Why Women in Property Need Their Own Table

Not just a seat at the existing one

The Numbers Nobody Argues With Anymore

Women now make up around 15% of the UK construction workforce overall — but only about 1% of the on-site manual workforce, and just 7% of senior management and board-level construction positions. In property investment, the picture is better but still lopsided: women hold roughly 25–30% of board positions in the property sector, and around 27% of UK investment roles more broadly.

That's real progress compared to a decade ago. It's also still a room where, more often than not, you're one of a handful.

I don't say that to be dramatic. I say it because it matches exactly what I see, meeting after meeting, across every corner of this industry I work in.

The Rooms I Sit In

I'm an on-market estate agent with IAD, handling traditional listings and sales. I founded 360 Property Hub to source off-market deals before they touch the public portals. I've got a long-standing auction partnership with Town & Country Property Auctions, and land is where I spend most of my own time and headspace.

That puts me in a lot of different rooms, investor meetups, auction previews, trade breakfasts, agent conferences.

I hear Assumptions all the time!

The pattern is consistent enough that it stopped surprising me a long time ago. Women are in the room. They're sharp, they're capable, they're doing genuinely serious work. And they're still, most of the time, a small minority, sat at a table built around someone else's default assumptions of who belongs there.

"A Seat at the Table" Isn't the Same as Your Own Table

There's a well-worn piece of advice in business: if you're not at the table, get a seat at it.

I understand why people say it. But it quietly assumes the table itself is neutral, that once you're sat there, everything else evens out. It doesn't, not automatically. A seat you had to fight for, in a room built without you in mind, still costs something every time you sit in it. The small translations. The being underestimated by default. Then explaining, again, why you're there.

None of that is anyone's fault in any single room. It's just the accumulated weight of an industry that's only recently started counting how few women are actually in it.

A dedicated space isn't a retreat from that. It's a different kind of table, one where nobody has to spend their first ten minutes establishing they belong there.

Why I Said Yes to Hosting Hard Hats to Heels

Hayley Andrews built Hard Hats to Heels nationally around exactly this idea, a community for women in property, construction and business, built for connection rather than justification. When the chance came to bring it to Cornwall and host it myself, I didn't hesitate.

Partly because I've felt that gap myself, in every one of those rooms I mentioned above. Partly because I've served as Tech Lead for TEDxPorthtowan Women, and I've watched what happens when women in an industry get a genuine platform rather than a token slot on someone else's agenda.

Mostly because it's overdue. Cornwall has property meetups, construction networking, business breakfasts. It didn't have this.

What This Isn't

This isn't separatism, and it isn't a complaint about the wider industry. I still work in it every day, across on-market sales, off-market sourcing, auctions and land — and plenty of the people I work alongside in those spaces are excellent allies who'd say the same thing I'm saying here.

It's simply this: a room built specifically for women in property, construction and business does something a mixed-industry meetup structurally can't. It removes the tax of being the minority in the room, even for one evening a month, and replaces it with the kind of unguarded conversation that actually moves careers and businesses forward.

Join Us at the Table We Built

Hard Hats to Heels Cornwall runs monthly, Wednesdays at 6pm, with the 2026–2027 schedule already confirmed. Tickets are £29.

https://hardhatstoheels.co.uk/cornwall

If you've spent enough evenings being the only one, or one of two, in a room that wasn't built with you in mind, come and see what a room built specifically for you feels like instead.

Cristina 🙏