Dive Brief:

• A British college professor and the diversity manager of a UK construction training association have taken a Manchester hotel to task for posting pictures of scantily clad women and men wearing hard hats on construction barriers hiding a job site.

• The photos on fences surrounding Malmaison on Piccadilly show female construction workers holding drills and wearing little except hard hats and the yellow-and-black warning tape often used around construction sites. Some of the barriers also feature shirtless, muscular men in hard hats.

• The University of Manchester professor wrote in an article for The Guardian: “The hard-hat babes send out a message that aligns with male fantasy, not female realty. And that’s a problem.”

Dive Insight:

Civil engineer Kate Lloyd, who works for the Construction Industry Training Board, called the images “shocking, depressing and highly insulting to women working in construction. Images like these are extremely powerful because they send damaging messages about women’s roles and their ‘place’ in the industry. Never mind the fact that they are being used to represent an industry that is working to challenge the stereotypes.”