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Can she fix it
Can she fix it?
| Yes she can! As Julie Bindel |
 ‘We get a lot of respect’ … builders Louise Horwood and colleague at work in Milton Keynes | ||
| discovers, female builders are in | |||
| huge demand – but can they ever | |||
| compete with the tea-slurping boys? | |||
| 1 | Of all the construction workers | ||
| employed at London’s Wembley | |||
| Stadium, what percentage would | |||
| you guess are women? Five? Ten? | |||
| Twenty at a push? How about | |||
| 0.05%? “Out of 10,000,” notes Karen | |||
| Procter, director of the national | |||
| organisation, Women and Manual | |||
| Trades (WAMT), “between three and | |||
| five are women.” | |||
| 2 | It’s a statistic that seems even more shocking when you consider that, in the | ||
| run-up to the 2012 Olympics in London, Britain is short of 350,000 builders. | |||
| Across the building trade, women account for fewer than 1% of workers, making | |||
| the building site still very much a man’s domain – what Procter describes as ‘the | |||
| last bastion of sexist discrimination in the workplace’. | |||
| 3 | The government belatedly seems to have taken notice. Education Secretary | ||
| Alan Johnson recently reserved £20m for training women in construction. | |||
| Whether this will be enough remains to be seen. | |||
| 4 | Amid all this bad news, though, there are a few success stories. Plasterer | ||
| Janet Shelley says that she has always wanted to “do things that people think | |||
| are impossible”, and so set up Women Builders, a company that now employs | |||
| the UK’s largest female construction workforce – 14 full-time builders. “We have | |||
| no problems filling vacancies,” says Shelley. “There are lots more women | |||
| wanting to work in the trade than there are jobs.” | |||
| 5 | So I set off for Milton Keynes, where Women Builders set up three years | ||
| ago. Women Builders are renovating a local village school, ripping out kitchens | |||
| and rebuilding walls. I meet Louise Horwood, a 20-year-old carpenter. “I always | |||
| wanted to be a builder,” she tells me, “but my dad, who is in the trade, was dead | |||
| against it.” After leaving school, Horwood briefly tried hairdressing college, but | |||
| hated it. “I had never been so bored in all my life,” she says, “and my dad’s | |||
| pressure on me only made me more determined.” She entered the world of | |||
| construction aged just 16 and at first struggled to cope. “Men would harassingly | |||
| say, ‘Don’t break your nails on that, love, it’s too heavy.’ But I kept going and | |||
| now I’m one of them.” | |||
| 6 | Janet Shelley works closely with WAMT – which represents and supports | ||
| women working and training in skilled manual and craft occupations – to try to | |||
| establish better working practices and reduce discrimination. When WAMT | |||
| began in 1975, small numbers of middle-class, white, educated women entered | |||
| the trade partly to protest at women’s exclusion. Today, however, 60% of | |||
| members are black, and have similar class backgrounds to their male | |||
| counterparts. “Most of these women are moving out of manual jobs like cleaning | |||
| and catering into trades where they can earn four times as much,” says Procter. | |||
| 7 | Women Builders is never short of work, but there is still the occasional | ||
| customer who does not understand the kind of firm they are. “Sometimes you | |||
| turn up for a job at someone’s house, or business, and the highly surprised | |||
| client will say to us, ‘Oh, you really are women!’” | |||
| 8 | Shelley and Horwood say that when they are on a building site, people will | ||
| stop and openly stare at them. Some will shout and ask what they are doing. | |||
| “We are at the stage with women construction workers today that we were 25 | |||
| years ago with male nurses,” Procter believes. “In a few years, it will be far more | |||
| common to see women in hard hats up on scaffolding.” | |||
| 9 | If women in building are to really flourish, organisations such as WAMT say, | ||
| it is crucial that the opportunity offered by the 2012 Olympics isn’t wasted. “We | |||
| will see how keen the government is to end the extreme levels of sexism and | |||
| discrimination in the building trade,” says Procter, “and we expect to see many | |||
| more women encouraged and trained to work on building sites, alongside men | |||
| who treat them as equals.” A tall order, maybe, but these women certainly know | |||
| how to stand up to the big boys. | |||