Women in Construction Earn the Highest Salaries in These States
Key Takeaways:
- Median wages for women in construction vary significantly by state, with Alaska offering the highest median salary at $74,251.
- Top-paying construction roles for women include lawyers, CEOs, computer analysts, and financial managers, with median wages reaching up to $170,000 for lawyers.
- Despite low overall representation in trades, women are increasingly occupying leadership and technical roles, indicating progress toward gender diversity in construction.
The construction industry has long been dominated by men, with women making up only about 11% of the total workforce. Although women remain underrepresented in construction trades, a recent report from Construction Coverage shows that they are more likely to hold some of the industry’s highest-paying positions.
Because of the concentration of women in top-earning roles, women working full-time in construction earn a higher median wage than the overall average for full-time working women in 39 states.
Pay levels also vary significantly by location. Alaska offers the highest median annual salary for women in construction at $74,251, followed by Massachusetts at $66,957, Washington at $64,158, Colorado at $63,715, and Minnesota at $63,584.
On the other end of the spectrum, women earn the least in Delaware, Florida, and Georgia, with annual median wages of $47,555, $47,958, and $48,777, respectively.
While women still have low representation within construction trade occupations—such as plumbers, carpenters, masons, and electricians—they have disproportionately high representation in some of the industry’s best-paying jobs. For instance, lawyers in the construction sector are the industry’s top-paid workers, with median annual wages of $170,000 for female lawyers working full-time. Women account for more than 48% of construction industry attorneys, over four times higher than their overall representation in the sector. This trend is seen across many of the best-paying occupations for women in the construction sector, including training specialists, CEOs, computer systems analysts, software developers, financial managers, HR managers, civil engineers, and management analysts.
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