By learning trades, women can save themselves — maybe even the economy
More than 70 years ago, Canadian women were building bombs and planes and filling every other skilled trade job vacated by men who marched off to war.
The legacy of the post-war peace dividend is that many women were sent home, while others were pushed back into pink-collar ghettos.
These days, it’s rare to see a single tradeswoman on a job site, let alone an army of them, which is surprising when you think about it. These are high-paid, skilled jobs that technology has made physically easier over the years.
Yet, there’s such a shortage of workers that jobs are going begging and employers are recruiting from outside Canada.
Trades training is being touted by UN Women as a salvation for women in developing countries. But it’s no different here.
These jobs offer a pathway out of poverty in addition to simply being a well-paid career alternative for young women not interested in going to university. The fact is that tradeswomen are likely to earn more money than their sisters with bachelor’s degrees.
In B.C., two years after completing apprenticeships, 91 per cent of tradespeople have jobs and 98 per cent of those jobs are full time. The median wage is $31 an hour, or $60,000 a year.
Yet only 4.4 per cent of the current apprentices across 72 different skills are women. Compare that with universities, where more than half of the students in most undergraduate programs are women.
Of course, it’s not for everyone. The work is physical. There’s also the workplace culture. It’s still OK for employers to say out loud that they don’t hire women because they’ll be a distraction on the job site, says Lisa Langevin, who recently downed tools to become assistant business manager for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
Both Langevin and plumber Tamara Pongracz say the trades are the final frontier for women. As much as parents tell their daughters that they can be whatever they want, they rarely think about them being electricians, plumbers, welders, crane operators, ironworkers or mechanics. It’s just not on their radar.
Because of the gender imbalance on work sites, both admit the culture is reminiscent of offices in the 1970s.
There are the inadvertent or directly sexist comments. There’s passive-aggressive behaviour like not bothering to tell a female co-worker that the place everybody’s going to for lunch is a strip joint.
Still, Langevin says the best compliment she ever got was when she went with her foreman to Vancity’s head office.
“One of the suits held the door open. My boss went first,” she said. The guy in the suit chastised the foreman, reminding him about the ladies-first rule, to which the foreman replied: “She’s not a lady, she’s an electrician.”
Beyond earning wages that a family can live on, there are opportunities to advance within the trades, learn other trades, move into management or teaching, or even start your own business, Langevin and Pongracz say.
Pongracz is now head instructor of BCIT’s trades access program. She says pressure from peers and parents keeps some young women out of the trades. For others, she says, it’s the cost of getting into the trades.
But a local initiative launched this week aims to both change attitudes and open doors.
It was sparked by an unusual alliance between businessman Ray Cyr and Kerry Gibson, UN Women’s Canadian representative. Cyr owns Fraser Valley Building Supply, which has stores in Mission, Aldergrove and Cloverdale. In his company, the majority of his managers and leadership team are women.
He believes that equipping women to pursue a career in the trades will help them narrow the wage gap, but also empower them to support themselves, their families and contribute to the economy.
With Gibson, the help of Wasserman and Partners Advertising and Benjamin Moore (the paint company owned by Warren Buffett that sells through local distributors, not big-box stores) they’ve come up with a campaign called Every Can Stops a Can’t.
For every can of Regal Select paint sold in Cyr’s stores, $1 will go toward sending women to apprenticeship and trades training programs. Every store will have a display and pamphlets explaining why this is important.
It’s a small step. But the hope is that other Benjamin Moore distributors will join in and the campaign will spread with the backing of tradeswomen, architects and consumers.
And why wouldn’t they? The goal isn’t just equality. It’s not only about helping women lift themselves out of poverty. Having more tradeswomen now would mitigate — if not alleviate — a serious labour shortage in the coming days just as it did in our grandmothers’ and greatgrandmothers’ time.