What happened?
I came up with the women’s movement, and I was (am) very supportive of women trying to gain employment in the trades. I saw some admirable women manage to break through the barriers to gaining these jobs. Now those barriers, while somewhat still there, are pretty much easier to overcome.
My observation, as an electrician, on the numbers? In the seventies there were few, but gaining. The eighties and nineties saw more, many more, to where you’d see at least one or two on a crew. Now? It’s gone back to just a few.
Where I work we have quite a bit of construction going on. There are more than thirty electricians working, pretty well mixed, both in race and age. But just one woman. She does fine, and is well accepted by the rest, but is the only woman. The same goes for the other trades. There’s one pipefitter, no carpenters, and no machinists.
Why is that, I wonder. I’m kinda disappointed.
BTW; I have not looked at any recant stats on the subject.
Peace,
mangeorge
Lack of interest on the part of women ? Men and women have different tastes.
And in many cases, the lower average level of strength among women would have a major influence; just because women CAN do a job doesn’t mean that they will WANT to when they will effectively be working harder than the men due to strength differences.
Electrician is not (to my knowledge, at least) one of the heavy lifting jobs, though.
From my perspective – a female college grad who graduated in the 1990s – women are pushed into science, engineering, law, medicine. Our college counselor never even mentioned trade school to me, and I’ve wished more than once that I’d considered becoming an electrician rather than a computer programmer or Professional English Major. We’re encouraged to work with our brains, not our hands, notwithstanding the fact that an intellectual slouch is going to fall flat on their face in most professional trades. There’s still a stigma among women against jobs that require tool belts.
But like I said, I wish I’d gone for electrical engineering or circuit design or something where I can create and repair and improve.
I thought of lack of interest. There was a lot of interest back in the day, but I don’t know if part of that was being told that “you can’t do that”. The challenge, iow.
I don’t think that strength has a lot to do with it, but maybe the dirt and sweat and tiredness do. And calluses. There are a lot of men in the trades who aren’t physically real strong.
Construction (industrial) electrician can be, and usually is, very heavy. Think running conduit and pulling wire and cable.
Is that stigma a “femininity” thing? What’s-her-name, the welder in Flashdance is a fantasy. I know that some men have a problem with strong women.
I am a woman, and I am in construction. I am the boss, though, so I don’t actually work much anymore. I just get to put out fires all day long.
My opinion? We’ve had women working for us before, but they end up getting pregnant, or this ends up too much like work. They start getting lazy.
Lots of reasons. It’s hard work, and your body starts wearing out. If all your friends are guys and you hang out after work, sometimes your SO gets jealous, and their SO’s definitely do. You fit in most of the time, but there is a difference. You have to prove yourself everyday. Better, smarter, harder, faster.
Electricians, plumbers, etc. make pretty ok money, but general labor, carpenters do not typically die millionaires.
It’s cold, it’s hot, you have to climb 50 steps 75 times a day, the supes are fools.
I was an ok trimmer, but I am a hell of a boss. This is what I am good at.
Hm, fair enough on the strength thing. I stand corrected, but I am definitely not an electrician.
It’s complex. I take pride in being able to change a tire and replace a set of disc brake pads and rotors, on being able to drive a stickshift skillfully, on being able to construct a computer. There’s not a stigma against being self-sufficient, mostly. A woman can still be feminine doing all that, and the movie stereotype of Woman Who Can Kick Your Ass is pervasive and empowering. Yet being a plumber or a carpenter is just so very rarely what a woman wants for her career. Having a traditionally male hobby is fine – video games, car repair – but I think there’s a distant fear of being unattractive or intimidating or, yes, unfeminine, if you take on a trade.
There’s also the rather faulty belief that trades are a lower-status career option. A girl who’s smart enough and privileged enough to go to college (and that does not take a huge amount of smarts or privilege, believe me) will be pushed to go there. If they enter certain curricula with moderately high grades, they can even get a free ride. Trades are not encouraged by most career counselors, not because women are unsuitable for them necessarily but because the women who are suitable for them are pushed toward college instead.
From the femininity angle, I guess it’s like pretty dresses and jewelry. Men mostly don’t care. Women dress up, consciously or not, for other women. Many women would fear that other women would find a female mechanic just… weird. Weirder than a computer geek or rabid football fan.
I consciously dress down. Very little makeup, jeans, minimal if any jewelry, simple wedding band-no flash, no polish on the nails. Not denying my femininity, but downplaying it for sure. There is no way I am going to be taken seriously if I am dressed to kill.
I will agree that the trades are definitely looked down upon as a lower class occupation.
I happen to find women who are dressed down, as you describe, to be extremely attractive. Sexy as hell, in other words. It has to do with confidence, I think.
And yeah, I doubt that colleges push anyone toward the trades. Not the one in my town, for sure.
I always get a kick out of that.
I use to do maintenance for a department store. We had a lot of college grads with degrees in management or retail sales with attitudes. They would try to look down on our crew like we made a wrong choice professionally.
Now the funny part. The only one in the stores who made more money than we did was the store manager of the larger stores. There were some of the employees bragging that with their masters degrees were being paid very well. Bragging on a rate that was 1/3 of my straight time rate. I worked 40 hrs a week they worked 50 to 60 for their base pay.
Our union actively trys to get women and minorities to apply for the apprentice program. Very few do take the test. Though we have a lot of women Chief Engineers.
It seems like women aren’t discouraged from taken on a filthy, physical job, as long as it requires education. Veterinary students are predominantly women, and I knew quite a fair number of women studying to be stage electricians.
I wonder if there is a subconscious need to look more like a man while on these jobs. I know there is in some of the professions. If you become a school administrator or are an attorney appearing in a courtroom and you are female, I believe the chances increase that you will be wearing a suit instead of a dress.
I have never been able to respect a man who is threatened by a strong woman. It shows his weakness.
In my last post I was going to make some snarky comment to the effect that all those people with masters degrees in cubicles are making far less than I.
mangeorge, many men are similar.
Zoe, there is nothing subconscious about it. I deliberately dress down. No one is going to take me seriously if I have perfectly manicured nails and a complicated hair style. In the winter, when we are less busy, I do tend to myself a little bit more.
Can I say something as a woman who has been working in the trades for about a year now?
Yes, even the “light” stuff involves physical labor. Yes, women can do it. But where (WAG) a man might use 20% of his strength to accomplish a task a women might need 40% of hers. Many things are more of an effort for us. That doesn’t mean we can’t do them, of course, but it really is true that men are stronger than women, particularly in upper body strength. I can lift a 100 pound roll of roofing material, but I can’t do it as many times in a day as the men, and I just can’t put one on my shoulder and walk up a ladder with it. I try to make up for it by busting my butt doing everything I can do, and most men are OK with that.
I now wish that I had gone into the trades rather than to college (or perhaps in addition to college). I am much more suited to this work than to sitting at a desk all day, yet to the desk jobs I was steered. However, I have also encountered some hostility towards women in the trades, particularly from union tradesmen. Just last week I was the target of a snide comment about women “stealing” jobs from men in hard times. There are still vile and sexist comments made - typically by either the oldest men or young idiots under 24 who probably have insecurity issues, and while I am happy to say most men I’ve worked with have called these troglodytes to task for their jerk attitudes, even before I had a chance to open my mouth, it is still not fun to hear this stuff. There are several sorts of pressures that drive women away from the trades, and probably out of them in some cases.
There is also the problem that these jobs are not women-friendly. As I frequently work at sites with minimal or no bathroom facilities being on the rag can be a nightmare. I’m not going to whine about having to hold pee, since the men do, too, but getting rid of bloody sanitary products and worrying about leakage is not fun under the circumstances. I manage, of course, but it’s an aggravation the men never have. Much of this work should not and could not be done by a pregnant woman. If a woman works trades and gets pregnant she pretty much has to quit work for at least awhile. There is NO way a woman could do these jobs and breastfeed - you can’t have the kids with you, there’s no privacy to pump milk, no way to store it… The hours can be long and irregular, which would play merry hell with child care. I imagine many women who did enter the trades as young women had to drop out of them if they wanted children.
And yes, you have to dress like the men, for purely practical reasons. Skirts and dresses are not compatible with climbing ladders. Work boots are needed to protect your feet. Long hair and dangling jewelry are not compatible with power tools. You wear a hat to keep crap out of your hair (that job last week? I got splattered with Gorilla Glue and wound up having to have a gob of it cut out of my hair) and if the hat wasn’t fugly to start with, it will be very shortly. In summer you wear t-shirts and wish you could strip to the waist like the men. In winter it’s long underwear, turtlenecks, sweatshirts, and flannel shirts - frequently all at the same time. Even if you aren’t a bull dyke, you look like one.
All that aside, if I could actually make a decent living in the trades right now I would (the chief problem right now is a lack of jobs to go around). I’d consider joining an apprentice program but I have serious doubts about them taking a woman in her mid-40’s. Especially since right now even the seasoned, experienced men are having trouble finding work and the union apprentices are showing up at job sites looking for non-union work because the unions have them side-lined and they’ve decided being fed scabs beats being starving union members.
There are also potential dangers that go beyond slicing your fingers off in a saw. Some job sites do not feel particularly safe - they are in out of the way places, in bad neighborhoods, and so forth. Even the men worry about personal safety at times, and some of them have been attacked, robbed, beaten up… as a woman you get to add rape worries to that. Granted, many of the tools we use can double as weapons, but that sort of thing is not so frequently encountered in a corporate office. At least these days we have cellphones and can call 911 from almost anywhere, or call each other to check that everything is alright, that didn’t used to be the case.
There is also the fact that the work is not so steady as a 9 to 5 office job - a lot of it is project based, you’re always hustling for work. When you get work the days may be 10-12 hours long, then you might have little or nothing for weeks afterward. Women do have a tendency to want stable incomes even more than men, particularly if they want families, which is probably connected to the length of pregnancy and still having primary child raising responsibilities most of the time.
It is my opinion that MOST tradesmen are either indifferent to women on the job, or actually like having women on the job as long as the women work as hard as the men. Unfortunately, there are slackers of both genders, but when a man is a slacker he’s just a slacker, when a woman’s a slacker it reflects badly on all women. That’s one of the downsides of being a minority - your misconduct smears the whole group. On the other hand, many women who are in the trades long term are respected as the equal or better than many men - they have to be in order to survive long term.
So, while the money can be good in trades there are definite tradeoffs in the profession. I think women should have the opportunity to go into such work (obviously!) but even if we removed the sexist crap and the nonsensical pressures against them there would STILL be significantly more men in such trades than women at any given time for utterly practical reasons, many rooted in biology (strength and babies)
You da man, Broomstick.
I think in veterinary medicine is because the stereotype has shifted from a manly, farm animal and horses (big, strong, not cute animals) oriented career to one dealing with pets and small animals (soft cuddly pets). The view many have now of a vet is someone who gives shots and drugs to their cute soft cuddly-wuddly kitties and puppies, not the person whose arm is up to the shoulder inside a cow’s ass to detect pregnancy status. People only see the “cute” part, and ignore that the same training is required by all, and that the person doing the “cute soft and cuddly” job is also trained to do exploratory surgery, chop up body parts, do necropsy, and kill.
I think women interested in trades are probably steered more towards engineering careers. Many of my trade-oriented female friends are engineers, and one is applying to work at a major cosmetics industry (girly enough for you?). 
Your vet desperately needs to go back to school for a refresher on cow anatomy. 
I think the current economy will change the way women look at the trades. The value of a college education, from an earning standpoint, ain’t what it used to be. And with all the talk about fixing our infrastructure and creating new fields in energy, green industries and the like, women are going to start branching out.
As a relatively small woman, I would be able to “help” with a lot of that type of work, but I don’t think I could ever be a full-grown tradesperson. Where Broomstick can lift a 100 lb roll of roofing material, I’m certain I would have an extremely difficult time with half that. I was in construction for a short time, but in the office end of it. I think most women would fare better behind a desk than behind a nail gun, just because of physical limitations.
No, they feel through the, you know, walls and stuff in there. Saw it on Dirty Jobs.
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A lot of people seem referring to trades as being construction only, but there seem some fields (electrician and plumber) where women do not have such a disadvantage, particularly if they work in certain areas (domestic/houses instead of industry/construction of new buildings). Since I’m not in trades, I would like to hear from others who may have more experience.
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mangeorge, I’ve done it. It’s because of anatomy that is is done.
A quick (and really dirty) way of detecting pregnancy in large animals (mainly cows) is doing a rectal exam, and feeling for the gravid uterus (and even ovaries) underneath the rectum. In cows, the rectum is fairly resistant and won’t easily tear. In horses, there may be a slightly higher risk, but it is also performed. And there is nothing cute, cuddly, and soft in that. Yet that image is not what comes up in people’s minds when they think “veterinarian”.