November 5, 2024: In February 2024, OUSEA began publishing a monthly spotlight to highlight the opportunity for employers to fill above-average job openings in construction, including by expanding opportunities to women. Since then, openings have fallen to more typical levels as construction jobs have become filled with the rebalancing of the labor market. At the same time, since February, construction employment grew by 133,000 – 18,000 of which was accounted for by women. This means that about 1 in 7 jobs have gone to women, helping to maintain the share of women in construction at just over 14 percent. This points to the need for initiatives like Commerce’s “Million Women in Construction” to offer momentum and help scale up women’s participation in the construction industry. This blog offers a review of what has happened to job openings and the opportunity for employers since February.

In September, there were about 300,000 job openings in construction, about in line with the average in the last seven years.  Job openings have come down from a record level of about 450,000 early in 2024 (see Figure 1). This record level of job openings was attributable to many factors, including solid single-family home construction amid low existing home inventory, investment in factory construction, and the normalization of supply chain disruptions (that began shortly after the start of the pandemic) alongside stabilizing input prices for construction materials and challenges filling job openings.

To some extent, job openings returning to average levels is because positions are being filled to meet demand for construction. Since February 2024, the employment of construction workers has increased by close to the decline in openings. Much of the increase in employment has come from specialty trade contractors in the non-residential sector.

Looking at employment for workers with less than a bachelor’s degree across major industries, construction continues to show the lowest share of women workers. These figures have changed very little since we started tracking earlier this year, suggesting that challenges remain and that efforts to increase women’s representation would be meaningful. As Figure 2 shows (horizontal axis), among workers with less than a BA, women’s share of industry employment ranges widely – women continue to make up only 9 percent of employees in the construction industry but account for about 80 percent of education and health services employees. The construction sector remains a large employer of people without a BA, representing nearly 10 million workers or more than 10 percent of employment for those without a BA. Women account for a small percentage of the workforce in the construction industry. Although women do comprise a relatively larger share of workers in some occupations within construction, those occupations are a small share of industry employment.  Most women are concentrated in office administration and support jobs, while a very small number hold jobs in construction/extraction occupations, which comprise the bulk of construction employment.

Construction is a high-paying industry. Construction continues to have the highest industry average hourly earnings, at about $27, for all workers with less than a bachelor’s degree, as seen in Figure 2. The education and health services industry, which still is the largest employer of women without a BA, has average wages that are about 19 percent lower ($22 per hour).  However, an important limitation is that these are averages across the entire industry. Certain occupations in construction – such as building and grounds cleaning occupations – tend to pay less. Other occupations like installation, maintenance and repair occupations tend to pay more. 

If more women entered and stayed in construction, there could be enough workers to fill existing job openings. If more women entered construction and raised their share of employment even incrementally to approach that in other industries, the corresponding number of additional workers in the construction industry would exceed the number of job openings, as seen in Figure 3. The bar on the left represents the current number of construction job openings. The bar on the right indicates the number of additional women that would be in construction if their representation moved closer to that of transportation and utilities, which is the industry with the next higher representation.^[1] The right bar is higher than the left bar, meaning that the number of additional female workers would more than cover the existing job openings in construction. In fact, only a 3-percentage point increase in their share of construction employment would fill the existing job openings.^[2] Of course, this is a hypothetical example, meant to illustrate the rough scale of the opportunities available in construction for women to fill job openings rather than to predict what would happen if more women entered construction.