The Comprehensive Guide to Hiring and Retaining Women in Construction

With a degree in history but no job prospects in the economically unstable 1970s, Vivian Price settled for a minimum-wage position on a factory assembly line. The work, Price recalled, was as unsatisfying as the low pay, so she enrolled in a trade school for a certificate in industrial electricity. Before long, she was driving a truck and then doing electrical maintenance for a refinery.

“It was a great job, very challenging,” said Price, who wound up with a successful, long-term construction career. “I was the only woman at the time.”     

The few women she worked with over the years bonded, mentored each other, formed a support group and shared ideas for how to get along on the job and win apprenticeships.

“Our goal in that group,” said Price, now a political science and sociology professor, “was to help one another survive in the trades.”

Fifty years later, more than one in 10 employees in the construction industry is a woman. Among those, 24.6% work in construction and maintenance roles, while most populate back offices as managers, sales reps and administrative staff, according to research by equipment rental company BigRentz. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has estimated that the rate of women in construction has grown 2% since 2010, when they made up 8.9% of the construction labor workforce.

The industry desperately needs to attract more people as construction firms continue to struggle with recruiting laborers and other employees, and women could be a key to easing the critical worker shortage. But the ways companies attract and retain women needs remodeling.

Following are five detailed steps, along with resources and tips, that women, researchers and observers with expertise in construction employment have identified as important in the effort to recruit and retain women for hard hat jobs in the industry.

1. Get out of your (hiring) comfort zone

Hiring managers for construction companies can no longer confine their recruitment efforts to strong, young men who spent their childhoods helping their dads repair car engines, build sheds and reshingle the roofs on their family homes.

The industry has suffered a chronic shortage of laborers since 2016, when the low rate of unemployment across the board sent would-be contractors into industries that do not ring the starting bell at 6 a.m. or require risky maneuvers like walking on rooftops or operating excavators or jackhammers.

Without a steady stream of traditional labor walking onto jobsites, contractors, prompted in part by women’s organizations and labor groups offering training to tradeswomen and advice to employers lacking applicants, started diversifying.

What they found was not a dearth of women willing to don hard hats and lift bundles of heavy materials. It was a reluctance on the part of potential female employees to step into jobsite cultures that were hostile to women workers.

“Women can certainly do this work,” Lark Jackson, associate director of the National Center for Women's Equity in Apprenticeship and Employment, told The Washington Post. But potential employers could be inadvertently discouraging female applicants with a lack of benefits like child care and maternity leave or a good-old-boy reputation.

The ones that actively recruit women, including a number of female-owned firms, are finding that these nontraditional laborers are trickling onto their worksites. Among them are Hispanic women, who make up 2.5% of female construction employees, outnumbering white women, at 1.9%, Asians, at 0.9%, and Blacks, at 0.8%, according to BLS.

Latina laborers, in particular, are a fertile population for contractors to tap. Construction has a heavier concentration of Hispanic men than any other industry, according to BLS, making the job familiar to their wives, sisters and daughters.

In fact, according to research from Catalyst, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing women in business, the bulk of women who wind up in jobs traditionally reserved for men learned about them from the men who work there.

“They let the women know it’s a good-paying job, better than the service sector,” Catalyst Director of Research Negin Sattari said. “From our conversations with women, they had no specific insight about recruitment. Most of them get to these jobs based on what they hear from people in their own networks.”

Sattari advised contractors to tweak their recruiting efforts to bring the news about job opportunities to church congregations, high schools and community colleges so friends and relatives can spread the word.

Sandra Hofmeister, owner of A&S Construction in Frederick, Maryland, said she is “passionate about women in construction” and is open to hiring them for her crews but hasn’t found “the right person.”

“A lot of Hispanic people who work in construction don’t speak English, but they understand construction is basically teamwork,” said Hofmeister, whose company specializes in building exteriors. “Roofing is not a solo guy work; you work with crews. If you speak Spanish or any language, you’re going to be OK as long as one of them speaks English and can communicate with the foreman.”

Hofmeister, who is from Peru and has worked in accounting for construction firms for most of her career, added: “For Hispanic women, (construction is) a comfortable living.”

Others have noted an increase of women migrants standing in early-morning lines hoping to be selected for a day’s work on a construction site.

In interviews with The New York Times, social service providers said migrant women, whose options often are limited to housekeeping and other low-paying jobs, are attracted to construction for the higher hourly wages and steady work.

Contractors who hire undocumented workers are slowly warming up to female day laborers, more of whom are enrolling in courses that qualify them for Site Safety Training cards, which require 40 hours of training but no Social Security number or English language skills. The Times pointed to Queens, New York-based safety classes whose enrollment of women ballooned from eight students in 2010 to nearly 80 in June 2023.

Likewise, contractors amenable to hiring ex-convicts will find a ready supply of would-be hard hat workers in women freshly out of prison.

Programs like the 16-week Trades Related Apprenticeship Coaching, train incarcerated women for jobs in construction that they can step into as soon as they are released.

TRAC trains women at the Washington Corrections Center for Women and Mission Creek, also in Washington, in carpentry, construction and ironworking, preparing them for rigorous union tests and physically demanding labor.

The pre-apprenticeship program boasts 250 female graduates, some of whom were wooed by union reps pre-release, which paved the way for quick employment once they got out.

Sattari suggested that companies that employ women in nontraditional roles show them off on their websites, social media posts and recruitment literature so women looking for good jobs will see that they are welcome in construction.

2. Educate elementary-school-age girls

Most girls, noted Hofmeister, an accountant-turned-construction-company-owner who opened her company in 2021 with her husband, don’t even think about working in the industry when they envision their future selves.

“It’s an unattractive profession for women. It’s not a pretty profession,” Hofmeister said. “I believe we have this unconscious bias since we are little: ‘Hey, you need to go to school, college.’ Nobody says you need this skill as a carpenter, plumber, mechanic, a roofer. It’s something that I believe our parents don’t tell you because they want you to go to college instead of being in the trades.”

And that, Hofmeister said, creates a problem for a building executive: “How do I attract women to the construction industry?”

A growing cadre of groups advocating for women in construction is chipping away at a solution: changing the narrative that girls are hearing about the trades.

“If we could get the message out to the younger girls so they could actually see themselves in the trades, I think it is a bright future for women,” Lorraine D’Angelo, past president of the Bronx, New York-based Women Construction Owners and Executives, said. “It’s lucrative; it’s a good career path and it’s interesting. You get to drive by and say, ‘I built that.’”

WCOE members have been going into elementary schools to talk to girls as young as possible.

“You have to show young girls the possibilities because if they don’t see it, they can’t envision themselves being there on the project site,” said D’Angelo, president of LDA Compliance Consulting in the Bronx. Women’s organizations “have been focused on trying to inform and advise young girls at a young age about the possibilities of a career in construction, even getting them at the grade school level. That’s ideal.”

Hofmeister, who is involved with Frederick County Women in Trades in Maryland, said the members are “very passionate about bringing this conversation to high schoolers...and explain to all of them (that) your choices are not just college. If you’re not good with books but you’re good with your hands, you can do trades.”

That sentiment is core to the message of Tools & Tiaras, a Jamaica, New York-based nonprofit that holds monthly hands-on workshops and summer camps for girls ages six to 14 in carpentry, electrical, plumbing and automotive skills.

The group, whose slogan is, “Jobs don’t have genders,” also educates its young charges about construction jobs and assigns them female mentors to help with career and personal development.

Judaline Cassidy, the founder of Tools & Tiaras and a plumber for more than 25 years, told Forbes Home she learned the hard way that construction jobs can be hard on women.

“While I’ve experienced, firsthand, the challenges and injustices that women working in male-dominated fields face, I’ve also received support,” Cassidy said. “It’s why I dedicated my life to fighting for gender, racial and economic equity in…construction.”

Cultivating a positive image of the construction industry among children before they reach college age is a driver behind BYF—Build Your Future—an Alachua, Florida-based nonprofit that helps construction companies build recruitment pipelines by instilling a positive mindset about the industry in students through contests, projects and lessons.

BYF’s parent organization, the National Center for Construction Education and Research, for example, will help a high school create a construction class. NCCER offers training, certification and career development for construction and maintenance employees.

3. Find PPE that fits women properly

Although women and men can perform many of the same tasks on the job, employers have to recognize their differences, in size and strength, for instance. And then, they have to accommodate them if recruitment and retention of women is a priority.

“I hated wearing my hard hat. It was just uncomfortable,” said Debra Harris, who wore one between 1994 and last year, when she retired from her long career, mostly in road maintenance. “Nobody likes to wear a hard hat.… Truthfully, when you get used to wearing it, it’s not so bad.”

“Hard hats are basically made for men,” noted Hofmeister, who dons one regularly to check on jobsites. “The safety vest, it’s bulky. It doesn’t have any shape. You wear it, you have to, but it’s not going to be pretty. You’re not going to look like a princess on the jobsite.”

Joking aside, looks and comfort are not the only drawbacks of personal protective equipment—or PPE—that is too big to fit a woman.

As far back as 2015, tradeswomen in a Washington State Department of Labor and Industries focus group complained that most employers issued one-size-fits-all gear to women and men.

One journey-level laborer in the group reported: “The harnesses—safety harnesses for tying off…they’re not made for women. You would have to buy a specific one for female bodies. They don’t fit you right. If you were to fall off a building with a standard harness on, it would do more damage than good.”

Others told of making makeshift alterations with safety pins and rubber bands to force the gear to fit, while some said they simply didn’t wear it because it hindered their ability to do the work.

OSHA counts as personal protective equipment gear such as gloves, safety glasses, protective shoes, earplugs or muffs, hard hats, respirators, coveralls, vests and full bodysuits.

In a 2012 report for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Texas A&M University professor Hongwei Hsiao noted that respirators that fit poorly can “result in serious health effects” to construction workers exposed to environmental hazards. And those wearing “improperly conformed” fall-arrest harnesses are at increased risk of “suspension trauma” from falls.

Then, last year, OSHA adopted a rule requiring that personal protective equipment must “fit each employee properly to protect them from occupational hazards.” 

“All workers, regardless of their body type or size, should be protected on the job,” Assistant Secretary of Labor Douglas Parker told Congress at the time. “Access to properly fitting PPE has been a long-standing problem for women working in construction.”

Protective gear isn’t the only jobsite necessity that often does not fit women. Harris, who began her construction career as a driver, said she would sometimes drive half an hour to find a fast-food restaurant with a women’s bathroom when she worked on jobsites that offered porta potties to be shared by men and women.

“There’s no (women’s) bathrooms” on the jobsite, but there are porta johns,” Harris said. “I was always fortunate; I had a truck and I was able to go to a gas station. To this day, I can hold my urine more than anybody I know.”

Price, whose hard hat career spanned decades, said the bathroom situation never improved.

“A lot of times we’re working from the ground up, so there are no brick-and-mortar facilities or inadequate facilities or unisex porta potties, not good maintenance, often filthy, lack of toilet paper, lack of washing facilities…broken lock on the door.”

OSHA has acknowledged that female construction workers suffer more often from bladder and kidney infections than their male coworkers, as they often put off urinating for long periods because of the lack of clean bathrooms.

While OSHA encourages jobsite mangers to make separate toilets for male and female workers available, the agency calls this a “best practice” and does not require it by law.

“You’d have to get real creative,” Price said, which might include dangerous options like abstaining from drinking water all day.

4. Create flexible work schedules and help find child care

“The biggest problem women have in the trades (is) it’s just not conducive to the way our society views child rearing,” Jean Bjork, owner of Bjork Construction, a general contractor in Northern California, said.

That also might be the biggest roadblock contractors have when recruiting and especially retaining women for hard hat jobs.

Hofmeister said she would welcome women of child-bearing age onto her hard hat crews.

“Young is good; I can shape that woman, mold that woman to do this kind of work,” Hofmeister said. “When the time comes, she will get married or have a family. Then I may move her into the office for six months. I would…do that, of course.”

Still, she said, not every contractor would.

“With women, they can see it as a liability,” Hofmeister said. “They might not want (a woman) to be working or managing something because you’re pregnant.”

She noted, however, “We need to shape the path for the others who come behind us” by accommodating pregnancies and child-rearing responsibilities with flexible schedules and positions.

Price, who did not have children while she was a hard hat worker, said she observed the difficulties her few female coworkers faced once they became mothers.

Price pointed to the lack of child care with hours early enough to allow a mom to get to a jobsite when it’s still dark outside.

“We often have to show up on the job at 6 a.m. and we’re traveling great distances,” she recalled from her days on the job. “If you leave the house at four or five in the morning, what are you going to do with the kids (especially if your partner) also works?… That’s always a big challenge.… It’s still a struggle today.”

The same challenge comes at the end of the day if overtime is required, Price noted.

“You’re working funny shifts; it’s a moving target, especially if you’re an apprentice,” Price said. “You don’t want to get laid off because you’re not available. It’s the same if you get sick. There’s very little tolerance (in a) male-centered workplace, where the idea is the women will be (the ones) to take care of the children.”

Price would advise employers to try to identify child care opportunities for women with children “and be aware that people have lives, and if they’re good workers, there needs to be some kind of understanding or policy that women need to take care of their children.”

He added: “Even if they don’t have (child care) on site, (they can) help identify it, for men and women. It’s not a women’s problem. They would retain more men if they also had these options. We want to move toward family friendly workplaces.”

The Catalyst study found that inflexible scheduling and set shift work were among the top concerns for women working in male-dominated fields—or considering it.

Sattari described some contractors who use a point system to penalize workers who call out at the last minute because of a family or other emergency—something that working mothers sometimes do.

Her advice to construction employers: “For women with caregiving responsibilities, make sure that schedules have some room for flexibility.… How can companies make sure their schedules are consistent within the broader context of the way the women are living?”

Such a concession, D’Angelo agreed, would go a long way toward retaining women once they’re on the job.

“The women still retain primary responsibility for child care within their houses,” she said, “so no provisions for child care makes that difficult, and so retention is difficult.”

5. Offer upward mobility

For Harris’ first three years on a highway crew, she worked as a flagger, earning the same $9 an hour she made as a cashier at a Michigan party store in 1994.

Then, she recalled, she thought, “Hey, a woman could make some good money out here as a laborer,” so she joined a union and eventually finished her apprenticeship and worked on a dirt crew, which, she said, she hated. Later, she drove a dump truck, dug ditches and worked as a concrete laborer before leaving the union and taking a salaried position with C&D Hughes, a road construction firm.

Although she lived away from home during the week—her husband stayed home with their children—“I felt very fortunate that I was able to make good money at that job,” Harris recalled.

Not all women contractors are as lucky, D’Angelo said.

“Some trades that women get pigeonholed into are like flagging,” she said.

Price said she has observed that many women start their apprenticeships sweeping up dust on the jobsite, placing materials in the gangbox and performing other simple tasks.

“They put you to sweeping all the time, and sorting materials…that lasts too long, and that’s a good way to run people off,” she said.

Price said she would advise supervisors to quickly get women digging ditches, using heavy hammers and drills, and working a jackhammer. But leaving women or men on heavy-equipment duty for too long could also run them off, she noted.

Both scenarios occur with men and women, she said, “but for women, it happens in fairly systematic ways, whereas a guy, they might give him a break. A lot of guys, they use him as a mule, they don’t like him, they’ll test him in a similar way. Harassment happens to men, too. But with women, there’s more of a (mindset) that they’re not going to make it.”

She said women need to learn the job in order to advance, a notion that advocacy groups for women in construction push.

“Women just don’t have to stop at being a laborer on a job but actually can grow into other supervisory roles, like forewoman, superintendent, general manager on the project, company executive, even opening one’s own company,” Renee Sacks, executive director of the New York-based Women Builders Council, said.

As they work their way up, D’Angelo said, they bring skills to a jobsite that men often do not.

“The benefit of having women on jobsites is the same whether they’re in the office or on the jobsite,” D’Angelo said. “Women tend to work differently from men—they tend to work more collaboratively and problem-solve differently. So, if there are issues on the work site, the women’s skills come into play then.”

Plus, women can be just as hard workers as men.

“By and large, women get into this area because they really want to do a good job; they want to work,” Price said. “They see this as a career that will allow them to have a good standard of living and provide a good livelihood for them, and if they have a family, provide for them, too. Just like men.”

Still, Price said, an equal future for women in construction is something “I think we will have to fight for… and we have to convince our organizations and employers that that’s going to be more rewarding than doing things the old way that wastes a lot of money—and overlooks a lot of talent.”