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This study delves into the professional trajectories of 20 women leaders Vice President (VP) and above in the U.S. Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) sector. These accomplished women, carefully selected from Engineering News Record's (ENR's) Top 400 firms, shared their personal stories, discussing both triumphs and challenges influencing their journey to senior corporate positions. This collection of experiences provides valuable insights to identify the root causes of women's underrepresentation in the industry. Moreover, this investigation aims to create a career roadmap that supports early and mid-career women in their pursuit of success within AEC. Success factors contributing to these women's rise include a supportive partner, receiving early mentoring and possessing a genuine passion for their projects. Companies seeking to stand out and benefit from innovative outcomes that diversity offers should consider implementing diversity programs and fostering the growth of women throughout their careers. This may involve actively recruiting young women and providing funding for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) programs and scholarships for pre-college girls. Identified initiatives hold the potential to increase the number of women entering the industry and reduce the rate of early departures, thus helping to close the workforce shortage gap in the construction sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forum papers are thought-provoking opinion pieces or essays founded in fact, sometimes containing speculation, on a civil engineering topic of general interest and relevance to the readership of the journal. The views expressed in this Forum article do not necessarily reflect the views of ASCE or the Editorial Board of the journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Will women and men follow distinctively different paths to achieve executive engineering leadership positions in the US architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry? Using Engineering News Record's (ENR's) 2019 Top 400 list, this research analyzed LinkedIn profiles for over 2,800 executives to assess career differences between genders. Statistical comparisons of important features, highlighted by number of companies, titles, education, and network size, revealed a significant impact of gender on individual career paths. A key finding was that men ascend to leadership with a single firm throughout their career, outpacing women almost fourfold (37% to 10%). Applying random forest (RF) as an ensemble classifier, researchers successfully predicted profile gender with accuracy of 98.95% for training and 89.53% for testing samples. Collating and categorizing the activities and milestones of individual and collective executives offer insight regarding successful experiences, skills, and choices to reach leadership roles. This creates a roadmap for current and future early and midlevel professionals to model their own vocational journey and accelerate progression up the corporate ladder. From an industry perspective, firms deprive themselves and customers of the proven wide-ranging benefits of diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Green principles have been increasingly incorporated into planning, design, construction, and maintenance processes in the engineering and construction industry. Along with the growth of the green initiative, going green not only demonstrates corporate social responsibility, but may yield significant economic benefits. This study compares financial performance between green and conventional firms in the engineering and construction industry. A total of 22 sample companies used in this empirical analysis are categorized into two groups-green versus conventional firms-in accordance with Engineering News Record and Newsweek green company lists. Two groups are compared in terms of short-term financial performance, long-term economic value, and market value. The analysis shows that green firms outperform conventional firms on return on equity (17.4 versus 8.2%) and economic value added margin (0.35 versus ). However, the green strategy has not yet been factored into corporate market value. The findings yield important managerial implications for engineering and construction organizations to integrate sustainability into their business operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: With an increasing American public desire to regulate carbon emissions from stationary and mobile sources, and with more states adopting renewable energy standards and green building codes as an effort toward green environment initiatives, there is an imperative need to evaluate the effectiveness and equity implications of using different mechanisms to reduce carbon emissions in the construction and facility management industry. After all, building construction and operation contributes more than one-third of the carbon emissions in the United States (US). However, the impact of emerging carbon regulatory policies on the construction industry is still unclear. This paper presents a carbon regulation based duopoly model to evaluate the effectiveness and equity of various carbon policies including emission standards, carbon tax, and emissions trading. An empirical analysis of the US housing industry is conducted to illustrate the impacts on the industrial production, emission reduction target, market structure, technology selection, and carbon cost allocation etc. The results encompass emission reduction contributions from large and small firms, the extent of carbon cost burden pass-through to consumers, changes in house price, industry output, and market share. Especially, the analysis shows the market-based mechanisms outperform the emission standards in terms of effectively achieving emission targets while maintaining a stable industrial production. To meet the 17% emission reduction target, a carbon price of $22.3 per metric ton is expected for construction firms. About 54% of carbon cost will be passed through to the end consumers at this carbon price. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Cash flow management is one of the most important determinants of the success of construction project management. Overdraft, retainage, financing, payment and billing policies constitute the most significant financial issues that contractors must plan, control and manage for the successful completion of construction jobs. Particularly, in an attempt to reduce project costs, contractors must balance cost savings of material discounts due to early payments and extra interest expenses because of additional overdraft. Through identifying feedback loops in project cash flows, a system dynamics model is developed for project cash flow management. The model is flexible to incorporate typical front-end and back-end loading cash flow management strategies and provides an interactive predication of project cash flows. A warehouse project is discussed to demonstrate how various cash flow strategies improve overdraft financing requirements and profitability. Especially, the analysis shows an 11% reduction on overdraft requirements while using an overbilling strategy, and 30% reduction if the trade credit strategy is implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While construction arbitration is analyzed in a plethora of information, there is a paucity of hard data about the consistency and reliability of the construction arbitration decision. The assumption that an industry familiar adjudicator will provide a reliable and consistent decision in comparison with the expectation of the industry as a whole has not been tested. This paper presents the results of a study on the reliability and consistency of construction arbitration through the examination of a variety of arbitrators’ decisions on the same construction dispute scenario. Data was collected from attorneys, owners, owner representatives, contractors, and subcontractors. Compilation of the survey results finds little consistency in the arbitrator’s awards, but with much thoughtful care in award consideration. The results suggest that the arbitrator’s industry background does not influence the arbitrator’s award. There is also no significant award bias due to the arbitrator’s education level or years spent in construction business. The results also indicate that previous arbitration experience does not predict the award outcome. This paper concludes that construction arbitration is wholly unpredictable. However, the result will be a well-reasoned and unbiased decision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the public expectation of better road performance accompanied by economic development and population growth over the past decades, state highway agencies have been under intense pressure for continuous improvement in the quality and cost efficiency of transportation projects. To meet these challenges, state highway agencies must seek innovative approaches to deliver highway projects, including outsourcing some of the agency’s functions and shifting maintenance responsibilities to contractors. Many states have implemented alternative contracting methods in project programming and execution to provide lasting and functional roadways at the optimum life-cycle cost to the public. The performance warranty is one of the innovative practices that has been declared operational by the Federal Highway Administration since 1996. Use of warranties in some states has required changes to state legislation and agency regulations. This paper discusses the laws and regulations needed to successfully incorporate performance warranties into current contracting practices and avoid litigation. The state of Alabama is used as an example of a state considering the use of performance warranties. Proposals for laws and regulations will be outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presumed high exposure to volatile organic compounds among construction workers has not been substantiated with biomonitoring evidence. This study found that construction occupation was associated with increased blood concentrations of toluene, ethylbenzene, o-xylene, and m-/p- xylene. The findings inform interventions for exposure reduction using engineering controls and personal protective equipment. Objective: This study aimed to examine blood benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, o-xylene, and m-/p-xylene (BTEX) concentrations and their trends contrasting construction workers with workers in other occupations from 1999 to 2014 in the United States. Methods: Using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, quantile regressions were performed to investigate associations between occupation and blood BTEX concentrations. Results: We found that high-risk and construction occupations were associated with increased blood concentrations of toluene, o-xylene, and m-/p-xylene at the 50–90th percentiles (P50–90), and ethylbenzene at P70–90. Moreover, although blood concentrations of ethylbenzene, o-xylene, and m-/p-xylene trended down among all US workers, no decreasing trend was observed for benzene and toluene among construction workers. Conclusions: Future studies are warranted to address questions about specific tasks to better assess VOC exposure from various trades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]