Margaret Devlin. Photo / Supplied
Infrastructure New Zealand chair Margaret Devlin says the sector is awash with statistics showing that diversity improves every aspect of an infrastructure business.
"So", she questions, "Why is it taking so long to be normalised?"
Devlin, a professional director with a long track record in the infrastructure space, took over the chairmanship of Infrastructure New Zealand earlier this year.
She also chairs the Women's Infrastructure Network (WIN), a group set up by Infrastructure NZ five years ago to support women and normalise diversity in the sector. Devlin was the inaugural chair of WIN's advisory board working to establish the network and develop its strategy.
WIN has already made a difference.
A year after starting, it sported 600 members in three chapters. Today there are 2300 members and seven regional chapters. Each of the groups operate largely independent of Infrastructure NZ with a full programme of events and advocacy.
Women are now visible at every level of the industry.
Devlin herself chairs the main industry body while Claire Edmondson is the organisation's general manager. There are now women chief executives leading some of the biggest infrastructure companies in New Zealand.
That's progress. Yet, Devlin says it has been a slow burn.
There is still plenty of work to do. She wants Infrastructure NZ to take the groundwork that's been done and start to turn this into real and measurable outcomes.
That means giving women an even higher profile in the sector and for there to be clearer career pathways. These changes will help recruit more young women to the sector at a time when New Zealand's infrastructure sector faces an unprecedented skills shortage.
The pressing skills shortage is not the only reason this is a good time for women to enter the sector.
Devlin says that on the first day of this year's Building Nations 2021 conference there was discussion about the impact of Covid-19 on the sector.
It has been tough, but it is not all negative. "The pandemic has forced people to think differently, to do things differently and to question long-standing assumptions. We're in a period of rapid change."
Devlin adds: "Change brings disruption, but it can mean opportunity. Before the first lockdown, New Zealand businesses spent an average of 250 days considering how people could work from home. It was done and implemented in three days."
For Aurecon managing director Tracey Ryan, the pandemic underlined the importance of having a flexible attitude to work.
She says the Covid-19 lockdowns had an impact on women with young children who are working from home and maybe in a more traditional family role where they are expected to take up a lot of other duties at the same time.
Ryan says Aurecon has been thinking a lot about work policies, taking a hybrid approach and focusing on client outcomes.
"How do we be truly flexible? It's about building purpose and working where it best suits you.
"Your employer and your clients should not dictate that," she says. "They need to give people choice.
"We support people working full time in the office if they wish to, but also giving them the freedom to make those choices and decide what's best for them."
Aurecon is building a new office in Newmarket which Ryan says is being designed around purpose. The idea is that it will help people collaborate and be a place where people can connect.
GHD regional general manager Sioban Hartwell says Covid-19 has forced her business to rethink travel: "We no longer feel the need to travel and do so much face-to-face.
"This is a real benefit in terms of people's time. But it also needs to be seen through the climate change lens."
Hartwell says climate change is part of a significant shift in the way society views infrastructure and that is changing the sector and the types of people it needs to employ.
"We're looking at the carbon footprint of what we build and at the cultural values.
"These are things we in New Zealand have not looked at deeply in the past", she says.
There is more focus on the social dimension. These days it is more usual to get the community involved when an infrastructure project is in the planning stages.
Hartwell says where there are questions about the whole process of design, building and operating, the community needs to understand how it will benefit.
"That means a change in the types of people we employ, and the skills we need to be able to do all those things," says Hartwell.
"It's about taking a holistic view instead of just an engineering view where you just look at the design problem and design it.
"Now you have to think about where those materials are going to come from and who is going to build it. You have to ask if it is culturally appropriate. I think it's brilliant and it's exciting. We're still at the early stages of this. At times we need to ask ourselves if we actually need to build something new or can we repurpose what is already there.
"We need to think about the whole lifecycle, the impact on the environment and on the community."
Edmondson says addressing climate change was the key priority to emerge from this year's Building Nations conference.
"How can we build sustainable infrastructure so we're not just putting something up and hoping it lasts 50 years, then putting something else up and hoping that lasts?" she asks. "We need to make sure we can either use the infrastructure that we already have and continue to maintain it or make sure that any new infrastructure we build will be there for a long time. Sometimes not looking at the cheapest option is looking at a more enduring option."
Edmondson cites Auckland's Harbour Bridge — which is approaching the end of its life span — as an illustration of the problem.
Amy Barrett says some of the existing infrastructure assets are not going to survive climate change and that is something we need to think about now. Barrett is the general manager for new business and commercial at Downer. "It's going to cost us a lot of money," she says. "We don't have many years to dither about this, we've got to get planning now and work on the resilience of our infrastructure, so it isn't washed away in a flood."
Diversity has come a long way since today's female infrastructure industry leaders joined the sector.
Each of them has a stock of war stories to tell about their early days. One common theme is the lack of role models and peers when they were starting out.
Hartwell is determined those problems should remain in the past. She harks back to her experience as a 19-year-old student working in the sector. She was expected to drive a dump truck without being given any instructions. There were no female toilets where she was working. To get the nearest toilet she would need to walk across the site accompanied all the while with wolf-whistles. She felt singled out because of her gender. But that reminder of how it feels to be on the outside stays with her now she is in a leadership role.
For Devlin, the challenge now is to extend the diversity agenda further. She says attracting talent and retaining skills remains one of the infrastructure sector's main priorities and there's a clear need to make the sector more attractive to prospective employees.
"One of the comments quite often made about Covid at the moment, is that we can't get skilled people into the country. That's absolutely true, although there are exemptions. Yet shouldn't we be looking at growing our own talent?"
Are we moving fast enough to promote diversity in the sector?
Devlin says the simple answer is no. "We need to keep pushing and understanding what the barriers are. The reality is we have a skills shortage and a capacity shortage. We've got 50 per cent of the population who are equally capable of doing those jobs. We need to encourage a career path and open the way for people who want to work to make a contribution."
Margaret Devlin
Chair, Infrastructure New Zealand
Irish-born Margaret Devlin — like many people from Ireland — left home to work in England after getting a degree.
Her first job in the UK was in retail. From there she moved in the infrastructure sector at the time the UK government was privatising the water sector in 1990.
She saw the industry move from a public sector monopoly to becoming a regulated business that had to learn to deal with customers.
That involved working on the sector's culture change.
Within a decade, Devlin became the managing director of South East Water in the UK. During her time in the role, she turned one of the sector's worst performers into one of the better performers. She was with the business for 15 years before moving to New Zealand and from management into governance.
These days Devlin is a professional director specialising in the infrastructure sector.
Not only is she chair of Infrastructure NZ but she also chairs Lyttelton Port and the Women's Infrastructure Network in addition to serving on the board of Aurora Energy, and Waikato Regional Airport Ltd.
Tracey Ryan
Managing Director
Aurecon New Zealand
Tracey Ryan recalls the nudge she got to qualify as a hydrogeologist while standing in the middle of an Irish bog.
She was always curious and came from a traditional Irish family where she was the first female to go to university.
Good at science and maths, she planned to become an engineer.
While working on a geological survey of Ireland — in the middle of a bog —a hydrogeologist told her she should become one. That meant leaving Ireland, heading to the UK, taking out a loan and studying for a Masters degree.
Ryan says her hydrology career saw her working projects to clean up and regenerate contaminated sites, at first in the UK, then Europe and the former Soviet bloc countries.
That included closing down the Ford car factory site at Dagenham in East London.
Ireland wasn't an option because it was early days for environmental protection there.
As a hydrogeologist, Ryan spent a lot of time outside onsite with her hard hat and hi-vis vest on dealing with heavy industry.
In her first days as a project manager, she had to oversee burly drillers.
Working in male-dominated workplaces was a tough assignment for a young woman. There were no role models, no peer group, no older female colleagues to provide support.
From those early years, her career took a more traditional course as she moved into client management roles before leading ever larger multidisciplinary teams then broader management roles.
In 2008, she moved with her Kiwi husband and young daughter to New Zealand to help her employer ERM build their business in NZ and became their first female local managing director.
Ryan says that being mobile and travelling the world was always part of her career. Now her role is about watching global issues, mega-trends and taking a strategic, big picture view.
Amy Barrett
General Manager (new business and commercial), Downer
Amy Barrett stumbled into infrastructure while overseas in the UK when she took on a fill-in job working on a public private partnership (PPP) bid for international investor John Laing.
The bid was to build a hospital. "I loved it. I'd never seen anything like this before. There was a team of 80 people working on the bid. The scale of it was incredible. The company offered me a permanent role," she says.
From a career which started at Telecom NZ she rose to take on a role managing PPP bids on a range of large social infrastructure projects in the UK and Ireland.
She says the best part of that work was seeing the social impact the projects could make. "We were going into deprived areas with a team of designers and leaving some incredible amenities for the people living there."
When she returned to New Zealand, she spent some time in commercial property development, including work on PPP bids here.
Since then, she has worked in business development with Downer and Hawkins, which Downer acquired.
Today she works in Downer's utilities business covering water, power, gas and telecommunications, among others. Her responsibilities include looking after the unit's growth, retention and strategy.
Barrett says her career highlights have come from being involved in bidding for, then subsequently negotiating very large infrastructure projects and contracts.
One recent example is Auckland's City Rail Link. "As part of that we had to embed whole-of-life value into the contract. The sheer size, scale and complexity of the project makes it a career highlight."
Another example was working with a group of doctors in West Auckland to develop an integrated family health facility, now the Totara Healthcare Centre, in New Lynn.
In this case, the social impact was the most important aspect of the project.
Claire Edmondson
General Manager, Infrastructure NZ
Claire Edmondson credits her time working on the Canterbury earthquake recovery as giving her a "crash course" in infrastructure.
In July, she took over as general manager at Infrastructure New Zealand. Most of her career has been spent as a management consultant, though her initial qualification was in law.
Edmondson worked as a senior political advisor for former Education Minister Hekia Parata and spent time in management consulting firm Martin Jenkins.
When Christchurch City Council lost accreditation to issue building consents, she was asked to work on the restructure to make it fit for purpose.
From there she became chief of staff for Christchurch Mayor Lianne Dalziel.
Then six years working as chief advisor to Roger Sutton, when he was the chief executive of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA), working on how to rebuild the city after the earthquakes. After CERA was wound up, Edmondson moved to Ōtākaro, the Crown company running projects in Christchurch.
She says her time in Christchurch gave her a crash course in the infrastructure sector.
It meant getting on top of the terminology and because she moved through a variety of senior roles, picked up a good understanding of the key issues.
This led to her role at Infrastructure NZ.
"You don't need to be a civil engineer to do this work. It's all about thought leadership and advocacy for the sector." Edmondson arrived in her role at a time when there was a need to increase diversity in the sector, not just in gender but in ethnicity and other aspects.
The task now is to move matters forward, help develop a pipeline of future women leaders and bring in more diverse thinking.
Sioban Hartwell
Regional GM (NZ & Pacific), GHD
At the time Sioban Hartwell graduated as civil engineer in the UK there were few women in the sector.
Certainly, there were no older women in leadership positions to act as role models. After working for a short time in the UK, Hartwell travelled to New Zealand as a backpacker and looked around for a job before finding a role in the environmental department at the Golden Cross Mine near Waihi.
Hartwell was recently appointed as GHD's regional general manager for New Zealand and the Pacific.
She has been president of Water New Zealand and is a Fellow of Engineering New Zealand.
Hartwell has been with GHD for five years and was previously the market lead for professional services company's water business.
She says that early job at the Golden Cross Mine set her on an interesting path.
"That job was instrumental in terms of my career direction. It was about environmental protection, but there was a strong link with managing water," she says.
"Since then I've focused on water: how you treat water, how you manage the impact of various activities on water."
Early in her career Hartwell moved to a position of responsibility where she was managing projects. She says the advantage of that was it gives you a broad overview of a lot of disciplines, "which is fantastic. I love to see all the elements of a project".
A career highlight was in the early 2000s when there was a major change in the way Auckland handled storm water.
That gave her the opportunity to work with a lot of clients looking at ways to integrate and manage water infrastructure with amenity and environmental benefits.
That low impact design approach is commonplace today, but it was new at the time.
Making infrastructure more attractive to women
"Women sometimes aren't attracted to the infrastructure sector because they have an image of it as being only about building things," says Amy Barrett. She believes one way to recruit more women is to emphasise the social impact of infrastructure and focus on the importance of outcomes.
"We often fail to emphasise how these projects can make a massive difference in people's lives. Even something as simple as a road can do this. Take the Waterview Tunnel, it changes how Aucklanders can move around the city.
"We need to be better at linking the outcomes from infrastructure with the sector. If we could do that, we would be able to attract more people with valuable skills.
Barrett also says women may not be aware of how collaborative the sector is. "You are working with clever, interesting teams of people."
Tracey Ryan sees flexibility as an essential recruitment tool. "There's more we can do around making our industry more flexible, making it more attractive, making it more supportive and looking at it from the standpoint of young people, young female engineers."
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