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Emily Pilloton-Lam is founder and CEO of Girls Garage. Miriam Warren is Chief Culture Officer at Yelp and Chair of the Yelp Foundation Board. The opinions are the authors’ own.
Picture this: At a home renovation site in West Berkeley, California, a group of high school girls haul in drywall, repair the floor, and roll up a board. Led by an all-female team, they work together to finish a house for an elderly couple in their community.
While this multi-generational female-led construction team may surprise you, it’s the norm for Girls Garage participants, who know the future of the industry is female.
Miriam Warren
Permission granted by Yelp
Girls Garage is the first nonprofit design and construction school for girls and youth ages nine to 18. Through classes in carpentry, welding, architecture and activist art, they support and equip the next generation of builders. The Girls Garage team and participants are literally building the world they want to see, and it’s happening at a critical time.
The construction industry is struggling with a labor crisis. The need for about 349,000 net new positions is contributing to project delays, rising costs and stagnant growth across the sector. Skilled trades shortages are no secret, but there is one glaring omission from our national dialogue: the underrepresentation of women in the industry and the untapped potential they represent.
By 2024, only 11 percent of the construction industry, including all clerical roles, will be women, according to the National Association of Home Builders. When you look at construction sites specifically, the number drops to just 4%. Addressing this imbalance is a vital opportunity to close the workforce gap and strengthen the future of the field.
Improvement of environments
Fortunately, many regions and subcategories of construction are already fostering more inclusive environments. A growing number of companies are actively seeking women and offering programs and flexible work arrangements to support them. With opportunities ranging from hands-on work to office positions, women can pursue careers that align with their interests, schedules and other responsibilities.
Skilled trades also offer high earning potential. While there is still work to be done to close the gender pay gap, the gap in construction is one of the smallest of any industry, with women earning about 94 cents for every dollar men earn, according to the Associated Builders and Contractors.
This demonstrates both the progress achieved and a lucrative opportunity for women, who can earn more than double the hourly wages of a comparable skilled trades job in education or health.
Emily Pilloton-Lam
Permission granted by Girls Garage
Fortunately, today’s push is nothing new; it builds on a growing legacy of women in the trades. From Rosie the Riveters of World War II to today’s female construction networks, there are rich examples of women thriving in this industry. More and more women-specific organizations, systems, and unions (eg, the National Association of Women in Construction and Women in Construction Operations) are emerging to help women thrive at all levels.
Real world examples
As these efforts gain momentum, they challenge long-held assumptions about who belongs in the industry and what skills are required to succeed. Simply put: many stereotypes surrounding women in construction are wrong.
Take Erica Chu, a Girls Garage alumna who participated in the program from ages 10 to 18. She studied civil engineering at San Jose State University and, with the support of the Girls Garage alumni network, landed a role as a project engineer at NOVO Construction in Menlo Park, California before even graduating.
Today, Erica pays it forward as the Girls Garage Alumni Coordinator. Christine Cox, CEO of Custom Drywall of Milpitas, California and funder of Girls Garage, followed a different but equally successful path: taking over her family’s drywall business and expanding it dramatically, all without any formal construction training.
At the West Berkeley site described above, the Girls Garage team, in partnership with the Rebuilding Together East Bay Network, completed their work in January and celebrated with a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by the city’s mayor and numerous female-led project partners.
As the owner and his mother move back in, the real, multi-generational impact of the project becomes apparent. Not only the residents have changed their lives. The Girls Garage participants who carried out the work and the entire community can see what is possible when women are empowered in construction.
