When Hurricane Katrina swept across the Gulf Coast in 2005, the storm decimated entire communities in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. Demolition of the wreckage and reconstruction of the infrastructure required a large workforce.
For a nonprofit based in East Biloxi, an area of Mississippi with high poverty rates, this sounded like an opportunity to help women find work.
Moore Community House had supported working mothers and their children for decades, most recently through an Early Head Start program for pregnant women, infants and toddlers. After the hurricane, the leaders of the organization wanted to ensure that women could take advantage of the jobs associated with the reconstruction effort.
Yet construction is an industry plagued by what experts call “occupational segregation.” In other words, this means that women are very underrepresented in the profession. They only make up about 10% of construction workers, so they don’t have much access to entire categories of jobs that offer decent wages without requiring a college degree.
In Mississippi, that relegates many women without a college education to part-time jobs for nearly minimum wage, or $7.25 an hour.
To begin to change that, in 2008 Moore Community House created a new program called Women in construction. It is an eight-week training course designed to prepare women for apprenticeships and jobs in the skilled trades, which can prepare them for careers that start out paying double or triple the minimum wage. . The program uses a curriculum that provides participants with nationally recognized credentials and teaches key skills such as handling construction materials and safety on a job site. Beyond that, it also helps women buy the tools and steel-toed boots they’ll need to work, and it connects those with children with resources to support them.
“We know that for women, especially single mothers, childcare is support in the workplace in general,” says Ruth Mazara, director of the Women in Construction program. “For a single mother to be able to participate in any kind of job training that leads to higher pay, it’s a must support service.”
Women in Construction is the kind of program that federal government leaders say can help more women succeed in registered apprenticeships and then break into higher-paying fields. It’s a priority these days for the US Department of Labor, whose data shows women make up just 13% of registered apprentices, despite making up nearly half of the nation’s workers.
To begin to change these numbers, the department makes women in apprenticeships and non-traditional occupations subsidies to organizations like Moore Community House (which received $750,000 from the government in 2021). According to Sarah Glynn, senior adviser in the Department of Labor’s Women’s Desk, interest in applying for WANTO support – and in recruiting and retaining more women in job training programs – has been high.
“It’s widely recognized that we leave a lot of talent on the table when we exclude women from certain professions,” she says. “I think there’s a huge appetite for it.”
Entry barriers
But even with increased community interest, specially designed programs and federal funds, barriers remain for women seeking to enter jobs that primarily employ men.
Occupational segregation by sex tends to push women – and especially women of color – away from high-paying fields while clustering them into low-paying fields. According federal research, of the 20 occupations with the highest weekly earnings in 2021, nine of them employ less than 25% women. These jobs include information security analyst and engineering roles of all types. Only one of these high-paying fields is female-dominated: the nurse practitioner.
On the other hand, of the 20 occupations with the lowest weekly earnings, eight are predominantly female, including restaurant hostess, housekeeper, nursing assistant, home health aide and hairdresser. Only one mainly employs men: the vehicle cleaner.
As part of a national campaign to increase the value of professional skills rather than diplomaspolicy makers, employers and educators encourage students and job seekers to consider pursuing skilled trades like construction that don’t require a bachelor’s degree. Yet women are lagging in these industries for several reasons, according to Glynn.
The first is that cultural norms and gender stereotypes have proven difficult to challenge and are sometimes embedded in education systems that channel children into traditional career paths at an early age. A second relates to structural systems that pose additional challenges for women, such as the fact that suitable protective equipment tends to be harder to find.
A third is the reality that “there is a documented problem of discrimination and harassment in some of these professions as well and on some of these job sites,” Glynn says. It can be subtle, like assigning women less desirable tasks, fewer shifts, and fewer overtime opportunities to advance their skills. Or it can be overt physical and emotional abuse.
In Biloxi, even though business leaders and trades organizations are eager to diversify their teams, women sometimes arrive and find work cultures less welcoming, Mazara says. If a supervisor does not treat women well or if some other form of discrimination takes place, Moore Community House steps in to advocate on behalf of alumni with their new employers.
“We’ll let them know, ‘Do you know what’s going on?’ Mazara says. “‘I can’t send you workers if that happens.'”
Babysitting required
Finding affordable child care is another major factor affecting the extent to which women can pursue apprenticeships and other vocational training programs, experts say.
This is especially true for single mothers. And in the county where Moore Community House is located, more than 42% of households with children were headed by a single parent in 2020, according to Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis data.
Certain circumstances unique to construction jobs add an additional challenge, such as the fact that these roles often require workers to show up very early in the morning.
“It doesn’t happen from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and it can be difficult to find a daycare that will let you drop your kids off to be on a job site at 6 a.m.,” says Glynn.
Yet even finding reliable care during more typical daytime hours can be difficult. That’s why childcare support is a great benefit of the Women in Construction program. Some participants are already enrolled in the Moore Community House Early Head Start, which provides educational, food and social services for families with young children. Others get six months of free child care with a provider of their choice, with funds from the Mississippi Department of Social Services, philanthropic foundations and the federal WANTO grant.
“The intention is for them to have the ability to fully focus on their coursework while they’re in class, and then the job search itself is a full-time endeavor,” says Mazara.
Once women in Biloxi take on land jobs in the skilled trades, the wages they earn generally allow them to better support their families. They can improve their transportation to make it more reliable, and they can improve their housing situation, perhaps even buying a house.
“Once they get in, they’re like, ‘I can breathe,'” Mazara says.
However, she adds, “a single mother of maybe two earning that salary is fantastic, but childcare is still a necessary work support.” So Moore Community House encourages the more than 700 women it has trained in construction to apply for state child care assistance that helps them reduce those costs.
This is an example of the advice that is shared in communities of people who have similar life experiences and needs, which can turn into a type of professional support network that Studies show can help women break into new areas.
“We tell our graduates,” says Mazara, “this is not the end, this is the beginning of our relationship.”