In 2025, women represented just 19% of ICT specialists across the EU. Now consider that construction — already one of the least gender-diverse sectors in Europe — is in the middle of its biggest technological transformation in decades. BIM, AI-driven project management, drone surveying, smart sensors, digital twins. The question is not whether the industry is going digital. It already is. The question is who gets to be part of it. 

As of early 2026, the construction industry is no longer debating whether it should attract more women — it is confronting whether it can afford not to. Across mature economies, retirements are accelerating faster than replacement. In emerging markets, infrastructure demand is rising faster than workforce formalisation. In both cases, excluding half the available labour pool is no longer a cultural problem. It is an operational one.

And yet the numbers on the ground are still stark. Women make up around 15% of the UK construction workforce, but only about 1–2% of on-site trade roles are held by women. Women occupy just 9.2% of the highest-paid roles in construction, while 29% are in the lowest-paid quartile.

In France, women represent nearly half of administrative and technical employees but less than 2% of on-site manual workers. The pattern is consistent across Europe: women are present at the edges of the sector — in administrative roles, in some technical positions — but absent from the core, and increasingly absent from the digital core that is now defining the industry's future.

Here is what makes this moment different, though. According to the director general of the European Construction Industry Federation, the green and digital transitions represent an opportunity to attract more young people and women to the sector. A transition, by definition, disrupts existing hierarchies. Old gatekeepers lose some of their power. New skills become valuable. New entry points open up.

The opportunity is real. Whether the industry takes it is another question entirely.

The European Commission is pushing hard on this front — with initiatives like Girls go STEM targeting one million girls into STEM studies and professions by 2028, and a new STEM Futures initiative in 2026 focused on identifying and sharing successful education practices with a focus on girls and women. EU businesses used AI technologies at a rate of 20% in 2025, up from 13% in 2024 — and digital transformation is now a priority across industries, not just tech. Construction is no exception.

So what does this mean in practice? It means that the VET programmes training the next generation of construction workers need to look different. It means digital skills curricula cannot be designed in rooms where women are outnumbered ten to one. It means that showcasing initiatives that support women's visibility in emerging areas such as data centres and digital skills — and linking that visibility to the wider skills challenge — is not a side conversation. It is the main one. 

The tools exist. The funding frameworks exist. The evidence that diversity drives innovation has been settled for years.

What is still being built — slowly, imperfectly, but unmistakably — is the will to use all of them together.

This is not the future. This is the construction site of today.

And yet, the workforce being trained to work on that site is still being shaped by curricula, assumptions, and cultural habits that belong to a different era. The digital transformation of construction is accelerating. The gender transformation of construction is stalling. CoHER exists at exactly that intersection — and it argues that these two transformations are not separate challenges. They are the same challenge, seen from different angles.

When a sector undergoes rapid technological change, it faces a choice. It can replicate its existing inequalities into the new digital layer — encoding the same biases into algorithms, hiring pipelines, and training programmes — or it can treat the moment of disruption as an opportunity to rebuild on more equitable foundations. CoHER makes the case for the second option, clearly and without apology.

Digital skills are not neutral. Who gets trained, in what, by whom, and in what kind of environment determines who ends up working with those skills — and who gets left behind. In construction, where women are already dramatically underrepresented, the risk of a digital transformation that simply replicates existing exclusions is real and present. A sector that fails to bring women into its digital future is not just missing a moral opportunity. It is making itself less innovative, less resilient, and less competitive.

The evidence on this is consistent: diverse teams produce better solutions. Cognitive diversity — different perspectives, different problem-solving approaches, different lived experiences — drives innovation in ways that homogeneous teams simply cannot. An all-male construction workforce designing smart buildings for a mixed population is, by definition, designing with incomplete information. Gender diversity is not a social nicety. It is an engineering advantage.

CoHER's approach to digital skills is built around this understanding. The project does not treat digital literacy as a technical add-on to an otherwise unchanged VET curriculum. It treats it as an opportunity to redesign the curriculum itself — to ask not only what skills are needed, but who is being invited to develop them, and whether the learning environment genuinely supports their participation. A training module on BIM software delivered in a classroom where female learners feel like exceptions rather than participants is not truly inclusive digital education. It is inclusion in name only.

This matters because the construction sector is at a crossroads. The green transition, the digital transition, and the demographic pressures facing Europe's workforce are converging at the same moment. The industry needs more skilled workers than it currently has. It needs workers who can operate in digitally complex environments. And it needs those workers urgently. The talent pool it has historically ignored — women — is not a future consideration. It is an immediate solution.

Innovation, at its core, is the ability to see a problem differently. CoHER is doing exactly that: looking at an industry that has long defined itself by who it excludes, and asking what it could become if it led with who it includes. The digital tools are already there. The skills frameworks exist. The funding mechanisms — through Erasmus+ and European structural programmes — are available. What CoHER is building, above all, is the will and the methodology to use them differently.

The most innovative thing the construction sector could do right now is not adopt a new technology. It is open its doors — genuinely, structurally, and permanently — to the people it has kept outside them for too long.