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Women are closing the gender gap in the construction industry
Dawn Ouellette Nixon//March 9, 2020//
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The roots of the gender gap in the construction industry go back to ancient times, says Karen Cooney Duerholz, vice president of business development at Allentown-based Boyle Construction.
For thousands of years men were the masons and the carpenters, Cooney Duerholz told a group gathered for a Penn State Lehigh Valley “Launchbox” focused on women in the construction industry.
Fast forward to today and women still only make up roughly 10% of those employed in the construction industry, according to the national Bureau of Labor and Statistics.
“The construction industry has grown out of the trades where there is still this perception of boy jobs and girl jobs,” Cooney Duerholz said, “But it’s slowly changing.”
Cooney Duerholz credits a rise in young women interested in construction careers to a push to attract girls to STEM education in the younger grades.
“With a more educated workforce, you’ll see more females coming in,” she said, “and we will see that gap close over time.”
Samantha Ciotti Falcone, owner of SCF Architecture in Center Valley, said no one ever told her that she couldn’t be in the industry, so she never thought that she couldn’t be. “I strove to not be the most qualified woman for the job, but the most qualified candidate,” she said. And, for the first, time she is beginning to see female tradespeople on construction job sites, and that excites her.
She believes that programs like the Lehigh Valley Let’s Build Construction Camp for Girls will expose more young women to opportunities in the industry.
“It’s about being confident in what you bring to the table,” Ciotti Falcone said. “It’s not about being the female. It’s about skill sets.”
