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. |