Gender segregation in the construction trades: Lessons
from thirty-five years of US policy failures
Susan Moir, ScD, Labor Resource Center, University of Massachusetts Boston
INTRODUCTION
In many developing economies, including India, China and countries in southeast
Asia, women workers do most of the heavy, unskilled work in the construction
sector. Evidence of this is seen in the growing number of news reports of women
killed in building collapses at unsupervised construction sites. Often the women
carry heavy materials all day and live with their children on the partially completed
sites at night.
In developed economies, construction work is relatively high paid and has often
served as a pathway out of poverty for immigrants and other disadvantaged
workers. Beginning in the 1970’s, policy makers addressed the exclusion of women
from the industry through government-mandated hiring goals. In 1978, a national
target of 6.9% women’s work hours was established in the United States for
construction projects that receive federal funding. Over the next few years, state and
local construction hiring targets for women were adopted in many areas around the
country. The motivating force behind these efforts was feminist opposition to
gender discrimination; however the rapid increase in women-headed households
provided a critical underlying structural imperative to policies aimed at opening up
good jobs to working class women. Decades after their enactment, these policies
have failed and the proportion of women in the construction trades in the US has
remained below 3%.
This paper will describe recent successes in increasing access for women to good
paying jobs in the construction industry in the Greater Boston, Massachusetts
1
region. These efforts are led by labor and community partners in an ongoing action
research project called the Policy Group on Tradeswomen’s Issues (PGTI).1
PGTI: AN ACTION RESEARCH PARTNERSHIP
PGTI is a regional collaboration of construction industry stakeholders, including
tradeswomen, building trades unions, contractors, government representatives,
community organizations and researchers. The group came together in early 2008
when the chair of the Women’s Committee of the New England Regional Council of
Carpenters (NERCC) approached the Labor Resource Center (LRC) at the University
of Massachusetts Boston with a request for assistance in understanding the
policymaking aspects of efforts to increase women’s access to work in the
construction trades. A research report, commissioned by Legal Momentum2, a nonprofit women’s legal and education fund in New York City, and carried out by
Northeastern University law students, was raising interesting questions about
compliance and enforcement strategies. Concurrently, federal agencies were
proposing changes to regulations affecting equal employment opportunities for
women in construction and the African-America Governor of Massachusetts was
prioritizing access and opportunities for all citizens. At the request of the carpenters
union, the LRC convened initial meetings of interested parties, including
tradeswomen, labor representatives, local and federal government representatives,
and researchers.
In early meetings, individual participants realized that, although most had been
involved with this issue for many years and all shared a passion for the cause, few
had a complete picture of the various facets of the problem. All were experts in their
own silos and there was no consensus on what should happen next. Most
participants recognized the need for greater information sharing, relationship
building across stakeholder interests, and development of a long-term collaborative
effort to solve this problem on a regional level. In the first year, the group’s
composition and participation levels changed often as some left the group when
they felt it did not meet their needs and others joined as the initial circle widened.
2
By the end of the first year, the group had a name – the Policy Group on
Tradeswomen’s Issues (PGTI)--and a slogan: “We will never, never, never give up.”
This reflected the sentiment of many participants that the struggle had been long
and frustrating and had often left participants defeated and isolated. PGTI would
have a long-term collaborative approach.
The group’s first collaborative project was the report, “UNFINISHED BUSINESS:
Building Equality for Women in the Construction Trades.”3 This review of the
literature, scholarly and lay, published and unpublished, provided a definitive
assessment of the consistency of evidence on the daunting challenges facing women
seeking to enter and advance in the construction industry. The report also examined
the policy failures that had contributed to the continued exclusion of women from
the trades, the industry’s impending labor shortage and sources of female workers
who are a good match for work in construction. Finally, the lack of enforcement was
highlighted by the rare and instructive projects across the country where
affirmative efforts had resulted in increased women’s employment. The conclusions
drawn from UNFINISHED BUSINESS were that the exclusion of women is due to
gender discrimination and an absence of political will and that the solutions to this
complex social failure will lie in complex plans for change.
BUILDING TRADES UNIONS: A VITAL PARTNER
One historic approach to change in the US construction industry is Project Labor
Agreements (PLA). PLAs are a pre-construction agreement between developers,
contractors and unions on wages and working conditions. More recently, PLAs (or
Community Workforce Agreements4) have set diversity targets for the construction
workforce. However, those targets have often not been met due to the absence of
pipelines into the building trades for women and people of color. A year after PGTI
began, the head of the Boston Building Trades Council, Martin J. Walsh, partnered
with the Boston Housing Authority on a groundbreaking PLA that, in addition to
setting diversity targets, created Building Pathways, a pre-apprentice program for
women and people of color that guarantees direct entry into a construction
3
apprenticeship program for successful program participants. Pre-apprenticeship
has been a frequently used mechanism for introducing women and minorities to the
trades but Building Pathways was the first program in Massachusetts to complete
the pipeline into employment. Shortly after its inception, Building Pathways’
representative became a leader in PGTI. In January 2014, Mr. Walsh went on to
become Mayor of Boston. Building Pathways was a key issue in the election
campaign and continues to be an important component of the Mayor’s strategies for
confronting economic inequality.
Over the past four years, Building Pathways has placed over 85% of its graduates in
union apprenticeships and jobs in the construction industry. Over half of those
graduates are women. The model is expanding and has been adopted by the building
trades in New Hampshire. While Building Pathways has increased the supply of
women and minorities to the industry, PGTI’s participants have initiated and
supported a variety of system changes to increase the demand for a diverse regional
workforce.

As a result of a series of community meetings with the City of Boston’s
enforcement agency and elected officials, data on compliance by public and
private projects covered by the local hiring ordinance (the Boston Resident
Jobs Policy which mandates 50% resident hours, 25% minorities and 10%
women) is now online and searchable by the public.5

Working with the multi-stakeholder monitoring committee mandated by the
$700 million Project Labor Agreement governing the reconstruction of the
University of Massachusetts Boston campus, diversity data is online,
searchable and analyzed in a public meeting at least every two months.6

PGTI participants have developed a tool for compliance, “FINISHING THE
JOB: Best Practices for a Diverse Workforce in the Construction Industry-- A
how-to manual for construction owners, developers, managers, contractors,
subcontractors, building trade unions, and community-based organizations.”
4
“FINISHING THE JOB” has been widely disseminated in the region among forprofit and non-profit developers and contractors.7

The state’s public agency overseeing apprenticeship has put demographic
data on gender and race online for all state-approved apprenticeship
programs.8 In addition, a state-level committee has been established to
monitor progress on women’s access to and opportunities for
apprenticeship in the building trades.
In March 2014, over 130 industry stakeholder attended PGTI’s community forum,
“Game Changers: New strategies for crushing the barriers for women entering the
construction trades.” PGTI participants and supporters described the alliances that
have been built since 2008 and made recommendations for industry and firm-level
changes to increase the numbers of women in the industry and improve retention of
tradeswomen. Three essential “game changers” for supporting the retention of
women in the construction workplace were described.

End women’s isolation at work by assigning tradeswomen in pairs or more,
especially those new to the trades.

Promote steady employment and consistent skills training through
placement on “core crews,” the contractors’ permanent workforce.

End the too common practice of “checkerboarding,” moving women and
people of color from job to job to cover diversity targets. Checkboarding is
illegal and interrupts the tradesperson’s on-the-job skills training.
RESULTS
System-level change is, of course, slow and difficult to measure. However, there are
initial indicators that the work of PGTI and its partners is having an effect.

For the first time in the nearly 30 year history of the Boston Resident Jobs
Policy, a construction project has met all the diversity targets, including the
10% requirement for women’s work hours. The Integrated Sciences Complex
5
at UMass Boston has met the 10% target from the day the ground was
broken and every day since.9

The four current construction projects on the UMass Boston campus have
reached an aggregated level of 9.02% women’s hours and continue to trend
up toward the target of 10%.

The percent of women working on covered projects across the city of Boston
doubled from the national rate of 3% in 2011 to 6% in 2012.10

Between 2008 and 2014, the percentage of high school age female students
enrolled in three construction-based vocational programs across the state
has increased significantly. Plumbing students have doubled from 3.73 to
7.2%; carpentry students have increased over 40% from 9.88 to 17.2%;
electricity students have increased over 20% from 5.58 to 7.7%.11
Neither PGTI and nor any of its single partners can take full credit for the trends that
are occurring in the Boston region. But we can say that we are participants in a
movement for social justice focused on a clear example of inequality. We can say
that we have engaged multi-faceted approaches to communicating across
community boundaries, spreading the word on this movement and making more
women aware of the opportunities that are opening up for them. We can say that
PGTI’s participants have consolidated and amplified political support for opening up
access and opportunities for women in construction. We can say that building
gender equality in construction will positively affect the regional economy as more
women gain access to good jobs with family sustaining wages, pensions and health
benefits.
WHY DOES IT MATTER?
Construction work can be difficult and tedious; it is often dirty and dangerous and
the industry has historically been hostile to women’s entry. 12,13,14, 15 Why do women
want to enter this environment? The obvious reason women want to enter any nontraditional occupation is the relatively high wages in fields dominated by men. The
6
mean hourly wage in the US of $24.55 an hour in the construction industry is
greater than three times the federal minimum wage ($7.25) and translates into a
more livable wage for workers and their families than is available through many
other occupations.16 Construction employment, especially the unionized sector,
often comes with health care coverage and pension benefits. The wages of women
employed in the construction industry are comparable to their male counterparts.17
On average, both male and female tradesworkers earn an annual salary of $48,390.18
In fact, women working in construction are closer to wage parity than women
across all occupations nationwide.19
But it is not all about the money. Research on tradeswomen has identified job
qualities that drive women to choose construction work. After monetary rewards,
women want career satisfaction, independence, and recognition for their work. In
essence, women want to work in construction for the same reasons men do.20 From
digging holes to topping skyscrapers, building our cities, schools, highways and
homes can give construction workers great personal satisfaction.21 In an economy
where many blue collar jobs have been de-skilled and routinized, tradeswomen and
men have a high degree of autonomy on the job; they retain a “pride of craft” and
can take satisfaction in working with their hands to produce a finished product.22
Given its ability to provide sustainable, living wages and the potential for job
satisfaction, the building trades have the capacity to be an important conduit for
women’s economic and social parity. The ongoing question for the participants in
this action research project is how can this potential be realized?
7
1
http://www.policygroupontradeswomen.org/.
https://www.legalmomentum.org/.
3 Moir, Thompson and Kelleher, http://scholarworks.umb.edu/lrc_pubs/5/.
4 Partnership for Working Families, The Construction Careers Handbook. (July 2013).
http://www.forworkingfamilies.org/resources/publications/construction-careers-handbook.
5 Boston Resident Jobs Policy, Reports and Publications, https://www.cityofboston.gov/brjp/.
6 Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance, http://www.mass.gov/anf/property-mgmt-andconstruction/oversight-agencies/dcam/community-access-and-outreach-for-the-university-/access-andopportunity-goals-for-umass-boston-dcam-isc-project.html.
7 http://www.policygroupontradeswomen.org/resources/bestpractices.
8 Division of Apprenticeship Standards, http://www.mass.gov/lwd/labor-standards/das/affirmative-actionresource-.html.
9
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ti2j46vxubp18n4/DCAMM%20ISC%20Project%20Access%20and%20Opportu
nity%20Data%202.26.14.pdf.
10 City of Boston, Advocacy and Strategic Investment report, undated,
http://www.cityofboston.gov/images_documents/02%20Advocacy%20and%20Strategic%20Investment_final
2_tcm3-37465.pdf.
11 Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education,
http://www.doe.mass.edu/infoservices/reports/enroll/default.html?yr=cvte0809.
12
Eisenberg, S. (1998). We’ll call you if we need you. New York, NY: Cornell University Press.
13
Ahearn Greene, J. (2006). Blue-collar women at work with men: Negotiating the hostile environment.
Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.
2
14
Moccio, F. A. (2009). Live wire: Women and brotherhood in the electrical industry. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University
Press.
15
Marshall, N. L. (1989). Women in the trades: Final report of a survey of Massachusetts tradeswomen. Working Paper
No. 195. Wellesley College, Massachusetts Center for Research on Women.
16
United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. (March 2013). Occupational employment and wages- May.
Retrieved March 26, 2014, from http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes470000.htm.
17
United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. (February 2014). Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey.
Retrieved March 26, 2014, from http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.htm.
18
United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. (July 2012). An overview of U.S. occupational employment and
wages in 2011. Retrieved March 26, 2014, from http://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-1/an-overview-ofoccupational-employment-and-wages-in-2011.htm.
19
United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. (February 2014). Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey.
Retrieved March 26, 2014, from http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.htm.
20
Ericksen, J.A., & Schultheiss, D.E.P. (2009). Women pursuing careers in trades and construction. Journal
of Career Development, 36 (1), 68-89.
21
Mansfield, P.K., Koch, P.B., Henderson, J., Vicary, J.R., Cohn, M. & Young, E. W. (1991). The job climate
for women in traditionally male blue-collar occupations. Sex Roles, 25 (1/2), 63-79.
22
LaTour, Jane, Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York City,
Palgrave Macmillan, NY, NY, 2008.
8