Blog

The headline reflects a goal that has served as a rallying cry for feminists. Various studies show a large discrepancy in pay scales for women versus men for similar types of jobs, but I recently came across an article that opened my eyes. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, across...

News of the skilled trades gap is in the daily news from every part of the country to places around the world. Great jobs are going unfilled at great companies with the labor shortage becoming more dire each day. Why? For the last 30 years, students have been ushered down the traditional path of college...

According to The National Association of Women in Construction (NAWC), women make up 9.1% of the construction workforce. When I first read that statistic, I thought it represented a big jump from previous data I had seen years ago. Upon closer reading, it’s not as encouraging. NAWC’s membership...

As I’ve written about numerous times, our nation suffers a severe shortage of skilled trade workers. The main reason has to do with social pressures and propaganda about the importance of college degree, a belief that this blog has also poked holes in. Another big reason is the reluctance of women...

May 24, 2016 Brute force is not required! Misconceptions abound about the trades and the people who work in them. Many of these misconceptions date back to a bygone era when there might have been more truth to them. One of these misconceptions is that the trades involve a lot of heavy lifting, so brute...

May 9, 2016 Old habits die hard! The knee-jerk answer some people might give to that question is because the skilled trades are not very welcoming to women. That may have been true in the past but for the most part not anymore. Social attitudes have evolved over the years and even where they haven’t,...

Attitudes have turned around. Most estimates peg females as only about 2% to 2.5% of all skilled trade workers and the percentage is not going up significantly. That’s too bad, because most skilled trade employers would be happy to hire females if only more would apply for trade jobs and apprenticeship...