FROM MEMBER TO FELLOW
Why women stall and how we intend to change it
There is a quiet and persistent pattern across construction professional bodies. Women qualify. Women become members. Then many of them stop.
They remain at member grade for years, sometimes decades, despite having the experience, competence and leadership track record to progress to fellow status. This is not because women lack ability. It is because the system quietly filters them out. And unless we name that properly, it will never change.
Most women do not drop out of construction at entry level. They drop out of progression. The stall almost always happens in mid-career, eight to fifteen years in. It coincides almost perfectly with the life stage when women start having children, take maternity leave, move to part-time or flexible work, step out of delivery roles or absorb caring responsibilities.
Most women do not drop out of construction at entry level. They drop out of progression.
It is also the exact period when fellowship-level evidence is normally built.
So women fall behind on paper. Not in competence. Not in leadership. Not in impact. On documentation. By the time many women look at fellowship seriously, they are comparing themselves against uninterrupted male careers and assuming they are ‘behind’, even when their actual capability and responsibility level is comparable or higher.
One of the laziest explanations for the fellowship gap is that women are simply less interested in senior recognition. That explanation collapses under even light scrutiny. What women are actually responding to is a combination of opaque criteria, unclear routes to fellowship, male-coded examples of leadership, lack of sponsorship, lack of feedback on readiness and a deep fear of rejection in a system that feels subjective. When the rules are unclear and the bar feels movable, women self-select out. Men apply and see what happens. Women wait until they feel ready. They wait forever.
Time off for maternity and caring does not formally disqualify women from fellowship. But it does something far more corrosive. It permanently damages women’s professional narratives in their own heads.
Women internalise the idea that they are now behind. They downgrade their own experience. They stop counting the leadership they did before children. They discount the responsibility they still carry after returning part-time. They start measuring themselves against uninterrupted male careers and quietly conclude that they are not fellowship material. Nothing in the fellowship criteria tells them to do this. But the culture does.
We tell women they have imposter syndrome as if it is a psychological weakness. It is not. It is a rational response to a system that rarely sponsors them, rarely nominates them, rarely tells them they are ready, rarely gives them feedback on readiness and rarely shows them people like them at fellow grade. When you never see yourself reflected at the top, you assume you do not belong there. That is not pathology. That is pattern recognition.
Another major blocker is brutally practical. Women are busy. They are time-poor. They are burdened with disproportionate emotional labour. Then we ask them to reconstruct 15 to 20 years of evidence, interpret vague competency criteria, write reflective statements, map experience to frameworks and guess what assessors want to see. With no structured support. So they do what exhausted professionals do; they put it off.
This is not a diversity issue. It is a capability and leadership issue. If we systematically fail to move women from member to fellow, we lose senior female role models, weaken the leadership pipeline, waste decades of experience, entrench male-dominated governance and quietly tell midcareer women that this profession does not see them. That is not sustainable.
For the CICES Women’s Network, this is not an abstract discussion. One of our specific targets for this year is to increase the number of women progressing from member to fellow. Not in five years, not eventually; this year. That is exactly why we are launching structured progression sessions focused specifically on supporting women who are already operating at fellowship level in reality, but not on paper. These sessions are not about persuading women that fellowship matters. They are about understanding why capable, experienced women have not progressed and removing the structural, psychological and practical barriers that have kept them at member grade. We are not assuming that women lack ambition. We are assuming that something in the system is not working, so we are fixing it.
The CICES Women’s Network is launching a structured progression support programme focused specifically on moving women from member to fellow. This programme is directly tied to our target of increasing female fellowship memberships this year. It is not an inspirational initiative, it is a practical intervention. We are inviting women at member grade to come and talk to us openly about why they have not applied for fellowship, what has held them back, what they believe they are missing, what they think the criteria really mean and what they are worried assessors will judge them on. We are using those conversations to design targeted, evidence-based support that closes the real gap between member and fellow for women. Not the theoretical one, the real one.
These sessions are deliberately diagnostic. They are designed to identify exactly where women’s confidence collapses, where documentation becomes a blocker, where criteria are being misinterpreted, where sponsorship is missing and where career breaks and part-time work are distorting self-assessment. So we can fix the actual failure points in the progression system.
Participants will be supported through a structured process that turns fellowship from an abstract future ambition into a concrete, time-bound project. Women will be helped to build a clear evidence map of their experience, reframe their leadership and impact properly and translate what they already do into fellowship-aligned narratives. They will receive practical guidance on how fellowship statements are assessed, how to structure reflective evidence and how to articulate contribution to the profession in a way that actually lands.
Crucially, this will be combined with active sponsorship and nomination support. Because mentoring alone does not move women into fellow grade. Sponsorship does.
Success is not one or two women becoming fellows. Success is a measurable increase in female fellowship applications, female fellowship success rates and senior sponsorship activity.
It’s a visible shift in how women assess their own readiness and how assessors interpret women’s career evidence. This is not a symbolic commitment. It is an operational target.
Women are not failing to reach fellowship. The system is failing to take them there. Until we design progression support that reflects women’s actual career realities, we will keep losing them in the middle. The CICES Women’s Network is done watching that happen.
If you are a woman at member grade who has ever thought, ‘I’m probably not ready yet’, ‘I don’t think I’ve done enough’ or ‘I’ll apply in a few more years’, this programme is for you. If you are a senior professional reading this, start sponsoring women properly. That is how this gap actually closes.