Women made up 11.3% of construction employment in 2025, the highest share in two decades — and almost all of the gain came from desks, not job sites.
That is the finding of an analysis by Na Zhao published Sept. 15 on the National Association of Home Builders’ economics blog, drawing on the federal Current Population Survey. About 1.37 million women worked in construction in 2025, roughly 31,000 more than in 2024, and 11.3% is the highest share over the 2004-2025 period the data covers.
A 15-year climb back
The trend line explains why 11.3% counts as a milestone. Women’s employment in construction fell from more than 1.1 million in 2007 to about 807,000 in 2010, as the housing bust cut activity across the industry. The climb back was slow: roughly 970,000 by 2017, back above 1 million in 2018, 1.24 million in 2021, and 1.37 million last year.
The share moved differently from the headcount. It sat near 9% through the years after the recession, then began rising noticeably in 2017 — meaning women were added to construction payrolls faster than the industry was adding workers overall.
Where the jobs actually are
The occupational breakdown is where the analysis gets uncomfortable for anyone reading the top-line number as progress in the trades.
Women hold 78% of office and administrative support jobs inside the construction industry, the highest share of any major occupational group in the sector. They account for 40% of service occupations other than protective services, 35% of protective service jobs, 24% of professional occupations, 19% of sales roles and 16% of management, business and financial operations positions.
In the work that gives construction its name, the numbers barely move. Women are 4% of construction and extraction occupations, 3% of installation, maintenance and repair, and 6% of production occupations — and those categories employ the most people in the industry.
Zhao ties the overall increase to the same shift: the rise in women’s participation “aligns with the expansion of white-collar jobs in the industry.” Construction has added estimators, project managers, schedulers, safety staff and back-office roles as projects have grown more complex and more heavily documented. Those are the jobs women have been hired into.
Why builders are watching this number
The industry’s interest in the figure is not primarily about representation. It is about arithmetic.
Construction had 326,000 open positions in July 2026, up from 298,000 in June and above the 305,000 of July 2025, according to NAHB’s reading of federal job-openings data. The openings rate was 3.8%, against 3.6% a year earlier. Those vacancies persist even though residential construction activity has weakened, because demand for skilled workers is being pulled elsewhere — NAHB points to data center construction, up 46% from a year earlier, and to immigration enforcement actions, as forces keeping the labor market tight.
Payroll growth tells a similar story. Construction added 22,000 jobs in August even as the broader economy’s gains stayed modest, and the sector added 22,000 in July in a month when overall U.S. payrolls shrank.
So the sector is hiring into a shortage, and the pool it draws the trades from is 4% female. Zhao makes the implication explicit: raising women’s participation in construction and extraction, installation and maintenance, and production occupations “could help expand the pool of skilled workers available to the construction industry.”
What the number does and does not say
A few cautions are worth attaching. The figures come from the Current Population Survey, a monthly household survey, and describe the construction industry as a whole — residential and commercial, field and office. A 31,000-worker annual increase on a base of 1.34 million is real but modest, and an 11.3% share still means the industry is close to nine-tenths male.
The 2017 inflection point in the share is also not explained by the data itself. NAHB associates it with white-collar growth; the survey does not establish what caused the turn.
For builders, remodelers and specialty contractors, the practical reading is narrower than the headline. The industry has succeeded at recruiting women into the parts of construction that look like other office work. It has not yet done so in the crafts where the openings are, and those are the openings that set how fast houses get built. More construction and development coverage is on RealtyWire’s commercial real estate page.
