Finding protective clothing that fits is all too often a major challenge for women working in construction, as Tiya Thomas-Alexander reports

“I fell down a hole and water went straight into my wellies because [they] were so small – only halfway down my calf,” recalls self-employed bricklayer Darcie Richards. “Then it was freezing cold; I was soaking wet for the rest of the day.” Although she was not injured, Richards, who wears size 5 shoes, cites the incident as an example of running into problems with obtaining the right personal protective equipment (PPE) because she is a woman.

Providing PPE is a legal requirement, yet for the 51 per cent of the population who are female, obtaining suitable supplies in their size is not always possible. Construction News examines how widespread this lack of basic provision is and shows why it is in the interests of all employers to do something about it.

CN has heard stories of women having to roll up trousers to make workwear shorts, tie hairbands around their wrists to stop oversized gloves slipping off, and wear two or three pairs of socks to make size 4 feet fit into size 7 boots.

Richards is a TikTok star, with more than 200,000 followers on the social media site. Her account biography on the site reads “doing it for the girls”, and she uses her platform to post videos from construction sites, giving the world snippets of what it is like to be a female bricklayer. Through the videos, she addresses and rebuts comments such as “women just can’t build” with casual videos of her expertly laying bricks.

"When people buy clothes, they don’t buy or wear clothes that don’t fit properly, so why should women be issued with safety clothing that doesn’t fit properly?"

She is also a brand ambassador for workwear company Scruffs and promotes videos in their women’s workwear. When she first joined the industry, just over two years ago, she says she often had to make do with men’s clothing. “It’s hard enough going on site and being a woman anyway. So going on site and then having to wear men’s clothes isn’t really ideal,” she says.

As a self-employed worker, Richards has bought all of her PPE herself, and has received comments on her social media channel about how smart she looks owing to the quality of what she wears. But the bricklayer – who stands five feet four inches tall – still sometimes runs into issues trying to obtain the right kit because it simply does not exist for women. This includes steel-toecapped wellington boots that fit her and, in the summer, she is forced to roll up her trousers to make workwear shorts.

Of the day she stepped into a hole, she says: “I wasn't injured. But it’s not a nice thing to be soaked all day because you’ve fallen down a hole and your wellies are just not big enough.”

From April, a change in regulations means contractors will be responsible for providing PPE to any agency or temp workers on their site.

According to the Office for National Statistics, women account for 13 per cent of the construction workforce. While the overall figure has not changed much in recent years, there are anecdotally more women filling roles on site than in the past.

Multiplex Construction Europe head of temporary works Siu Mun Li has been in the industry for more than 20 years, working at three other major contractors before moving into her current role in 2016.

It is only in the past four years that she has managed to get PPE that fits properly.

“I had always worn oversized PPE, had to alter the length or width of my PPE or source and order the right-sized items myself as they were not on the company’s standard supply list,” she says. “Oversized PPE would constantly get caught and snagged on things [like] steel reinforcement, scaffold [and] formwork items when walking on site, which was a hazard and risk to safety.”

“If you’re a woman in construction, you get to a point where you think that [employers] really don’t care about you"

Li says that years of putting up with baggy and unsafe PPE were frustrating: “Constantly being issued with poorly fitting PPE or having to source my own fitting PPE eventually become a bugbear of mine and something that I grew increasingly frustrated with,” she says. “When people buy clothes, they don’t buy or wear clothes that don’t fit properly, so why should women be issued with safety clothing that doesn’t fit properly? Would it be acceptable for a small-sized man to be issued with 2XL-sized PPE?”

Li says she made it her mission at Multiplex to improve the range of women’s PPE across its sites in the UK. One of her initiatives was to develop designs for the first hi-vis dual-tone women’s waistcoat, for which the contractor collaborated with clothing firm Leo Workwear and distributor OnSite. The waistcoat, indicating a supervisory role, was not previously available in a version tailored for women.

Louise Houston, head of inclusion and diversity at materials supplier and contractor Tarmac, says that having basics like PPE for women sorted is fundamental to making women feel welcome in the industry.

While still relatively new to her role, in late 2018, Houston asked colleagues if there were things they needed in the workplace. As a result, in 2019, Tarmac launched PPE suitable for women to wear during pregnancy. She says: “It isn’t about this being a competition and only Tarmac having women’s PPE, it’s about us as an industry saying: hold on, you know, if we want to attract and retain more women within this industry, which we do, then things have got to be in place to make it easy and make people feel like they belong.”

Nicola Jones is a Cardiff-based project manager for consultants Gleeds with 27 years’ experience in the industry. Last year, her daughter Charly Short, who wears size 6 clothes, joined the firm as a graduate trainee. She describes seeing her daughter try on a standard-issue hi-vis jacket: “When it arrived, it was down to her shins and obviously way past her two hands.”

Jones helped her daughter buy a women’s jacket from a local supplier, arranging to have the Gleeds logo printed on the back. “It’s not the best way to go,” she says. “But they’ve sort of fixed it now and she wears a decent-size coat without breaking her neck like the rest of us had to.”

Issuing the workforce with appropriate clothing and equipment is not just a legal requirement, it also makes good business sense in more than one respect.

As Multiplex’s Siu Mun Li says: “Not having to worry about ill-fitting PPE helps me work better and safer as I don’t have to worry about getting snagged on things on site, which means I can concentrate on the job at hand and not whether I will get there in one piece. It makes me more confident as I don’t need to feel self-conscious and worry about how I look as I know my PPE fits. If I’m happy, I’m also more productive.”

Suzannah Nichol, chief executive of trade body Build UK, says that PPE for women has often been overlooked because many do not realise the impact it can have. “If you’re a woman in construction, you get to a point where you think that [employers] really don’t care about you. Or if you’re new to the industry you might think, crikey, is this what it’s going to be like, and you may then choose to leave.”

But amid a skills crisis and a labour shortage not seen in a generation, the industry simply cannot afford to push away half the potential workforce through a lack of consideration for their needs. She says: “If we are losing women because they are not provided with the right PPE, then we are shooting ourselves in the foot.”

Leo Workwear, the Devon-headquartered supplier that worked with Multiplex’s Siu Mun Li on its female clothes, has been in operation for 40 years but only launched its own women’s line eight years ago.

The firm’s marketing and development manager, Nick Bale, says this followed increased demand for the products. It designs its high-visibility safety wear along international standards, such as ISO 20471, which set out minimum areas of fluorescent and reflective material.

But Bale says the standards are not designed for women because smaller sizes do not generally include enough material to meet the ISO requirements. “We have to advise women to wear a full high visibility trouser with a high-visibility top to conform overall,” he says. “We need the standard to catch up.”

Standards body ISO had not responded to requests for comment at the time CN published this article.