Perpetual pioneers: Women and work in the construction trades

After nearly thirty years of attempts at gender integration, women make up less than three percent of workers in the construction trades despite the relatively high pay rates in these occupations. Tradeswomen remain perpetual pioneers in persistently gender-skewed occupations and they encounter many of the same obstacles as the women who came before them. This study examines both the difficulties women face in trying to enter the construction trades, and the ways in which some manage to make a long-term livelihood in these occupations. The research questions: (1) how gate-keeping and other constraints that result from the gendered expectations of the work create dilemmas for women; and (2) how women's ways of managing and responding to these dilemmas are central to theories of gender inequality in the workplace.; Based on field work and in-depth interviews with women at multiple career stages including job-seekers, apprentices, and experienced workers, this study explains the process of gaining access to and learning a construction trade. To succeed, tradeswomen must actively develop viable ways for doing construction work as women. This study analyzes women's agency including how they resist, challenge, and redefine normative expectations for gender and sexual conduct at work. Examining how women's forms of resistance and integration interact with occupational barriers and everyday gate-keeping to keep most women out of construction while opening the door for a few has implications for understanding persistent occupational segregation, the production of gender differentiation and inequality, as well as the possibilities for change.