Paula Chandler, 52, originally from Ashington in Northumberland, is a national design director for a construction firm – and is now a judge at the Women in Construction awards after winning the lifetime achievement award in 2023.<\/p>\n
“From my personal experience growing up in the north east of England, I would say it was actively discouraged to for women to get into the construction and engineering industry,” Paula said.<\/p>\n
“When I was doing my work experience I was shipped off to a council office to answer the phones, despite me asking for an opportunity to go and get involved.<\/p>\n
“In my first job interview, it was an all-male panel, and they had me running round the room asking design and technical questions, which I loved.<\/p>\n
“And at the very and of the interview one of the panellists asked me if I could make a decent cup of tea. <\/p>\n
“My whole world came crashing down.<\/p>\n
“Because it hit me that in that one moment, with that one statement – they weren’t taking me seriously.”<\/p>\n
Paula said she questioned the interviewer, and asked if he had asked the other candidates, who were all male, the same question.<\/p>\n
She got the job – and said she “set about changing those perceptions from the inside out”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Paula Chandler, 52, originally from Ashington in Northumberland, is a national design director for a construction firm –…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":625792,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[96,391,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-625791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-tv","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625791\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}