Women in blue collars are often targets
A woman on a repair crew was deliberately stranded on top of a 200foot wind turbine by her male co-workers after enduring months of lewd taunts. An aerospace worker got the nickname Bird Seed because men flocked around her like pigeons. Men dropped tools on female co-workers or deliberately turned on electrical power when they began working on lines.
Sexual harassment has been endemic in bluecollar workplaces from the moment that women entered them and continues to this day, according to interviews with more than a dozen employment lawyers, academics and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission workers, as well as dozens of women who described such incidents.
More than 80 women in these fields responded to a call for accounts of sexual harassment.
One gold miner, Hanna Hurst, described her harassment at work as rougher than any she endured serving in the military in Iraq. Men made remarks about her ovaries and passed around cellphones with pornographic pictures. She left after her drill and walkie-talkie were both tampered with so that she could neither work properly nor hear instructions, jeopardizing her safety.
‘I had to quit’
“Mining gets in your blood,” said Hurst, who now works as a mining inspector for much less money than what she earned in the mines. “At the end, I walked away. They made it so miserable for me that I had to quit.”
Physical danger is one issue that sets sexual harassment in blue-collar environments apart; unions, torn between representing the accuser and the accused, are another. Women in these jobs also often endure deliberate humiliations like not having bathrooms provided for them on construction sites. They can be blacklisted in construction or similar fields where tight networks and referrals are crucial to win the next job.
“Regardless of who you work for, you will run into the same people over and over again who will not want to work with you just because you reported harassment,” Concetta Defa, a construction worker in Utah, wrote. “In most cases women become unemployable because of it.”
That fear is one reason many experts in the field believe that sexual harassment is underreported — and remains rampant — in blue-collar workplaces.
‘Suffer in silence’
“A lot of these blue-collar women, they suffer in silence,” said Megan Block, an employment lawyer in Pittsburgh. “They don’t have the choice, they don’t have the money, they don’t have the time.”
An analysis of the percentage of women employed in blue-collar occupations from 2000 to 2016 shows that female representation in these industries has shrunk — in some cases by as much as 10 percent — or stayed static over that period.
While there is no direct evidence of causality, many employment lawyers and academics believe that sexual harassment is one of the reasons women leave such jobs or do not enter them in the first place.