Women's Work

Last spring, Lydia Mansfield swapped out the jeans and casual tops of the nonprofit sector for the hi-vis gear and hard hats of the trades. 

I’ve watched this transition as it’s unfolded; Lydia and I became friends several years ago while working at a social services nonprofit. After being laid off from that job in November 2024 amid budget cuts, she started to reimagine what a stable career could look like. She landed on the trades because she knew she wanted to be part of a union, as she had been at her previous nonprofit job, and also because of the work itself. 

“There’s a dignity to doing work that uses your body and your brain and that creates something outside of yourself—that can be used by other people and outlast you,” she told me. 

So Lydia applied to the Oregon Tradeswomen pre-apprenticeship program, designed to prepare people who may not have any prior experience to enter the trades. 

Since graduating from that program last summer, she’s interviewed for an apprenticeship with the local elevator constructors union. In that interview, she felt “acutely aware” of how she would be perceived by the all-male interviewers. Breaking into such a male-dominated industry requires her to push back on a lot of deeply held beliefs about men’s and women’s roles. 

“Being a woman in that space is inherently political,” she said. 

As Lydia navigates this new sector, she finds herself frequently calling her mother, Martha. They’ve found a lot of common ground in these conversations—Martha was a tradeswoman (or “blue-collar worker,” as she would tell me later) in the 1970s. 

“Things are really different, but they’re not. There’s still a serious element of unwelcomeness and fear,” Lydia told me. “These problems maybe were more acute in the 1970s, but it’s not echoes of the past today, it’s a throughline. The line got thinner, but it’s still a throughline.” 

A few weeks later, over the phone, Martha told me about her own experience as a young woman in Pennsylvania. She started her career as a water-meter reader in 1974, during a push for more diversity in the industry. Martha realized early on that a career in the trades could give her the life she wanted to live. So she worked hard—taking night classes and earning certifications that made her even more qualified than her male peers. Over the years, that effort earned her opportunities to advance, eventually into a management position at a water treatment plant in the late 1970s.

“I was the first female in every job I had across the corporation,” she said. 

Some of the men she worked with felt threatened by her presence. One particularly hostile coworker “didn’t want anyone to know a woman was doing the same job as him,” she said.

Martha said that she would’ve been pushed out of the industry by men like him if she hadn’t had a union contract. 

Throughout her experience, both men and women accused her of “taking a job from a man.” She learned to quip back: “Let me know if you know anyone else willing to pay my bills.” 

For many women working in the construction trades, the kind of sexism Martha encountered fifty years ago still feels very present. The industry is overwhelmingly dominated by men: Data from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research shows that, while the number of women in construction has increased over the past ten years, women still make up just over 4 percent of all construction trades workers. That means the cultural distance between where women were in the mid-twentieth century and where they are today is shorter here than in many other sectors—and many women I spoke to for this article say things are getting worse.

“It’s not the covert sexism you see in other occupations,” said Maura Kelly, a Portland State University professor and sociologist who studies inequality in the trades. “A lot of the behavior is centered around this idea that ‘this is not a job for women.’” 

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Executive Order 11246, “Equal Employment Opportunity.” This order created regulations that discouraged discrimination in hiring within the government and among its contractors and subcontractors. 

Beth Berendsen, policy director for the advocacy organization Chicago Women in Trades, said that the equal opportunity in employment initiatives of the 1960s and ’70s formed the basis for her organization and other trades-focused activism.

“There is a cohort of women activists who came into the trades in the late ’70s, early ’80s, and started a bunch of these tradeswomen’s organizations all across the country,” Berendsen said. “They were really trying to build power for themselves and change the industry. And the wind at their back was Executive Order 11246, which was creating opportunities for employment that didn’t exist before.”

In the intervening decades, women and other minorities have broken into the trades and carved out supportive spaces for themselves. But recently the wind has been shifting against them. 

In January 2025, when Donald Trump returned to the White House, he immediately rolled back policies that for decades have paved the way for equally qualified women and minorities to have the same opportunities as White men in the workforce at large. 

One of the second Trump administration’s earliest executive orders, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” revokes Executive Order 11246.

In the past year, the administration has dismantled federal mechanisms that enforce nondiscrimination laws, define harassment, and fund programs that uplift marginalized populations. Federal targets of the administration have included the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, formed in 1965 to enforce the workplace nondiscrimination laws created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Women’s Bureau, which was formed in 1920 under the US Department of Labor to promote economic security and career advancement for women. The Women’s Bureau administers the Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations grants, which have helped fund work by organizations like Chicago Women in Trades to develop training opportunities and other pathways for women to enter the trades. These grants have been in legal limbo since last May. 

Many of the Trump administration’s actions are tied up in court challenges from advocacy groups including Chicago Women in Trades, and the outcomes of these court challenges will determine the long-term effects of those actions. However, several women I spoke with for this story said the administration’s campaign against equal opportunity has already reverberated all the way down from the highest office to the average construction worksite. Many said they have coworkers who feel more emboldened to make sexist and racist comments on the job. 

“People really feel empowered to echo the language and the talking points of what they’re hearing from leaders at the federal level,” Berendsen said. 

Jessenia Rivera, the communications committee cochair for the National Taskforce on Tradeswomen’s Issues and cochair of the group International Native Women in Trades, hears from tradeswomen around the country about their experiences. “As the oppression of this administration kicks up, the aggression in the trades has kicked up on a level that’s disturbing,” she said.

The November 2025 murder of Amber Czech, a young welder in Minnesota who was bludgeoned to death on the worksite by a male coworker, led many tradeswomen to speak up about harassment and hostility on the job. 

“A lot of people reached out to me with these heinous stories about what’s happened on their jobsites,” Rivera said. “A lot of women are just fed up, and a lot of women are really scared.” 

Overlapping marginalized identities can make these threats even more acute. Anjanet Banuelos Bolanos, an Oregon Tradeswomen board member and a field representative with LiUNA Local 737, the Oregon laborers union, began her career in 2011. She’s a third-generation tradesperson; both her father and grandfather were laborers before her. As a Hispanic and Indigenous person, she felt a push for more women of color to enter the industry in the mid-2010s. But now, she says, “It feels like we’re regressing to the way it was when I came into the union.”

On some jobsites, people of color—both men and women—feel less welcome, Banuelos Bolanos said. She’s had conversations with Hispanic and Latino union members who are afraid of Immigration and Customs Enforcement coming to their site and targeting them, regardless of their legal immigration status. 

Men with Spanish-sounding names are receiving a message similar to what she was told in the beginning: You don’t belong here. “It’s eye-opening for the male membership,” Banuelos Bolanos said. “Our siblings are starting to relate and understand.” 

Isis Harris is a member of IBEW Local 48, the Portland-area electricians union, and a pre-trades education instructor. As a Black woman, she says she has always felt aware of how being a minority, by any definition, affects her experience on the worksite. 

“I felt the isolation of being ‘the only’ on worksites,” she said. “If you feel like the only person having an experience, you hold it inside.” 

In 1989, a group of women working in the construction trades in Portland founded Oregon Tradeswomen, an organization dedicated to promoting the success and well-being of women in the construction, manufacturing, mechanical, and utility trades. 

From its origins as a support group, Oregon Tradeswomen evolved to host a career fair and conduct direct outreach to schools to educate women and girls about careers in the trades. The organization established its pre-apprenticeship program in 2004. 

Connie Ashbrook—an elevator constructor who cofounded the organization and served as its first executive director—remembers how Oregon Tradeswomen was received at the time. When she entered the trades, there were informal networks of women supporting each other in the form of potlucks and newsletters and knowing glances shared on the jobsite. But Oregon Tradeswomen offered something different. 

“Tradeswomen were excited there was an organization just for them,” she said.  

Many of the women I spoke with credit the organization’s work with contributing to Oregon’s relatively high proportion of female apprentices. (Apprenticeships are on-the-job learning programs in which apprentices are paid a lower rate while they learn a trade.) According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, almost 10 percent of Oregon’s construction apprentices in 2024 were women, while nationally only around 5 percent were women. 

Today, in addition to creating educational and training opportunities for newcomers, Oregon Tradeswomen is working to improve the industry’s work culture. It is a provider of RISE Up, a respectful workplace training program for companies that seeks to advance the industry as a whole toward safer, less discriminatory workplaces for all tradespeople. The goal of the program is both to prevent harassment and to teach people how to intervene when harassment occurs.

Courtney Hamilton, Oregon Tradeswomen’s executive director, says the message these trainings try to drive home is: “You don’t have to do something that’s not safe for you.”

The training program, which has seen a lot of engagement from local employers in the past year, educates employers and employees on what equal opportunity means and how to create environments where all workers feel safe reporting harassment and safety concerns, regardless of gender or race. This helps create jobsites that are safer and more welcoming for everyone.

Ashbrook now cochairs the National Taskforce on Tradeswomen’s Issues. In that role, she’s seen an increased interest in alleviating hostile work cultures that negatively impact the well-being of all tradespeople.

“There’s more of an acknowledgment that it’s not just women,” Ashbrook said. “If something just impacts women, many people don’t pay attention to it.” 

In January, I was invited to the monthly meeting of Sisters of Iron, the women’s committee for Ironworkers Local 29. In the dim basement of Workers Tap, a bar in Southeast Portland, a small group of women arrived both in person and online, enthusiastic and ready to connect with each other. The energy felt high for a Wednesday night, especially considering that several women came straight from work; one, who joined online, was still in her car. The women at the bar offered to grab each other drinks from upstairs before settling around a folding table. 

Ashley Lautenschlager, an apprentice ironworker, said she’s been to almost every Sisters of Iron meeting since she joined the union. 

“I worked ten hours today and then drove from campus because I’m not going to miss it,” Lautenschlager said. “I feel like I show up for the girls and they show up for me.”

Lautenschlager went through the Union Pre-Apprenticeship Construction Training program (U-PACT) while incarcerated at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville. The program, designed to prepare incarcerated individuals to enter an apprenticeship immediately upon release, is a partnership between the state and the local ironworkers, cement masons, and bricklayers unions. The U-PACT program changed her life, she said. 

“Obviously, being a felon, it’s harder to find a good-wage job,” she said. “For somebody like me, who did five years in prison, now I have a career and I can make forty dollars an hour and have full benefits and a retirement plan and a pension. There’s nowhere else that I would be given that option.”

For people of all backgrounds, trade unions offer economic mobility that’s rare in other professions—better health insurance, better pay, and the promise of a pension upon retirement mean entering the trades can change a person’s life. Many women I spoke to talked about how their income increased when they made a career change from an office job to a union apprenticeship, even at the entry level. 

But it’s not just about the money. At the Sisters of Iron meeting, when the topic of previous projects comes up, Lautenschlager tells me how proud she is to have worked on the Abernethy Bridge. The other women chime in about how their work feels important—it’s integral to the structural integrity of infrastructure projects. 

For many reasons, tradeswomen won’t let go of their careers without a fight.

On a school day at the end of January, I visited the Career Technical Education Center (CTEC) in Salem. Students enrolled in high schools throughout the Salem-Keizer School District can apply to spend half of their class time at CTEC, where they get hands-on training in one of the school’s ten career-preparation programs. 

I spoke to eight students across three of CTEC’s programs: auto body repair, construction, and manufacturing. They expressed encountering milder forms of the kind of problems that exist in the trades industry more broadly—having their knowledge second-guessed by their male classmates, being one of only a handful of girls in a classroom, and not always seeing themselves represented when they go on field trips with the school’s industry partners. 

They’re even experiencing the trickle-down impact of conservative politics. 

Amaya, a high school junior in the auto body program, said she’s seen some of the more conservative messaging about women in “nontraditional” professions. 

“Especially online nowadays, even females will look down on you because you’re not feminine [enough]. They’ll be like, ‘Why are you doing guy stuff?’ They want you to go more towards those traditional roles,” she said. 

The other girls from her program expressed their agreement, saying they have also encountered messages online telling young women to get married and have kids instead of pursuing a career. Some have even received pushback from their families about pursuing a trades education. 

The girls are aware of how persisting in the trades challenges societal expectations for women. And they’re not particularly concerned about that. 

“Going into a male-dominated field doesn’t mean that you’re not feminine,” Amaya said. “But [it does mean] that you can do stuff that other people can’t.” 

The girls I spoke to talked about how developing those skills that not everyone has, and learning to speak up for themselves in the program, has increased their self-confidence. 

Tahtyahna is a senior in the auto body program. She said persisting in the trades has so much to do with being a role model for her younger siblings; she’s the oldest of nine. 

“I feel like my biggest influence is showing my sisters that they can do whatever they want to do,” she said. “Whether it be a male-dominated field like the trades, or whether it be anything else that they want to do. If I can work in this field, then it’s okay for them too.”

Charlene Getchell has spent most of her life in male-dominated spaces. She grew up with three brothers. She served eight years in the Marine Corps. Then, in 1996, she began her career as a carpenter. 

Carving out a space for herself in the field and honing her craft has given her a confidence that feels unshakable. 

“It’s so empowering. I will not back down if I feel I’m right,” Getchell said. “I’ve developed a skill set no one can take away from me.” 

Now, she has an active role in fostering that confidence in others; she’s taught carpentry to young people in Portland for over ten years. When she moves from the book-learning part of the curriculum to the hands-on training, she sees a difference in her students, regardless of gender. 

“They just blossomed because their phones were put away and their hands were on their tools,” she said. “That’s why I love to teach, to see students come alive and discover who they are.” 

Technical proficiency is not the only thing that students need to learn; making supportive connections can be just as crucial. After all, forming relationships with other women has always been a lifeline for women in the trades. The elders I spoke to entered the trades knowing they were the first, and often the only. Now women can see each other in their unions and on the worksite. They connect with each other in women’s committees and elsewhere. 

“The strategy is to build community,” Getchell said. “Our sisters across the trades have always understood community is the answer.”

Tags