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Articles

CJRBE: Vol. 6 No.2, Dec. 2018

Overcoming the Barriers of Female Students Choice of Built Environment Courses

  • Jimoh Richard, Oyewobi Luqman & Adamu Amina
Submitted
December 20, 2018
Published
2018-12-21

Abstract

Many studies have examined the causes of women underrepresentation in construction, barriers to their career progression as well as impact of discrimination and harassment on women construction workers; however, only a few have explicitly examined how the barriers they encountered in their choice of built environment courses could be mitigated.  This paper examines overcoming the barriers of female students’ choice of built environment courses vis-à-vis determining the medium of knowledge of the built environment courses, reasons for their choice of courses and the challenges the females practising in the built environment faced in the course of their practise. Questionnaire survey was adopted with samples drawn from three different categories of respondents. A total of 298 questionnaires were self-administered to these categories of respondents, out of which 186 (62.4%) were returned. The findings reveal that increase in awareness of opportunities in construction; favourable selection and recruitment criteria as well as availability of equality in policies and procedure are the main influencing factor in career choice amongst women in the built environment profession. The study concluded that the motivating factors responsible for choice of career in the built environment are not the same for the categories of the respondents considered. It was thus recommended that aggressive enlightenment is required in secondary schools to encourage females in the choice of built environment courses which will enhance better representation of women so that the impact of women professionals in the construction industry can be extended.