feisty
Australian women in construction are no longer the exception that proves the rule. They're running major building and engineering firms, directing national infrastructure programs, and sitting on the boards of the sector's most influential bodies. The pipeline is still narrow, but the names at the top of that pipeline are worth knowing.
Why construction still matters for this conversation
Construction is Australia's fifth-largest industry by employment, with roughly 1.3 million workers. Women make up just 13 percent of that workforce, and the share with senior leadership roles is smaller still. That gap makes the women who have broken through worth naming, not as curiosities, but as proof the path exists. It's also an industry in the middle of a structural shift: infrastructure spending is at record levels in 2026, and the companies that will win the decade's biggest contracts are already deciding what their leadership looks like.
The sector's intersection with finance, procurement, and government policy means these leaders often cross over with the dealmakers profiled in pieces like Australian women in infrastructure investing. But the builders are a distinct group, and they deserve their own list.
The leaders to know
Vanessa Oulton
Vanessa Oulton serves as Managing Director of Multiplex in Australia. She joined the contractor in the early 2000s and has worked across project delivery, commercial management, and operations before taking on the top role domestically. Under her watch, Multiplex has delivered several of the country's most watched high-rise and mixed-use projects. Oulton is a regular voice in industry discussions about gender targets and contractor accountability.
Denita Wawn
Denita Wawn is CEO of Master Builders Australia, the peak industry body representing residential and commercial builders nationwide. She has held the role since 2015 and has become one of the sector's most prominent advocates on workforce, housing supply, and industrial relations. Wawn gives regular evidence to parliamentary inquiries and is one of the few women whose voice shapes national construction policy from the top of the industry body rather than from inside a single company.
Natalie Cohen
Natalie Cohen is a senior executive at Lendlease, where she has led major urban regeneration projects in both Australia and internationally. Cohen has spent her career across development, investment management, and construction delivery, which gives her credibility across the commercial cycle. She's been a consistent advocate for flexible work structures in an industry that has historically treated site presence as non-negotiable.
Kate Gilmore
Kate Gilmore has built her career at CIMIC Group, one of Australia's largest contractors. She has held senior roles across engineering and infrastructure delivery, working on transport and resources projects at scale. Gilmore is a strong example of a technical career path that reached the executive level without migrating into a purely commercial or HR function, which is still relatively uncommon for women in the sector.
Renata Hakenberg
Renata Hakenberg leads diversity and inclusion strategy at a major tier-one contractor, with a particular focus on trades entry and retention. Her work sits at the intersection of workforce policy and operational practice. The industry's structural problem isn't just executive representation. It's the near-complete absence of women in the trades that feed the project management and leadership pipeline. Hakenberg's work targets both.
What's driving change, slowly
Three forces are shifting the numbers. Government contracting requirements, particularly on Commonwealth-funded infrastructure, now include gender workforce targets that contractors must meet or explain. Second, the skills shortage that has run through the industry since 2022 has made employers less selective about candidate profiles, which creates entry points women didn't have before. Third, the industry's own peak bodies have shifted from voluntary targets to harder accountability measures.
None of this is fast. Construction's culture on site is changing at a different pace from construction's culture in the boardroom, and conflating the two produces misleading optimism. The women named above have mostly built careers in commercial, project management, and executive functions. The trades pipeline, which is where most construction careers begin, remains overwhelmingly male. That divide shapes everything about how change moves through the industry.
The procurement function is one of the more integrated pathways for women into senior construction roles, as shown by the leaders covered in Australian women in procurement and supply chain. Several of the country's most senior female construction executives entered through commercial and procurement rather than through site management.
What these leaders share
A few common threads show up across these careers. All of them stayed in the industry rather than pivoting out when advancement stalled. Most of them built technical credibility early and commercial credibility later, rather than moving into HR or communications, which is the default redirect many industries use to manage women who might otherwise compete for operations roles. And most of them have been explicit, on record, about the structural problems they faced rather than packaging their success as evidence that the system works fine. That candor is part of what makes them useful names to track.
The list above is not exhaustive. There are senior project directors, state managers, and technical leads at mid-tier contractors who aren't household names but are running large programs. The industry's fragmentation, thousands of builders across residential, commercial, and civil, means significant careers can go relatively unnoticed outside a sector that doesn't generate the same media coverage as banking or technology.
Watch the tier-one contractors, the peak bodies, and the government delivery agencies over the next two years. That's where the next round of senior appointments will land.