Celebrating Women in South Africa's Built Environment
Fifteen years into Ecolution's journey within the green building industry, the sector has built a strong case for sustainable buildings when it comes to cost premiums, operational savings, and investment performance. It has also made significant gains in the case of gender equity, but there is still a way to go.
The Workforce Gap
The green building industry sits within the broader built environment and construction industry in South Africa where Women make up just 15% of registered built environment professionals. According to the Council for the Built Environment's 2023/24 Annual Report this includes architecture, engineering, quantity surveying, project and construction management, valuation, and landscape architecture. Narrow the lens to engineering specifically, and it drops further to nearly 11% of engineers registered with the Engineering Council of South Africa being women, with only about 4% of those women holding professional engineer (PrEng) status, meaning just 0.44% of all registered engineers are women with PrEng.
Statistics South Africa's Q2 2025 Quarterly Labour Force Survey shows that of all employed women in the country, only 1.9% work in the sector, one of the lowest shares of any industry tracked. Where women are present on the ground, industry research puts their share of the construction workforce at roughly 11.5%, up only marginally from 10.3% in 2021. Ownership tells a similarly narrow story at the top end of the industry, as women own fewer than 7% of the contractors registered by the Construction Industry Development Board at Grade 7 and above, the tier that handles large public infrastructure projects.
The Pay Gap
Across the built environment as a whole, the pay gap is its own challenge, as South Africa's national gender pay gap currently ranges from 23% to 35%, meaning women earn roughly R72 for every R100 men earn. That gap has widened since 2008, when women earned closer to R89 for every R100. Specifically in the built environment, a 2025 study by the South African Council for the Project and Construction Management Professions found that 45% of women in construction earn less than their male colleagues performing equivalent work, and 60% report experiencing gender-based discrimination or bias on the job.
Research from the SA-TIED programme, drawing on eight years of tax data across the entire formal workforce, finds that nearly half of the pay gap is due to structural factors. Women tend to work at lower-paying companies than men, clustering in sectors like education, retail, and care work, while men dominate higher-paying industries such as mining, construction, and manufacturing.
Leadership compounds the pattern, as the 24th Commission for Employment Equity Annual Report puts women at just 25.8% of private-sector top management roles and 36.4% of senior management roles nationally. Narrow that to construction specifically, and the same report shows women hold just 19% of top management positions in the sector, well below the 25.8% private-sector average across all industries. Even against an already low industry-wide figure, construction falls further behind.On the JSE specifically, Stellenbosch Business School's 2025 Women's Report found that only 19.1% of listed company directors are women, behind the global average of 23.3%, with little movement over the past five years. In property, the imbalance sharpens further; a woman leads only one of roughly 30 listed Real Estate Investment Trusts in South Africa - just 3.3%, well below the 19.1% boardroom average.
Signs of Change
Green building, specifically, offers a counterweight, as the Green Building Council of South Africa (GBCSA) reports that close to half of South Africa's accredited EDGE experts, professionals trained under the international green building efficiency standard, are now women. Programmes like the GBCSA and IFC's Women in Green Building Competition offer direct pathways to certification, built on newer credentials that appear to be moving faster than the broader industry. Congratulations to Georgina Smit on her appointment as GBCSA's new CEO. She was GBCSA's Head of Technical prior to this year, when she stepped into the CEO role, succeeding Lisa Reynolds, continuing a run of female leadership at the organisation since Dorah Modise who served as CEO of the GBCSA from 2017. The green building sector is also not without other women-run sustainability consulting firms, from Solid Green, Greenfit Consulting, to Misplon Green Building Consulting, Woman Led sustainable buildings departments in WSP and Ecocentric Consulting and more, shaping an industry that in turn is also helping shape the future of our built environment as a whole.
There is also momentum in the broader industry at large. For example, in 2024 Nomvula Mzimba became the first woman in the South African Institution of Civil Engineering's 120-year history to chair the organisation. At Nelson Mandela University, women now make up 42% of undergraduate Construction Management students, up from 28% in 2015. However, industry surveys state that historically 35% of women leave the profession within five years, citing workplace hostility, stalled progression, and the strain of building a career in a culture the industry built without them in mind. If anything, this statistic proves that gender equity is not just about representation of women within the industry, but ensuring the industry itself evolves from one built without them in mind, to one built with them as equals.
Gender equity is a work in progress, and one we take seriously at Ecolution. We are fortunate enough to have a team made up of many women who are creating the future of our industry. They, along with the women who have shaped Ecolution before them, have played a defining role in the gains we have made as a business. A rising tide lifts all boats, but only the ones close enough to the water to rise with it. We would like to keep closing that distance in the industry we work in every day, and see the broader construction industry do the same.
