Beginning today, Webcor will turn the spotlight on our amazing female employees with a new recurring series featuring Women of Webcor (WOW), the company's Employee Resource Group for women. The debut of the series coincides with Women in Construction Week 2022, which is the first full week of Women's History Month.

The focus of Women in Construction (WIC) Week is to highlight women as a viable component of the construction industry. This year's theme, “Envision Equity,” seeks to raise awareness of a wide range of roles in the construction industry that women enjoy.

Each installment in the series of articles will pose a question and feature answers from WOW members. The initial set of questions include the following:

• Your most memorable moment working in construction
• The most difficult scope item you've had to coordinate and build
• The biggest change you want to see in the industry
• The one piece of advice you would give to your younger self
• How to manage work/life balance
  The first thing you build in the field yourself
• Who inspires you

...and more.

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We Asked Four of Webcor's Women Builders About Their Most Memorable Moment Working in Construction

Women account for only about 10 percent of the construction workforce. That makes every woman builder a groundbreaker. Webcor is celebrating its female builders during Women in Construction Week with the first in an ongoing series in which Women of Webcor will share their expertise, perspectives, and memories. The first in this series features four WOW members recounting their most memorable moment working in construction.

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Bhavana is currently working at the American Express SFO Centurion Lounge Renovation and Expansion.

My favorite memory is seeing the opening of SFO Terminal 1 Boarding Area B. That moment gave me goosebumps. I was literally just three years in construction, managing projects up to $50M. On this massive project of close to $1 billion, I got to manage MEP Sustainability Commissioning testing for all phases and manage one of the core trades, special systems scope for Phase 2 and Phase 3. I knew nothing about MEP and special systems before stepping foot on this project. I did good and was very appreciated for the work that I put into this project. I learned a lot about construction and airport construction in general. I moved on to also manage BIM and tenant management in Phase 3 which also made my contribution pretty significant to the project. I was super proud of being a part of one of the biggest terminals in the world. It felt like a great achievement for being a part of the massive team that made the first LEED Platinum airport terminal in the world. It is the biggest highlight of my resume.

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Isha is currently working at the Transbay Parcel F project.‍

The use of technology in construction always excites me. My manager at the time encouraged me to create barcodes that could link all the construction issues of a particular area. I was pleasantly surprised to see the positive response it got.

Later, we used this technology and 3D renderings to showcase how the building would look in the future.

It brought immense satisfaction when field personnel used their mobile phones to visualize complex spaces with such ease.

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Angela works in Project Support in Northern California.

I was fresh out of college working on the renovation of Concord Pavilion as a Project Engineer.  Many of the big, burly foremen didn’t take me seriously because I’m a smaller person and was very young.  After several months of being out in the field every day and putting out fires, the structural steel foreman came up to ME one day (instead of the superintendent) to say that the area where the JLG needed to go wasn’t flat enough.  Once that was taken care of the same morning, the floodgates opened and all the foremen started coming to me.  Two lessons learned from that experience:  it takes patience and perseverance to earn respect, and the trade foremen definitely talk to each other.

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Karen is currently assigned to Preconstruction & Estimating.

I have a two-part response, but they are both related. Receiving TCO (temporary certificate of occupancy) for the Dining Center at UC Merced was awesome! As my first project ever, it was my first experience in what receiving TCO meant, and the team had great camaraderie. We all worked very hard to hit the date almost exactly to what it needed to be and we did it. So the excitement of everybody around that was awesome and very memorable. Similarly, I was super lucky to be nominated to participate in the grand opening that UC Merced held for the first delivery buildings and it was awesome because the milestone was celebrated across the board from Webcor to students to the University and that made everybody’s hard work feel validated. I don’t think that will happen ever again in my career.