ACEC Chair Dan Larson Delivers Opening Remarks at Women’s Leadership Forum

 

Delivering opening remarks to kick off the Women’s Leadership Forum, ACEC Chair Dan Larson jokingly admitted that he is not an expert on what it takes to build a career as a woman in engineering. That designation, he told the otherwise all-female audience, belonged to the slate of speakers, panelists, and attendees who assembled Sunday morning for the first day of the two-day session in Cleveland.

Instead, Larson discussed in his remarks who wasn’t in the room. He asked attendees to picture a talented employee they had hired, trained, and counted on – someone on track to lead who one day was simply gone. “Those women should be here today,” Larson said, “Many of them would be sitting up here on this dais as leaders. And their absence is one of the most glaring and expensive problems our industry has.”

Larson tied the issue directly to the industry’s persistent workforce shortage. Projects are waiting on people firms don’t have, while senior engineers are retiring faster than they can be replaced. In that climate, he argued, developing and retaining women “isn’t a nice to have, nor is it a program we run when times are good. It’s a strategic imperative.”

He urged leaders to be honest about what attrition really costs. A departing engineer isn’t simply a vacancy. Ten years into her career, she knows the clients, the sites, the history, and she is the person younger engineers turn to when they’re stuck. “You can fill the seat. Maybe. But it takes years to fill it with the same experience.” Beyond that visible loss lies a hidden one: the teams she would have built, the relationships she would have developed, and the young women who might have stayed because they saw someone like themselves as a leader. “Attrition does more than subtract,” said Larson. “It removes a future multiplier.”

Most troubling, he said, is how often the loss is preventable. “Many women who leave engineering aren’t leaving the work. They’re leaving a system that asked them to choose between the career they built and the family they love.” Those norms were built when that tradeoff was assumed. They have, he declared, outlived their logic.
“It’s time for a new norm.”

Larson rejected the notion that high performance and family support are at odds, insisting it isn’t a “zero sum game.” The best organizations, he said, hold people to high standards while offering flexibility, build clear paths to leadership that “don’t require disappearing from home for a decade,” and judge people by “what they deliver rather than by how late they stay.” Firms that get this right will not only keep their own talent but attract the talent everyone else is losing. He also noted a less-discussed reason women leave: some can’t see the path their predecessors walked. Fixing that, he said, “costs nothing but honesty.”

Larson closed with a challenge to fellow leaders. “We can keep losing talented engineers and calling it a pipeline problem,” he said. “Or we can recognize that the solution is largely within our own walls.” To the women in the room who had “built flourishing careers in a field that didn’t always make room for them,” Larson declared that the industry “owes it to them to make sure the next woman doesn’t have to fight quite so hard to stay.”