Chris Price: Women are one answer to construction workforce shortages

A woman’s place is on the construction site.

More and more women are embracing this idea, and that’s good news for Hoosiers as women are ready and able to help offset workforce shortages that threaten to slow building projects across the state. Unfortunately, to get into construction jobs, women often have to overcome barriers created by people who either resist their presence or simply fail to appreciate that many women want to and can contribute on the job site.

It’s no secret that construction is a male-dominated field. Woman have traditionally held a very small percentage of construction jobs. In fact, the generally accepted shorthand is that nine out of 10 construction workers are men; however, women have chipped away at those numbers in recent years and now make up roughly 14% of the construction workforce. Furthermore, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that when the number of men in the construction workforce fell by the thousands from 2019 to 2020, the number of women in the industry increased.

It’s also no secret that the construction industry needs workers. With billions of dollars in projects in process or on drawing boards, it’s estimated that Indiana’s construction workforce alone will need to grow to 275,000 workers by 2026, up from about 164,000 now. We shouldn’t ignore half of our population as we seek to meet that need.

We certainly shouldn’t ignore women like Emily Mick, a supervisor at Milestone Contractors. She’s got more than a decade of heavy highway experience under her tool belt, having started as a labor apprentice before working her way up to foreman about three years ago. Why did she go into construction? For many of the same reasons her male peers do: She likes the work, she likes being outdoors, she likes the satisfaction of looking at a big project and saying, “I worked on that.” She also likes knowing that there will always be construction jobs available, and that they’ll offer good pay and good benefits. What she doesn’t like is having to constantly prove herself to men who, even with all of her experience, wonder if she can do the job.

Rosa Florez-Mendoza shouldn’t be ignored either. She was working as a dental assistant when she accepted that what she really wants to do is work in the construction industry. So she went back to school to study construction management while getting experience on job sites. She gets frustrated when men make assumptions about her knowledge and ability. “I hate not being taken seriously,” she says. “They don’t know what I know.”

And let’s not put barriers in front of Brownsburg High School senior JoJo Wustefeld, who is determined to go into construction but who has already been told that she should do something else. Why? Because, as one guidance counselor told her, she’s “too smart, too pretty and too little” for construction work.

Barriers and discouragements like the ones faced by Emily, Rosa and JoJo have got to go.

We need to recognize young women who have an aptitude for construction work and cheer them on. We need to show women entering the workforce that they can find rewarding career opportunities in construction. We need to let women who are looking to make a career change know that construction will allow them to support a family and live a comfortable life. And we need to appreciate the women working in the industry, giving them opportunities to grow and get the most out of their work. We need to do these things because we need as many Emilys, Rosas and JoJos as we can get to meet the growing demand for construction industry workers. And because women like them deserve to have careers that they find rewarding and fulfilling.

And, finally, we need to do it because a woman’s place is on the construction site, and the more women who know that the better off Indiana will be.•

__________

Price is president of the Indiana Construction Roundtable Foundation.