Still a Man’s World : For Women, the Construction Trades Are Proving to Be a Bastion of Bias

Anne Brophy was working in an office and hating it in 1979 when her husband suggested she take a test with him for an engineering apprenticeship.

She outscored him. She also bettered a male friend who took the exam. But although placement was supposedly based on test scores, her friend was called for a job first. After protesting, Brophy finally got an apprenticeship.

“Four years of hell,” she calls it.

“You’re not dealing with the more liberal, progressive members of society,” she notes dryly. “You walk into the lunchroom and guys talk about how they beat their wives into submission every night. It’s a crock. You know it’s put on for your benefit.”

Only support from her husband, Jay, and another woman in the program kept her from fleeing. “At least 100 times I just wanted to chuck it and walk away,” she says.

During the last two decades, women have broken down barriers to many fields once dominated by men.

Construction work is not one.

Judith E. Kurtz, an attorney with Equal Rights Advocates, a San Francisco group that works to increase the number of women in the building trades, calls the industry “one of the last bastions of exclusion for women in employment.”

In California, women make up less than 2% of the construction work force, about the same as nationally. And despite a 12-year push to bring more women into apprenticeships, they have less than 5% of construction slots in state-approved programs.

In 1978, federal and state officials decided that women should make up 20% of apprenticeship programs overseen by the state. That’s roughly half their presence in the California work force. Overall, female apprenticeships have climbed from 8% of the state’s 51,000 apprenticeships to 11%. But during the same period, construction job numbers, which represent about 60% of the apprenticeships, have barely changed.

The state’s Little Hoover Commission is investigating claims that the agency charged with certifying apprenticeship programs is doing next to nothing.

For the few women who get onto job sites, things can be tough: daily insults and coffee-fetching commands, groping co-workers and dangerous pranks.

Why do they put up with it?

Journeywomen and even those who have left the trades or dropped out of apprenticeships say the jobs are good. About 670,000 jobs in California--5% of the state’s total work force--are in the building trades. After a four- or five-year apprenticeship--hands-on work during the day and technical classes at night--a journey-level worker can easily earn $25 an hour, plus union benefits.

But it’s not that simple for women. Just ask Anne Brophy.

After finishing her operating engineer’s apprenticeship and passing a test in 1983, she had 15 interviews one summer and two journey-level job offers. Instead of talking about what equipment she could operate, some interviewers just asked about having kids, she says.

“One flat-out told me I had all the qualifications,” including the highest test score among applicants, she recalls. “But he wasn’t going to hire me because he didn’t think I could handle the rough language on the job. ‘It’s not the right place for a woman,’ he said.”

Now Brophy, 42, works in a Century City high-rise. The job’s good.

“No matter what you know or what you do,” she says of construction work, “you’re never going to be as good as the dumbest man.”

At one meeting of Women at Work, a 2-year-old Pasadena-based support group for women in the trades, organizer Gina Frierman Hunt asked the three dozen or so people present how many had been harassed on the job. Every hand shot up.

“It’s 100% prevalent,” she says.

But most women say they never file a union grievance or a sexual harassment suit with the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing.

They say retribution and ostracism discourage boat-rocking; instead, they handle things the best they can. “More women on the job are going to make better working conditions,” says Lynn Dabney, 36, a Los Angeles electrician.

More insidious, they say, is the singular failure of the Division of Apprenticeship Standards, the state agency that certifies training programs, to do its job.

Only 8.3% of apprenticeship programs met their women’s recruiting goals in 1989, the last year for which numbers are available. The division found that 90% of these programs had made “good faith” efforts to do so and exempted more than a quarter of the programs from their goals.

The division also has never taken action to sanction programs, insisting that decertification can come only when a program flatly refuses to try harder.

Critics charge that’s not enough. But not much is likely to change because the agency’s budget was cut by a third this year and could face elimination next year.

At a Little Hoover Commission hearing in January, Joseph Hogan, a former regional director with the U.S. Labor Department’s office of federal contract compliance programs, called the apprentice division a “sham” and the trades “the most blatantly discriminatory sector of the California work force.”

Kurtz says the percentage of women in apprenticeship trade programs dipped to 4.9% in 1989 from 5.14% in 1988; still, she says, the division took almost no action.

The Hoover commission, formally known as the Commission on California State Government Organization and Economy, is expected to issue a critical report in May.

Apprentice division chief Gail W. Jesswein argues that revoking a program’s certification would drive many from the voluntary oversight program and dry up training and placement opportunities for all workers, women as well as men: “There’s no forcing them to do these sort of things.”

The real problem, Jesswein says, is the unrealistic goal of women filling one in five apprenticeships: There just aren’t enough women who want to be sheet-metal workers or bricklayers. During building booms, for example, the scarcity of workers forces contractors to look for them in Arizona and Texas.

That’s news to Mary Gaddis, who teaches a course in the skilled trades for women at Laney College in Oakland. Last semester she had 400 applicants for 20 spots.

“They’re interested in everything,” says Gaddis, who became the first woman in the 1,800-man pipe fitter’s union in 1979. Today there are 15.

Brophy says she’s always meeting other women interested in her work: “There are a lot of women, total strangers, who come up to you and say, ‘It’s marvelous what you’re doing.’ ”

On her back, her head and hands under a sink installing a garbage disposal, Linda Jofuku felt the handle of a hammer and her partner’s hands groping between her legs.

She kicked at him, threatened to scream, grabbed her tools and ran off to report him to the foreman.

Her co-worker was suspended for a couple days, but in many ways it was just another day on the job for Jofuku.

After graduating from high school in 1975, Jofuku left home, dug ditches and pushed wheelbarrows around job sites until she worked her way up to a carpenter’s job. For the 5-feet, 4-inch, 110-pound Jofuku, it was no easy task. But she loved the work.

“Each day you get a sense of accomplishment,” she says. “It’s exciting to see a building go up. That’s what keeps you going. That and the money.”

After six years of nonunion work, she decided in 1985 that she could do better by starting an electrician’s apprenticeship.

She lasted a year.

While she was installing a doorbell one day, working with low-voltage--but live--wires, three male co-workers dumped a bucket of water on her.

“They really just wanted to see my wet T-shirt,” Jofuku says. “That’s the kind of antics you dealt with on a daily basis. You really feel like quitting.”

After her co-worker tried to fondle her with his hammer, she decided to quit. Jofuku stayed on the for a few more weeks because she needed the money but left as soon as she found an advocacy job with an organization trying to increase minority participation in the trades.

Jofuku, 33, now works as the business representative for the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers in San Francisco, trying to shatter the glass ceiling she says exists for Asians in the white-collar world.

Still, she says, the trades are a good opportunity; the work helped her self-esteem, despite the daily degradations: “A hammer was not shoved up my crotch every single day, but it did happen. Something was said every day.”

But there was no one to whom she could complain.

“You’re in a union, you want to preserve brotherhood and sisterhood,” says Jofuku. “It’s very difficult to fight for yourself when you’re isolated, when you’re the only woman. You feel there’s something wrong with you.”

Some men see it differently.

“We anticipated problems on the job site with harassment, but just the opposite turned out,” says John Scott, director of an electrical apprenticeship program in San Francisco. The men “pamper them; they treat them like daughters. They’re too easy on them.”

The problem, he says, is getting the men to let women do the hard work; complaints about discrimination and hazing have been few.

“All the old stuff you may have heard about years ago doesn’t happen any more,” says Calvin Emery, manager of Plumbers Union, Local 78, in Los Angeles. “In the work place, really, the thing that counts in this business is if you hold up your end. The building trade is really a brotherhood based on ability. It’s always been that way. No matter who you are.”

Marty Hunt, training director in Los Angeles for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, agrees that things are getting easier for women.

“Women on the work site have changed that (sexist) attitude over the last decade,” he says. “I’m not saying there’s no prejudice, but it’s changing. The guys are becoming more accustomed to them. Women are more conscientious; they’ve got something to prove.”

None of these tradesmen, all with long experience in the field and with the unions, say they are aware of more than a few isolated complaints from women.

“In general, the women are making a good showing, they’re well accepted,” says Bill Markus, the corresponding secretary with the Operating Engineers Union, Local 3, in San Francisco.

But he does say members of the “female gender” face problems that men don’t.

“Women being women,” Markus says, “they fall in love, get married, get pregnant.”

It was a typical bus ride back from a desert construction site: Some of the guys were playing craps, a few drinking beer. Then someone started flashing a hand-lettered sign at passing female motorists: Show us your breasts. But not phrased quite as politely.

One woman in a car quickly wrote and displayed a retort: “Show me your (penis).” The bus full of construction workers, all clustered to one side, started wildly pointing to one hard hat. Opening a window, he obliged.

Hunkering down in her seat, apprentice electrician Lynn Dabney feigned sleep. “I was trapped,” she recalls. “It was awful. I felt nauseated.”

It wasn’t the first time Dabney had felt like an interloper in a boy’s locker room. During the first year of her four-year apprenticeship program, a teacher tried to show a tape of a boxing match instead of going over the scheduled lesson. Dabney complained.

Another time, a male classmate didn’t do his homework and copied Dabney’s, word for word. He got a better grade.

“I always claimed I was treated differently,” she says. “It was so vivid, I just laughed.”

But more often she wants to scream, as she does almost every time she starts a new job and sees the same calendars: The tool company posters that show bikini-clad or topless women in high heels, seductively straddling jackhammers. “Serving professionals,” said one that particularly offended Dabney.

“All those women are me,” she says.

Last year, in the electric shop of a Hollywood studio, she asked another electrician to take down an out-of-date calendar. “If you don’t like it, quit,” he responded. “I have a right to have this calendar up.”

When he was on vacation, she took it down and replaced it with a nature calendar. “Whales and stuff,” she says.

He didn’t talk to her for a month.