The need investigate career progression of female professional employees in the South African construction industry

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to investigate factors influencing career progression of female professional employees in the construction industry in order to identify challenges and suggest possible mitigations. An integrative review of purposively sampled literature on career progression is used to arrive at challenges to career progression faced by female professionals in the South African construction industry. The limitation of the study is its theoretical nature at this stage. Findings show that involvement of women in the construction industry has increased. However, women apparently still face challenges in progressing to senior positions in their careers. Some noted common factors include training, mentoring support, and networking. Implications of the study include the need to study factors influencing female career progression with the support of empirical data. There is also a need to examine the factors that act as barriers and analyse their nature in order to develop possible mitigations, which are also nuanced with the experiences of the subject population. The study forms a basis for understanding influencing factors and challenges to career progression of female professionals. This study is at its early stage of a more extensive research project and will be used as the foundation for empirical studies.