We need to talk about women and retrofit

This article was originally published in issue 48 of Passive House Plus magazine. Want immediate access to all back issues and exclusive extra content? Click here to subscribe for as little as €15, or click here to receive the next issue free of charge

I recently sat down and felt compelled to ask ChatGPT to "name a process undertaken by women that has been made more efficient and stress-free through innovation and process changes." The results that came back were about washing machines, robotic hoovers, kitchen appliances, automatic dryers, laundry detergent, stain removers, and ironing. I had not mentioned anything in relation to cleaning or housework, but it still showed inherent biases and lacked the variety of skills involved in women’s lives today.

I asked the same question with "men" in place of "women," and the innovations listed were financial tracking, investing, online banking, and budgeting software.

My job is to constantly evaluate how to better support women homeowners in embracing retrofit projects. Women homeowners today require a multitude of skills including data analytics, financial tracking, procurement, cleaning, buying, designing, technological competence, scheduling, cooking, specification, and parenting, all while often managing another career.

Observing the pitfalls in the renovation or retrofit process through the lens of thousands of women in the community I run is disheartening. I spend every day listening to a multitude of stories from women around why and how things go wrong, how to try to mitigate risk and how to resolve disputes.

This experience has had two clear effects. It has only further inspired me to hone my focus on identifying the hidden opportunities to better support women. And it has made me conclude that the retrofit industry has an opportunity to create a better framework to improve the project journey for women homeowners. However, another dependency of this journey is whether the appetite to embrace retrofit exists amongst women homeowners.

So where do we look for solutions? With over 10 years working within the branding industry in the UK, there is still a misunderstanding that it is about selling products, ideas, and lifestyles to people that they do not need. If anyone thinks that pretty designs, well-written words, and compounding data are enough to convince a woman today to buy anything, then we have made the first significant mistake. In the retail industry and consumer markets, they have to work exceptionally hard, invest significant time, and ensure they don’t underestimate women’s ability to grasp the truth about something and whether it actually benefits them profoundly.

We could revisit the stories about misogynistic tradespeople overlooking women to talk to the man, or the perception that women won’t understand construction, technology, or metrics, or that they get taken advantage of when it comes to costing, but I think it would do a disservice to the subtle, overlooked lesson: don’t underestimate women.

The real focus should be on highlighting the significant opportunities and misconceptions about women homeowners today that are blocking the pathway for women to embrace retrofit. A recent report on retrofit by the Federation of Master Builders stated, "There is low consumer demand for work to reduce the carbon impact of existing homes, with consumers typically showing little or no interest in energy efficiency or low/zero carbon technologies."

I did think immediately that it hadn’t caveated that little to no public engagement had been made on any significant scale to enlighten, educate, and inspire consumers on the benefits and opportunities to retrofit their homes. Are there lessons to be made from the growing number of significant sustainable decisions women make today? Did the dramatic rise in women buying more second-hand clothes come from a rise in living costs? Or was it a very clever platform called “Vinted” which improved the process, making buying and selling second hand clothes suddenly very easy?

Deloitte's 2023 report, The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and McKinsey's findings highlight an exponential growth in sustainable purchasing behaviours among UK women, driven by environmental awareness, ethical considerations and a desire for durable, repairable products. How can one presume a lack of appetite when the level of conversation with women homeowners around a retrofit approach or energy efficiency upgrades is at opposite ends of the scale compared to food, health, and beauty?

To address this, how should we engage better and capture the attention of women homeowners? Well, we can learn from the many consumer-focused businesses that have made significant shifts in consumer behaviour, such as the non-alcoholic beverage industry or natural cleaning products industry.

Olio, the giving away instead of throw away app that lets you simply offer an item of very little value to anyone who can re-home it, has gone from 2.3 million users in November 2022 to 4.8 million in November 2023. Seventy percent of its users are women in the UK. There is absolutely no financial or social gain from giving away these items, but users understand that not throwing something away is better for our planet and are prepared to take up time in their day to offer items for free to someone in their local area. No one would know if they had thrown it away except them, so if the system is in place to do the right thing, people do.

It comes back to making assumptions, and this is also the case with the presumed adversity that women have to technology adoption. Women use technology for what it can do, not for the sake of it, and research shows that women can be early adopters of many systems and processes when they work really well. They have less tolerance for bad user interfaces; if it is hard to use, they will not use it, not because they cannot. Marketers and manufacturers have data to support that women do more research than men before making a purchase.

To truly enable women to adopt retrofit, the industry should focus on developing better project process-driven frameworks to improve the journey, design technology with intuitive interfaces, build robust support networks, and promote gender-inclusive policies and practices. We just may need to call on a different set of professions to enable women homeowners to lead the way, rather than perceive them as a barrier.