Only 15% of leadership roles in construction are held by women. Ronda Salazar left a decades-long career to change that math — one uncomfortable truth about her own perfectionism at a time.
By Helen Davis, Community Strategist Interviews founders and coaches building purpose-driven businesses for Humans of Fuzia.
August 3, 2026
Women hold just 15% of leadership positions in construction — a figure Salazar cites from her own experience, and one that lines up with recent industry data: according to the National Association of Women in Construction, women held about 15% of construction management roles in 2025, up from 12% the year before. Ronda Salazar spent 36 years inside that industry before she decided the number was hers to move.
She’s one of the founders featured through Humans of Fuzia, a global storytelling platform where entrepreneurs and coaches talk openly about what’s actually working — and what isn’t — in building their businesses. Salazar’s answer to that second question is unusually candid for someone one year into her own company.
She left corporate America in December 2025, not chasing a bigger opportunity but escaping a smaller one: a role where she could no longer influence or mentor the people she managed. What she built instead is a coaching practice for women navigating construction leadership, a field where, as she put it, “you may be the only woman in a room in those kinds of settings.” She knows the terrain personally — 36 years of it — and now spends her time translating that experience into a business built to move an industry-wide number, not just her own revenue line.
The pain point she’s chasing is specific. Women in construction leadership can do the job — Salazar is proof of that — but struggle to prove it in terms their organizations reward: promotions, raises, recognition. “It’s very difficult to translate what those responsibilities are into a business impact,” she said, describing employees who quietly carry results no one has taught them to document. Her course tackles this directly, walking women through converting day-to-day work into specific, fact-based statements tied to business outcomes — the exact skill required to be seen, not just to perform.
That mechanism is also her clearest lesson for other coaches scaling in a niche: Salazar isn’t trying to out-market anyone. She’s converting 36 years of lived, hard-to-fake credibility — construction associations, direct outreach, LinkedIn — into a narrow, defensible niche instead of broad visibility. For founders building authority-based businesses, specificity is doing the work that ad spend would otherwise have to.
Where Salazar is still working it out is marketing itself. “I am not a marketing person or a salesperson by nature,” she admitted — and she’s a solopreneur, handling accounting, sales, and coaching alone. It’s a common industry-wide struggle: women building authority in male-dominated fields often have the expertise but not the infrastructure — no team, no built-in audience — to make that expertise visible at scale.
Execution Tip: Write down one result you produced this month and rewrite it as a single sentence tied to business impact — not “I helped the team,” but what changed because you did. That’s the sentence Salazar would tell you to lead with.
Salazar’s closing line carries the weight of the whole conversation: “We’re already in the industry. We just need to step forward with confidence, knowing that we can do the jobs just as well as the men can.” It’s advice for the women she coaches. It’s also, unmistakably, a note to herself.
Connect with Ronda Salazar
- Book: Roar Like a Woman: 35 Empowering Words to Unleash Your Inner Lioness
- Ronda Salazar | LinkedIn
