by Lauren Breckenridge, LEED AP
Sustainability Associate at Green Badger
Last week I had the opportunity to attend Engineering News-Record Groundbreaking Women in Construction conference, GWIC for short, in San Diego, and I am still thinking about it days later, which is honestly the best sign that a conference was worth attending.
A Room Full of People Ready to Do the Work
GWIC draws together women (and the men who champion them) from across the construction industry contractors, engineers, project managers, executives, and founders. What struck me most wasn’t just the caliber of speakers, but the energy in the room. These weren’t people waiting for permission to lead. They were already leading and sharing the playbook with everyone around them.
The conference opened with a keynote from Emily Cohen, CEO of United Contractors, who represents more than 800 union-signatory contractors and 40,000 workers across California. She didn’t sugarcoat what it takes to rise in a male-dominated industry, and her candor set the tone for everything that followed.
The Session I Keep Talking About
If you ask me what the standout moment of the whole conference was, it was a breakout session called Construction Tech Spotlight: A Miami Startup Transforms Coastal Infrastructure, featuring Anya Freeman, founder and CEO of Kind Designs. Anya started her career as an attorney (already interesting!) but watching water levels rise firsthand in Miami pushed her to make a career pivot into technology with a purpose.
Her company developed patented 3D Living Seawalls that are now being installed at coastal sites across the U.S., and what makes them so exciting is that they aren’t just protecting the shoreline, they’re designed to support marine ecosystems and give sea life a place to thrive. In an industry where sustainability often gets treated as a checkbox you fill out after the fact, seeing someone build ecological benefit into the product from day one was genuinely thrilling. It reminded me of why I do the work I do and why it matters that more people in construction think this way.
A Girl Scout Moment That Got Me
One session I did not expect to hit me as hard as it did was the Girl Scout Partnerships presentation, featuring Beth Duyvejonck from Opus and Marisa Williams, CEO of Girl Scouts River Valleys. They’ve built a program called Power Girls that brings young women onto construction sites and into STEM, showing them what’s possible before anyone has the chance to tell them it isn’t for them.
I walked out of that session already drafting a mental email to my local Girl Scout chapter. Honestly, the younger girls are exposed to the construction and sustainability industries, the more confident they become in them and the more likely we are to actually solve the workforce pipeline problem that this industry has been wringing its hands over for years. If you’re in construction and looking for a way to make a tangible impact beyond your day job, I cannot recommend exploring this partnership enough.
Making Your Voice Count
Another session worth calling out was The 2-Minute Test with Colleen Hauk of The Corporate Refinery, which focused on communicating with clarity and confidence, whether you’re on a jobsite or in the boardroom. What made it special was that Colleen had volunteers come up on stage for live, real-time coaching, getting immediate feedback on delivery, presence, and the works. Watching my peers visibly improve in the span of a few minutes was both humbling and energizing, and a good reminder that soft skills are not soft; they are, in fact, the whole game.
The Thread That Tied It All Together
Mentorship came up again and again throughout the two days, and every time it did, I felt it personally. I didn’t have a mentor guiding me through the early stages of my career, and I know how much harder that made things. Navigating this industry without someone in your corner who’s been there is its own kind of challenge.
So if there’s one thing I’m carrying out of GWIC and into the rest of this year, it’s a real commitment to being that person for someone else, whether that’s a young woman just discovering that construction and sustainability are even career options, or someone a few years in who just needs to know the unwritten rules. The conference made it clear: the women leading this industry got here in part because someone believed in them. Now it’s our turn to pass that forward.
Here’s to putting words into action!
