Building the Future – But not with Half the Workforce
Imagine a construction site somewhere in Europe in 2030. The walls are clad in hemp-based biopanels. The floors incorporate phase-change materials that quietly absorb heat during the night and release it across the day, slashing the building’s energy bill. The insulation is made not from virgin raw materials but from aerogel granules recovered from demolition waste. The concrete blocks were cast without a gram of ordinary Portland cement.
Now ask: who built it? Who installed those biopanels, mixed those mortars, cut those eco-concrete blocks to fit? If the answer looks anything like today’s construction workforce, it will be overwhelmingly male — somewhere north of 85% in most European countries. In some trades, closer to 95%.
The green building revolution is arriving. The workforce revolution that needs to accompany it is lagging far behind.
A sector in transformation — with a persistent blind spot
Construction is one of Europe’s most consequential industries when it comes to climate. Buildings account for around 40% of the EU’s total energy consumption and approximately 36% of its CO2 emissions. The European Green Deal, the Renovation Wave, and national energy retrofit programs together represent a historic mobilization — one that will require a surge in skilled workers over the coming decade.
Yet even as the materials, technologies, and policy frameworks evolve rapidly, the gender composition of the construction workforce has remained stubbornly static. Across the EU, women represent just 10–14% of the total construction workforce — and that figure masks an even starker reality in the skilled trades, where female participation often sits in single digits. In some countries and some specializations, it has barely moved in a generation.
This is not merely a social equity problem, though it is certainly that. It is a practical constraint on the industry’s ability to deliver the green transition. The skills shortage in construction is already acute. The additional labour demand created by ambitious retrofit and renovation targets cannot be met without drawing on a far wider talent pool. Women represent the single largest underutilized source of that talent.
The green building revolution is arriving. The workforce revolution that needs to accompany it is lagging far behind.
Why women are missing — and why the barriers are not inevitable
The reasons for women’s underrepresentation in construction are multiple and interlocking. Some are structural: physical infrastructure on sites — from PPE (personal protective equipment) to sanitation — has historically been designed around male bodies and male norms. Some are cultural: persistent assumptions about who belongs in a hard hat, reinforced by hiring practices, informal networks, and everyday workplace dynamics that can make women feel unwelcome or invisible. Some are about pathways: vocational education and training systems that have not actively recruited women, careers guidance that steers girls away from trades, and a lack of visible role models.
What is important to understand is that none of these barriers are inevitable. They are design failures — and like all design failures, they can be fixed. Industries that have made deliberate, sustained efforts to include women have seen real change. Construction has not yet made that effort at scale. The green transition offers a genuine opportunity to do so, precisely because it is reshaping what construction skills look like.
New sustainable materials — bio-based panels, aerogel insulation, mortar systems with phase-change materials — require new knowledge, new handling techniques, and new installation approaches. The skills gap they create is as available to women entering the workforce as to anyone else. There is no legacy advantage to overcome, no established male monopoly on knowing how to install a hemp-fibre biopanel or mix a geopolymer mortar. This is genuinely new territory, and new territory can be claimed by anyone.
Where SNUG enters the picture
The SNUG project — a Horizon Europe initiative developing circular economy-based sustainable insulation materials and lightweight prefab solutions for building envelopes — might not look, at first glance, like a workforce inclusion story. Its focus is materials: aerated eco-concrete blocks, self-levelling mortars with phase-change materials, aerogel-based insulation, bio-based panels made from hemp, rice husk, and agricultural waste.
But every material that SNUG develops will, at some point, be handled by a worker. It will be transported, cut, mixed, applied, fixed, inspected, and maintained by human hands. The question of whose hands — and whether those hands represent the full diversity of the available workforce — is not peripheral to SNUG’s mission. It is intrinsic to it.
This blog series starts from a straightforward premise: that the development of sustainable building materials and the development of a more inclusive construction workforce are not separate agendas. They are the same agenda, approached from different angles. Materials innovation creates new job categories and new skill requirements. Workforce inclusion ensures those opportunities are distributed fairly. Done well, each reinforces the other.
New territory can be claimed by anyone. The green transition is an opening — but only if the industry chooses to walk through it together.
What this series will explore
Over the coming posts, we will take each of SNUG’s material streams and examine the specific workforce and inclusion dimensions it raises. We will look at what new skills each material requires, where women are currently positioned in those supply chains, what barriers exist to their fuller participation, and what practical interventions — in training, in site culture, in procurement, in project design — can make a genuine difference.
We will look at the self-levelling mortar with phase-change materials installed in a demonstration building in Norway and ask what it means for retrofit workers in communities facing energy poverty — and whether women are being trained to do that work. We will look at aerogel-based insulation, and the skills gap it creates in lime plastering and heritage retrofit and ask whether vocational training programmes are actively recruiting women into those specialisations. We will look at hemp biopanels and the agricultural supply chains behind them and ask whether the women who grow and harvest those fibres have a pathway into the higher-value installation work those materials enable.
These are not abstract questions. They have concrete answers, and those answers have consequences — for the pace of the green transition, for the distribution of its benefits, and for the kind of industry construction becomes over the next decade.
The moment is now
The EU’s Renovation Wave targets the deep retrofit of 35 million buildings by 2030. Achieving that target will require hundreds of thousands of additional skilled workers across Europe. The materials those workers will be installing — many of them still being developed in laboratories and pilot plants today — are genuinely new. The workforce that installs them does not yet exist in its final form.
That is both a challenge and an opening. An opening for a new generation of workers — including the majority who are currently underrepresented in the industry. An opening for training systems, employers, and policymakers to make different choices than the ones that produced today’s 90%-male construction workforce.
We are not arguing that sustainable materials will automatically produce a more inclusive workforce. They will not. Inclusion requires deliberate action: in how training programmes are designed and marketed, in how sites are managed, in how procurement criteria are written, in how project teams are assembled. What we are arguing is that the moment of transition — when new materials require new skills and new entrants — is precisely the moment when deliberate action is most likely to take root.
SNUG is building the materials for greener buildings. This series is about making sure the workforce that builds with them is as sustainable and as diverse as the materials themselves.
Next in this series: Hemp Biopanels and the Women Growing the Green Construction Revolution
SNUG is a Horizon Europe project developing circular economy-based sustainable insulation materials and prefab solutions for building envelopes. This blog series explores the intersection of materials innovation and workforce inclusion.
By courtesy of CRES – Centre for Renewable Energy Sources and Saving
