Quebec’s construction industry is plagued by sexism. The State is its biggest client. What is he waiting for to intervene?
The Legault government has embarked on major reforms to dust off the construction sector, as a period of unprecedented investment in Quebec’s public infrastructure begins. The watchwords: agility, speed, productivity!
But there is something else the government could do to bring the industry into modernity: intervene, finally, to force it to correct the sexism that permeates it.
In terms of fairness, this industry is a dinosaur. A bastion of machismo which remains remarkably hostile to the presence of women, and which makes them feel it through forms of discrimination and harassment worthy of another century. The most recent reports on the subject describe a strong-arm culture where women are too often treated as intruders, inferiors or objects.1.
However, the mountain of public money that Quebec is preparing to invest in major projects has the potential to be not only a powerful engine for the economy, but also an extraordinary lever for gender equality.
The State could ensure that the major projects it finances set an example – that workers have fair access to the jobs that will be created there, and that they have the assurance that they will be treated with dignity. The base, what! But we can no longer rely on the goodwill of entrepreneurs alone to make this happen. After decades of procrastination, it might be time to take action.
This is what other governments around the world are doing. In a few days, the state of Victoria, Australia, will tighten the screws on companies bidding for public construction contracts. From now on, large projects will be reserved for entrepreneurs who will entrust women with a minimum proportion of working hours on the site.2. In addition to reaching these thresholds, they will have to follow an extremely precise recovery program to eliminate all forms of discrimination against women, not only during the project in question, but throughout their organization.
From 1er July, those who fail to meet these commitments will face sanctions.
Other Australian states and territories have followed suit. One of them (the Australian Capital Territory) began testing different approaches: for the construction of a new primary school, it required that the management team be 100% female and that all sub-primary providers hire at least one woman. For a new college campus, he ensured that women made up at least 15% of the workforce.
The Australian public authorities are betting that by using their enormous purchasing power in this way, they will push their suppliers to adopt more inclusive ways of doing things – and thereby transform one of the most unequal sectors of their economy.
The most fascinating thing about the story is that Quebec itself has had a comparable program for 36 years now.
Since 1988, large companies doing business with the government must demonstrate that they are making efforts to remedy the injustices suffered by certain groups in the labor market: women, Aboriginal people, visible minorities and (since 2009) People with Disabilities. They must adopt quantified objectives to increase the representation of each group and take concrete means to rectify their discriminatory practices, otherwise they will be excluded from future contracts and subsidies.
This is called the Contractual Obligation Program: it applies to all companies with more than 100 employees that win a contract or grant of at least $100,000 from the Quebec government.
All of them… or almost. One industry is exempt: construction!
Incredible but true: the industry that would probably most need such a kick in the behind is the only one that is exempt.
The idea of subjecting the construction sector to it was nevertheless considered in the mid-1980s, as researcher Laurence Hamel-Roy relates in a memoir3. At the time, it was judged that the female labor pool was too small to justify it. In 1997, when the Quebec Construction Commission adopted its first Women’s Equality Access Program (PAEF), it was planned that companies with at least 10 employees would be forced to hire workers. We ultimately preferred to focus on awareness rather than constraint. In 2015, the second version of the PAEF once again provided that entrepreneurs would have the obligation to better integrate women when they won public contracts. It never happened.
Every time the public authorities had the opportunity to give the industry a boost, they retreated.
In recent weeks, as part of the study of Bills 51 and 62, several organizations have once again called for public construction contracts to impose requirements regarding the inclusion of women – including the Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse, the Conseil du statut de la femme, the five industry union associations4. Wasted effort.
Some may find this a bad time to add to the burden on entrepreneurs, at a time when they are shunning public calls for tenders and complaining about overly burdensome regulations. For my part, I find it difficult to digest that for almost 40 years, respect for the fundamental rights of workers has been subordinated to the imperatives of productivity. Even more so on projects financed by taxpayers, in a society which likes to trumpet its attachment to equality between women and men.
In hostile terrain
Women represent only 3.8% of personnel on Quebec construction sites. This is less than in the firefighters or in the combat professions of the Armed Forces! True, fewer girls than boys are interested in a career in the field. But that doesn’t explain everything. Even today, it is known that some bosses openly refuse to hire women. Moreover, 84% of construction companies do not employ any. Female workers who manage to find a place for themselves on construction sites often find themselves in inhospitable territory: 35% of them say they have experienced discrimination because of their gender or their origin (compared to 6% of men) and 22% of men. have suffered intimidation or harassment (compared to 15% of their colleagues). If they dare to complain, they run the risk of being ostracized or outright fired. So, although there are measures to facilitate women’s access to the industry – they made up 10% of new entrants in 2023, a record – it is not enough to retain them. After one year, one in five workers will have already left the sector; after five years, one in two will have deserted (13% of men leave after one year, 32% after five).
Sources: Quebec Construction Commission, Action travail des femmes
1. Read the report Typology of gender-based and sexual violence in the construction industry and its impacts on the continued employment of women
1. Read the report Maintaining and stabilizing construction workers in Quebec: an industry at a crossroads
2. The policy extends to any public construction contract worth at least A$20 million (C$18 million). For each of the trades involved on the site, 3% of working hours must be allocated to women. For each management position, it’s 35%. And 4% of the total number of hours planned for the project must be allocated to women apprentices or in training. These targets will be revised upwards over the years.
2. Read the Building Equality Policy page on the Australian government website (in English)
3. Read Laurence Hamel-Roy’s memoir
4. Read the text “Diversity measures that fall flat and nothing more for women with PL51” in THE Duty
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