different associations and training organisations to try and get something in place
01:20 to actually stop all these barriers that these women were facing and that I'd faced so long ago.
01:25 You still do get an element of people who for whatever reason don't want women on site.
01:34 To put it into some sort of perspective the dropout rate for first year female apprentices is 74%
01:39 so within that first year the toxicity that surrounds them and the type of reactions they get
01:45 makes them leave and we can't keep them which is a massive massive issue.
01:48 We need to start holding ourselves to a higher standard both in the workplace and with the projects that we deliver
01:54 and we're only going to do that if we start bringing in different voices and different opinions and different ways of doing things.
01:59 No one should be telling women or anyone else what they're capable of or not capable of
02:04 and I think that if we start taking that out of conversation and recognising different abilities
02:09 then that opens doors to endless opportunities.
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