To Our Daughters: Play in Dirt, Dream Big
REVISITED — SEVEN YEARS LATER
I wrote the piece below for MBE Magazine in the spring of 2019. Seven years later, I’m still asked some version of the same question on nearly every jobwalk:
“So — how did you end up in this?”
The question is friendly. The question is also loaded. It’s friendly because the men asking it are usually genuinely curious. It’s loaded because nobody asks the men.
I wrote this for the young women who get the question and aren’t sure yet how to answer. Seven years on, I’d add one thing: you don’t owe anyone a tidy origin story.
You’re allowed to take up space in this industry without explaining why you’re allowed to.
For anyone navigating those rooms — here’s the original.
MBE MAGAZINE — SPRING 2019
The conversation is always the same. I meet someone new, we stray into the career conversation, and then a variation on this exchange happens:
New person: What kind of business are you in?
Me: I’m in construction!
New person: Really? (Expressed with a puzzled grin.) Not what I expected.
Huh? What did you expect? Is there something about my features or demeanor that screams a certain type of job? Nope — it’s my gender.
I was born and raised in the construction industry. My parents, Jannie and Richard, started Athena Engineering in 1984, eventually growing it from their townhouse to a multi-million dollar company specializing in HVAC and building automation. As soon as I could read, write, and understand a filing system, my mom had me in the office. One of my earliest memories is of walking around a laboratory in a hazmat suit with the legs and arms rolled up, learning about HVAC. I wasn’t supposed to be there, so our project manager and my dad were holding me up between them to make me seem taller (it didn’t work). I played in dirt, held a welding torch, and had my own little toolbox. Nothing was off-limits.
Fast forward to now and I know why I chose construction — I was never told it was male-dominated. To me it was a career field wide open to all types of people. It wasn’t until I was in the thick of my industry that I noticed a complete lack of women, and when I say a lack, I mean basically none. Throughout my 12-year career, I’m nearly always the only woman at jobwalks, coordination meetings, and client meetings. We work hard to find women engineers to add to our team, but rarely find more than five to ten women enrolled in mechanical engineering or construction-related majors. Once I started speaking on panels about the subject, the same question kept coming up — “What advice would you give to another woman trying to make it in a male-dominated industry?” I still don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know one thing: we need to stop telling the next generation that anything is male-dominated.
Either intentionally or not, we tell young girls which industries are unfriendly to them when we call a particular job male-dominated. When we say this, what we are really telling girls is that they can try to work in an industry like construction, but men have already claimed those spots and the road to success might be hard-fought. We’re well-meaning and trying to impart a lesson, but we are blind to the seed that the phrase plants in the mind of a young child. Most industries are male-dominated — that is well known and a fact that is repeated ad nauseam. Change the question and ask yourself which industries are female-dominated. Short answer: very few. But it’s our job to change that. We need to stop telling young girls that the industry is full of men; it restricts their imagination, keeping them from dreaming of themselves standing on a dirty jobsite as an electrician, crane operator, engineer, carpenter, or construction executive. The same goes for boys. An industry has no gender — stop giving it one.
The onus is not on just women. It lies squarely on men, too. To my dad, I was both a son and a daughter. He taught me woodwork, model building, and how to check the oil in a car. None of these tasks were gender-specific — they were just life skills I happened to take an interest in. It’s on everyone to remind the young women in their lives that there is no such thing as male domination, that the world is open and available for girls too. Teach her how to be strong because this world is tough for everyone, not just for girls.
Let’s stop talking about how everything in construction is dominated by men and reframe the conversation with the young girls we talk to. My answer when asked by young girls about my job is simple: I love building things, and if you do too, there’s a space for you. Maybe then one day, our daughters won’t get a puzzled grin and a shocked response when they tell a stranger they’re in construction. They’ll get a respectful, normal, run-of-the-mill, “That’s cool. Tell me more.” This is the path to equitable representation of men and women on a construction site, working side-by-side, building our cities.
Resources for women exploring STEM or construction careers
- Society of Women Engineers
- National Association of Women in Construction (NAWIC)
- Women in Construction Operations (WiOPS)
- Girls Inc.
Originally published in the Spring 2019 issue of MBE Magazine.
