March 4, 2026
She Came to Work to Work
Women in Construction Week 2026 — those who level up and never stop building.
In construction, the job tells you who you are pretty quickly. You either rise to it, or you don't. For the women who've built careers at Stacy Witbeck, rising was just the start. Leveling up is the daily motion.
Tiaja Harley Wiltshire started her first project while pregnant, said nothing about it for two weeks, and has been outperforming expectations ever since.
Women now make up 14% of the construction workforce. The number is growing. The stories behind it are better.
Spotlight: Tiaja Harley Wiltshire — Project Engineer, East Coast
Tiaja came to work to work. She wanted the job to speak before anything else did. When she told her team she was expecting a baby, her project manager's message was direct: never hide who you are because of the room you're in. She took note and carried on.
Nearly five years later, Tiaja has run complex joint venture rail projects, relocated across the country for work, and built the kind of track record that gets you into rooms most people spend years trying to reach. One defining stretch: a subcontractor missed a major scope of work on a live project, and she found herself at the center of the recovery. Tiaja gathered documentation, ran mediation, and presented findings to directors and executives while managing a delivery timeline that couldn't slip. She held it together, earned the trust of everyone in that room, and got it done.
"My thoughts and ideas truly mattered, rather than just simply being acknowledged."
A lot of her trajectory runs through one person: Ken Prince. He handed Tiaja her first internship at 19, reappeared years later on a separate project as a trusted partner and eventually built an East Coast team around people he personally selected, Tiaja among them. She calls him her superhero.
The best way to describe her job site is the Cha-Cha Slide: one direction, then another, then back again. It's an accurate description of how complex construction projects actually run. Tiaja has learned to move with it and still deliver.
Her current safety helmet is clean: three stickers, and name. Her last one was covered in nature decals, flowers, women in construction patches, and a stripe of pink spray paint. Two hard hats from two different chapters of her career, yet both hers.
Tiaja is most direct about something the industry doesn't always make room for: motherhood. She spent years convinced she couldn't do both, be present on a project and be present for her kid. She was wrong, and she'll say so plainly.
"You can have both. You can have a career and still be a mom. I'm proof of that."
It's not simple. Sick days, school closures, the mental load that doesn't punch out at five. But Tiaja shows up, manages the complexity, and delivers. She's leveled up at every stage, as an engineer, as a project leader, and as a mother. That's construction and that's also just who she is.
In December, Tiaja will mark five years in her current role, and she has no plans to slow down.
In construction, your work speaks for itself. Tiaja's work has been speaking volumes.