Trump Is Making It Harder for Women to Work in Construction

Apprenticeships are highly sought after. Many provide on-the-job training at no cost, and some pay workers while they’re still learning. Apprentices don’t just save on the tuition costs they’d pay in a higher-education program, they also don’t have to work additional hours at an unrelated job to support themselves. And for workers who already have children, it’s a more financially secure path than the more traditional college route.

The only problem is that these types of training programs are heavily concentrated in male-dominated construction and manufacturing fields. Many girls and young women simply don’t believe careers in the trades are available to them after high school, an idea that’s reinforced by stereotypes of plumbing, steelworking, and similar careers as dirty, physical, rough work. Less than 10 percent of construction jobs are held by women in any given year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but those workers are overrepresented in sales, business, and management positions. The kind of skilled work that can lead to promotions—pipe fitting, plumbing, carpentry, electrical work, etc.—is even more lopsided toward men, with only about 4 percent of those jobs taken by women.

Pushing for more women and people of color to have access to these apprenticeship training programs, and the good jobs they lead to, is about fairness and equity. “Part of why a white man with no college degree outearns a Black woman with a college degree is because white men can get access to those good jobs without the education, where Black women, in order to get higher earnings, have to get that additional education,” said Kate Bahn, chief economist at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “We don’t see women, and women of color in particular, having those opportunities for upward mobility without having to invest a huge amount in their education or otherwise.”