A big yellow crane is powered up at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds. Seventh grader Khadija Talib from Lesher Middle School in Fort Collins steps up into the seat to learn how to use the machine. She takes the controls and swings the crane’s arm to hit a soccer ball.
“Hang on…goal!” yells one of the operators.
“Perfect! You’re a natural,” says the other operator.
Talib is one of 1,700 girls from across the Front Range who attended the annual Transportation and Construction GIRL Day. The event is organized by women, for women, to encourage them to consider careers in the transportation and construction industries.
Talib said it's unlike any field trip she’s been on before.
“It's like, interactive, like, it's not like a classroom or something where they just teach us,” she said. “We like, actually get to try some of the things out.”
Leaders in hot pink hard hats direct the students to nearly 70 interactive exhibits. Girls could operate a crane, drill a piece of plywood to a wall, and weld two pieces of metal together.
Angie Diaz is a sales representative for Arvada Rent-Alls, which demoed a 1.2-ton excavator at the event. She liked seeing the girls get out of their comfort zone.
“At first, some girls were like, ‘Oh, I don't know if I want to try that,’ you know, it can be a little intimidating seeing the size of the machine,” she said. “Then they see others, and then they're like, ‘Oh, yeah, I want to get on there and try it.’”
The event led some of the girls to think about what classes they should take in high school, or even a career to pursue in college.
Talib is still unsure about working in the construction industry. She doesn’t like all the loud noises, but she feels like the profession is more open to her.
“It's just that men do a lot,” she said. “(I) feel like it's a men's kind of job, like lots of people think that, but I feel like a lot of women would like to do it too.”
Last year, there were around 4,000 women working a hands-on construction or extraction job in Colorado, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s 0.3 percent of the entire craft industry in the state. It’s lower than the national average of 0.5 percent, as well as the Mountain West average of 0.7 percent.
The Colorado Department of Labor and Employment told KUNC News that, according to data from the Census Bureau, around 37,000 women worked in the construction industry last year. However, those numbers account for the number of jobs worked, not the number of people. They also include other jobs that are not hands-on craft jobs, such as accountants and secretaries.
“It's critical that we reach young girls early. Otherwise they're just not going to look at this industry,” said Keller Hayes, the founder of Transportation and Construction GIRL.
Hayes has some theories about the low numbers. She said that when construction industries would visit schools in previous years, there was little female representation.
“We would send someone who was ready to retire, who would also be male,” she said. “The girls would sort of sit back in the back of the room and go, ‘Well, okay, that doesn't have anything to do with me.’”
Even when young women attended trade-related classes in college, old stereotypes were present.
Christina Zavislan, who works for Mortenson in Denver, said she was the only woman in a 400-student construction design class when she was a student at Colorado State University.
“I was picked on by the teacher, just like, ‘Why are you here?’ And ‘This isn't the right place for you,’ Or he called me ‘girly,’” she said. “It was discouraging. I hope that no one ever sees that again.”
Women who got a degree and made it into the working world still faced gender discrimination. Maja Rosenquist, now the Senior Vice President of Mortenson, remembers how she was treated when she started out in the industry around 30 years ago.
“The questions were largely centered around, ‘Are you going to cut it in this industry?’ Like, ‘How are you going to handle yourself?’” she said. “Versus, you know, ‘Who are you? What are your skills?’”
But Zavislan said it’s important to have women on a construction site, as they offer a valuable perspective on how to be more creative in building.
“The guys usually are like, ‘Well, we're going to build it. We're going to start here, we're going to end here, it's going to cost this, and then turn the keys over,” she said. “The women in the group are like, ‘Well, how is this used? How are the people that are coming here going to be accessing the building?’”
Rosenquist and other female leaders have worked on diversifying Mortenson’s workforce. The latest numbers show 11 percent of the company’s hands-on workers are women. But Rosenquist wants to get that number higher, considering there’s a shortage of workers pursuing construction jobs.
An analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data by the Associated General Contractors of America shows Colorado’s construction jobs decreased by 2 percent over the last year — one of the sharpest declines in the nation. In Fort Collins, that drop is around 5 percent.
Many construction groups are looking at financial incentives to draw more women into the industry. Mortenson offers an apprenticeship program for anyone 18 years of age where they can work on a job site and get full salary and benefits. They also pay for their schooling at night.
“(They) get hands-on experience while working,” Zavislan said. “As long as they complete the program and are obviously a good performer, it's like a career path that has them to $100,000 salary in less than 10 years.”
But even within the craft industry, there are more positions to choose from than crane operator. Transportation and Construction GIRL noticed that and created a YouTube page full of testimonials of women who worked in positions like environmental manager or hydraulic engineer.
Rosenquist said she thinks that more women would join skilled trades if they were more informed about job variety.
“We still have that vision of, ‘Oh, it's going to be a job that doesn't pay very well,’ or ‘I'm going to be dirty every day,’ or ‘I'm going to have to, you know, hold a stop sign,’” she said. “And that's actually not the case at all.”
That was the case for Sela Martinez. She said she became a major rock hound when she was only five years old after finding a rock she liked on the playground. She thought collecting rocks was just a fun hobby — until she participated in a career week with a construction company.
“I had realized, oh my goodness, there's so much more that goes into this,” she said. “There's the design phase, there's the groundwork, there's the engineering and the ingenuity that goes into these projects.”
Martinez is now a senior at the Colorado School of Mines, and she’s on track to become a geotechnical engineer. She wants to do soil analysis on construction sites, and she’s happy to show her friends that even if you love rocks, drawing, or design, you still have a place in the construction industry.
“Other people's perceptions are only based off of lack of knowledge,” she said. “So as long as we can educate them and kind of tell them, ‘Hey, this is actually what it is,’ then they start to realize, ‘Oh, my God, that's actually super cool.’”
Back at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds, the Transportation and Construction GIRL Day is coming to a close, but the dreams are not. The girls from Lesher Middle School are already brainstorming the array of jobs they can choose from. One classmate mentions doing tiling and architecture. Another classmate, Avery W., said she wants to build tiny homes.
“I'd probably like doing drywall, because like, my dad builds tiny houses, so I would like to do that too, that sounds fun,” she said. “I already sent him a photo of me on the excavator and he’s like, really proud.”
No matter the direction, that’s the spark that women construction leaders want to keep lighting for the generation to come.
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