Sexuality Attitudes in the Building Trade?

ATTITUDES towards sexuality in the construction industry requires some careful research and a journal in the British building trade, Construction News, is seeking the views of UK contractor and cost consultant employees for a survey on attitudes towards lesbian, gay and bisexual employees in the construction sector.  Take the survey now - all answers are anonymous and treated in strict confidence.


A similar survey by CITB last year , shared with Construction News, found that sexist and homophobic language was regularly heard on sites.   What a surprise!  According to Construction News:  'Almost half (48 per cent) of workers said that they had heard homophobic language in the past year, while 13 per cent had heard it at least once a week.'


Now Construction News has teamed up with sister titles Architects’ Journal and New Civil Engineer, along with gay, lesbian and bisexual charity Stonewall, to explore attitudes towards sexuality, including homophobia and workplace support.


Mark Hansford in an article in Construction News entitled 'Is our industry homophobic?' on the 3rd, February 2015 wrote: 
'Built environment companies do less to promote sexual diversity and tackle homophobia than banking and the armed forces...'


According to Stonewall, a leading gay rights campaigning group, lesbian, gay and bisexual workers' productivity could be at risk as it singled out the construction industry for failing to keep pace in the drive to support sexual diversity.  The British building trade doesn't even figure in the league table of the Workplace Equality Index of 100 leading firms:  in the top 10-ranked companies for workplace equality are the heavyweight consultancy Accenture, closely followed by the Home Office and the computer giant IBM. 


The league table started in 2005 and is based on a ranking of companies’ efforts to improve sexual orientation equality.  In addition, only four built environment companies are participating in Stonewall’s Diversity Champions Programme, representing just 0.6% of the 627 participating organisations. 


Now National Construction Enterprises  (NCE) have teamed up with sister titles The Architects Journal and Construction News to conduct an anonymous survey that explores attitudes to sexuality across the whole construction sector.  The survey is targeted at the whole construction industry, and employees of both genders and all sexualities.