The construction industry is missing out on numerous performance gains derived from gender diversity. Its reputation for excessive work stress, resulting in poor psychological health, is among the reasons for women not entering the industry or for them leaving the industry prematurely. Using an online questionnaire survey, this research investigated whether women professionals in the construction industry differ from their men colleagues in the stressors faced at work and the degree of work-related psychological injuries suffered. The respondents comprised 167 men and 110 women professionals working in the Australian construction industry. The results reveal that: (1) women professionals suffer more anxiety and acute stress symptoms than men professionals, but no significant difference is apparent between the genders in the level of depression suffered; (2) the top 10 stressors at work facing construction professionals are the same for both genders, with time pressure, excessive workload, long work hours, and unpleasant work environment being the critical issues; and (3) women professionals experience more discrimination, bullying, and sexual harassment. The research contributes to practice by identifying aspects that need improvements for making the construction industry gender diverse and sociopsychologically sustainable.

Studies of work stress in the construction industry have largely considered work characteristics as cofounding factors of work-related psychological illnesses and have paid minimal attention to the characteristics of construction personnel. However, literature from the field of psychology suggests that characteristics of individuals are heavily associated with stress-induced psychological illnesses. This study, using multiple correspondence analyses of data collected from 283 professionals in the Australian construction industry, investigated the simultaneous influence of six personal characteristics of construction professionals, such as gender, age, occupation, income, marital status, and personality traits, on work-related psychological illnesses. Key findings are (1) marital status is a vital moderator of work stress whereby professionals with a status of separated, divorced, or widowed are at high risk of suffering severe anxiety, depression, and acute stress; and (2) female professionals at middle management levels reported mild to moderate anxiety and depression, whereas their male counterparts were largely within normal ranges. These findings imply that in order to reduce productivity losses and economic costs caused by work stress, construction organizations should have (1) specialized programs that identify and provide social and emotional support for employees who are suffering marital discord; and (2) family-friendly and female-friendly employment policies and terms.

While the causes of accidents in the construction industry have been extensively studied, severity remains an understudied area. In order to provide more evidence for the currently limited number of empirical investigations on severity, this study analysed 24,764 construction accidents reported during 2002-11 in South Australia. A conceptual model developed through literature uses personal characteristics such as age, experience, gender and language. It also employs work-related factors such as size of organization, project size and location, mechanism of accident and body location of the injury. These were shown to discriminate why some accidents result in only a minor severity while others are fatal. Factors such as time of accident, day of the week and season were not strongly associated with accident severity. When the factors affecting severity of an accident are well understood, preventive measures could be developed specifically to those factors that are at high risk.

Universities are facing many challenges with growing student numbers and a need to modify the traditional lecture and tutorial–based face-to-face pedagogical style both for students who work full-time while studying and for international students who may have language difficulties. To address these challenges, a flipped classroom pedagogical model was trialled in a second-year module in a Construction Management undergraduate degree program. The model consisted of preclass online quizzes, in-class face-to-face lectures, group tasks, active learning spaces, adaptive online tutorials and a case-based assessment. Evaluation findings suggest that preclass activities are an important feature of a flipped classroom to actively engage students in independent learning and to help them construct their own knowledge. Findings also highlight the significance of physical space to facilitate collaboration and interactions between students, improve their learning experience, and inspire students to learn in an active environment. The findings have implications for both educational developers and academics to support the development of open, online, and blended learning courses and to deploy, implement, and evaluate higher education courses.

Insulation systems for the floor, roof, and external walls play a prominent role in providing a thermal barrier for the building envelope. Design decisions made for the insulation material type and thickness can alleviate potential impacts on the embodied energy and improve the building thermal performance. This design problem is often addressed using a building information modelling (BIM)-integrated optimisation approach. However, one major weakness that lies in the current studies is that BIM is merely used as the source for design parameters input. This study proposes a BIM-based envelope insulation optimisation design tool using a common software Revit and its extension Dynamo to find the trade-off between the total embodied energy of the insulation system and the thermal performance of the envelope by considering the material type and thickness. In addition, the tool also permits data visualisation in a BIM environment, and automates subsequent material library mapping and instantiates the optimal insulation designs. The framework is tested on a case study based in Sydney, Australia. By analysing sample designs from the Pareto front, it is found that slight improvement in the thermal performance (1.3399 to 1.2112 GJ/m²) would cause the embodied energy to increase by more than 50 times.

Poor mental health has become rampant in the construction industry globally, causing productivity and profit losses for organizations as well as disabilities and diminished quality of life for workers. Addressing the challenge is critical for a progressive industry and healthy workforce. Existing literature discusses the causes and effects of poor mental health among construction workers. Yet, it does not, based on real-world incident data, explain vulnerable trades, common incident mechanisms, and recurring psychological injuries, nor does it examine variations of lost time within the incident severity outcome due to psychological injuries. The present study addresses these gaps by analyzing workers’ compensation offered to construction trades workers from 2008 to 2019 for psychological injuries in the Australian construction industry. Carpenters and joiners, electricians, plant operators, structural steel workers, and construction and plumbing laborers suffered more permanently incapacitating psychological injuries than other trades. Workers in projects located in metro, small rural towns, and very remote regions were more heavily represented in permanently incapacitating psychological injuries than workers in other locations. The worst psychological injury, which resulted in a combination of permanent incapacity and an extended period of lost time (over 3,000 h), was caused by anxiety combined with depression or stress, or posttraumatic stress disorder from experiencing traumatic incidents, workplace violence and bullying, or vehicle incidents. Age and gender of workers did not show a statistically significant association with psychological injuries. The findings offer practical insights for developing optimized occupational health and safety management programs for improving the mental health of construction workers.