The Building Equality Policy: Driving Gender Equity in Construction

In 2022, the VIctorian Government introduced the Building Equality Policy to improve the gender participation in the construction industry. At the time, women made up only 2% of the construction trades workforce in Victoria, highlighting the industry’s significant gender imbalance.

On all state government construction projects valued above $20 million, Head Contractors must deliver mandatory female participation. This policy turns gender equity in construction from and aspiration into a measurable target that contractors must report against.

The Building Equality Policy at a glance

The Building Equality Policy is a Victorian Government procurement policy that sets minimum targets for women's participation on publicly funded construction projects. It came into effect on 1 January 2022 and applies to projects valued at $20 million or more.

The policy does two things at once. It sets numerical targets for women's labour hours across different role types, and it requires contractors to put a Gender Equality Action Plan in place. That second requirement matters, because it ties the policy to the gender equality indicators under the Gender Equality Act 2020, rather than treating headcount as the whole story.

For head contractors, this means gender equity is now a contractual obligation on major government work, assessed at tender and tracked through delivery, not a voluntary commitment.

The Building Equality Policy targets

The Building Equality Policy sets four participation targets, each measured as a share of estimated labour hours on the project:

• Women must perform at least 3% of total trade hours
• Women must perform at least 7% of non-trade Construction Award hours
• Women must perform at least 35% of management, supervisory and specialist hours
• Women who are registered apprentices, trainees or cadets must perform at least 4% of total hours

The structure of the targets is deliberate. The 35% management target and the 4% apprentice target sit at either end of a career, which is what stops the policy from simply moving women into entry-level roles without a path forward. The aim is participation that leads to leadership, not just a headcount at the gate.

Why the Building Equality Policy was introduced

The policy exists because the numbers were stark. Women make up only around 2% of the construction trades workforce in Victoria, one of the sharpest gender imbalances of any industry. To address it, the Victorian Government and the Building Industry Consultative Council developed the Women in Construction Strategy 2019 to 2022, and the Building Equality Policy is the procurement lever that gives that strategy teeth.

The strategy works across three areas:

• Attracting more women into construction through school programs and career awareness
• Improving recruitment by creating clear entry pathways into trade and semi-skilled roles
• Retaining women through supportive and inclusive workplaces

Behind those pillars sit the real barriers the strategy is trying to shift: cultural norms on site, informal hiring networks that recycle the same candidates, and a lack of visible role models for women considering a trade. If you are new to the obligations that flow from this, the Catchment Social Procurement Reporting Playbook (catchment.software/playbook) sets out how participation requirements like these are structured and reported.

Using procurement to drive gender equity in construction

Government procurement is one of the most effective levers for change in construction, because the government is one of the largest buyers of infrastructure in the country. When gender equity is written into the conditions of a publicly funded contract, every contractor bidding for that work has to engage with it.

This is the logic behind the Building Equality Policy. Rather than asking the industry to improve gender equity in construction voluntarily, Victoria has made women's participation a condition of winning and delivering major public projects. It is the same mechanism that drives local content and social procurement outcomes, applied to gender.

Reporting and proving Building Equality Policy compliance

The targets only mean something if they can be evidenced, and this is where many projects come unstuck. Proving compliance means tracking labour hours by gender and role type across every subcontractor on a project, often over a multi-year build, and showing progress against the Gender Equality Action Plan at the same time.

Pulling that together from subcontractor timesheets and spreadsheets at reporting time is not just slow, it is a risk. Spreadsheet-based processes cannot produce audit-ready, defensible evidence that the BEP targets were met, and on a government contract a gap in that evidence is a compliance liability rather than an inconvenience. The Catchment Reporting Time Calculator (catchment.software/calculator) gives a sense of the hours manual reporting absorbs, which is a useful input when you are making the case for a more structured approach.

Catchment support for Building Equality Policy reporting

Catchment is a system of record for social procurement, built to capture workforce data to the standard a government client or auditor expects.

Catchment enables head contractors to:

• Track labour hours by gender and role type against the BEP targets
• Keep evidence structured and traceable across every subcontractor on a project
• Connect workforce data to Gender Equality Action Plan commitments
• Standardise reporting across a portfolio so multiple projects read consistently

The Building Equality Policy has shown that gender equity in construction can be required, measured and reported on the largest projects in the state. The contractors who can prove their participation are the ones who protect their position on government work. To see how Catchment supports Building Equality Policy reporting, book a demo at catchment.software.