With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1159085
SEPTEMBER 2019 BCBUSINESS 33 certificate in the skilled trades had median earnings of $72,955, Statcan reports, 7 per- cent more than men with a college diploma and 31 percent more than those with a high- school diploma. A new code of conduct To propel women into the skilled trades, Langevin supports quotas, even though she admits that most female tradespeople want merit-based hiring practices. Quotas would speed things up, she says, pointing to the Policy Group on Tradeswomen Issues ( PGTI) in Boston, which has made them part of its push for a 20-percent female workforce in Massachusetts by 2020. The current share of women in registered apprenticeships is 8.5 percent, with the number varying between trades, says Susan Moir, research director for PGTI. By comparison, B.C.'s female repre- sentation has been virtually stagnant. It rose to 4.7 percent in 2017, up from 4.4 percent in 2015, 3.1 percent in 2006 and 3 percent in 2001, reports SkillPlan, a Burnaby-based provider of workforce development programs and training. Moir says Massachusetts is well on its way to reaching the 20-percent goal, which 14 registered apprenticeship programs have already surpassed. PGTI considers govern- ment and industry its partners, with federal, state and municipal governments mandat- ing legal targets for female participation in construction. On Massachusetts and feder- ally funded construction projects, 6.9 per- cent of the working hours must be tallied by women. The City of Boston has set a goal of 12 percent of working hours undertaken by women on construction sites larger than 4,645 square metres, while one project is now at 16-percent women's hours, Moir says. Perhaps most important, more female teens are beginning to consider the trades a worthy career. In 2018, Moir says, 18.5 percent of students at the state's vocational- technical high schools were young women. Achieving similar numbers in B.C. means addressing workplace culture, Langevin stresses. This includes tackling less blatant forms of sexual harassment such as lewd washroom graffiti, rude comments and bosses' refusal to allow a female tradesper- son to join out-of-town work crews, because someone's "girlfriend would have trouble with that." WHEN VANCOUVER general contractor Kendall Ansell walked into one of the Big Five banks with her new business partner to discuss opening some accounts, the employee they met with directed all of her attention to just one of them–the man. Ansell was ignored. Ironic, given that the busi- ness, Belle Construction, B.C.'s first female-led construction company, was Ansell's idea and long-time dream. Equally ironic: she created Belle, launched this past March, to help boost the number of women in the industry. Ansell began work in con- struction as a seven-year-old stacking wood for the family's Cherry Homes construction firm in Maple Ridge. "The thought never came into my mind of being a general contractor," she recalls. Ansell went on to study interior design at BCIT, eventually opening an epony- mous business. While doing projects, she noticed that male trades workers sometimes made homeowners ill at ease: "The owners didn't feel comfortable asking questions." Women tradespeople created a congenial atmosphere, she says, providing "more of a nur- turing presence on job sites." Before starting Belle, Ansell couldn't find any female contractors, but now they approach her for work. In May, she launched the annual Belle Construction Achievement Award, valued at $500, for a top female stu- dent in BCIT's Construc- tion Management program. "It's about equality and inclusivity," says Ansell, who hopes the award will encourage more young women to consider a trades career. Tamara Pongracz, chief instructor for BCIT's Trades Access department, says the college has welcomed female trades students since the 1970s. And with gender roles becoming less regimented, more teens and young women are joining BCIT's programs. To capitalize on this, BCIT offers high-school students a shortened version of its four-month Trades Discovery for Women, which facilitates hands-on experience in about a dozen trades disciplines. The result? Trades Access grads are now 20-percent female. Countering that achieve- ment is a dismal statistic: at last count, women held just 4.7 percent of trades jobs in B.C. What is going wrong? It's all about retention, Pongracz says. Women still get passed over for jobs–just as she was when she entered the plumbing trade in the late 1980s. And many workplaces still don't welcome women, something she blames on employers, who bear "the responsibility for the health and welfare of their workers." Pongracz is optimistic that the Builders Code, which sets standards of behaviour to eliminate hazing, harassment, bullying and discrimination for all workers, will make the trades more inviting to women, Indigenous people, youth and new Canadians. A growing number of construction com- panies have signed the code, pledging to uphold its equality tenets. But change is slow and incremental, Pongracz warns: "It's an evolution, not a revolu- tion." –R.S. AFTER LAUNCHING THE PROVINCE'S FIRST FEMALE-LED CONSTRUCTION BUSINESS, KENDALL ANSELL WANTS TO HELP MORE WOMEN GO INTO THE TRADES Sometimes the shortcomings of a past female worker are projected onto new appli- cants, Langevin relates: "One friend who was interviewed was told, 'We once hired a woman and she wouldn't go up a 12-foot lad- der, so we won't hire women.'" Although B.C.'s long-standing human rights laws explicitly protect against such sex discrimination, employers can sidestep them. Complainers, men as well as women, tend to be blackballed—they're the first laid off and the last rehired, Langevin says. However, she's hopeful that recent pro- vincial legislation will make the trades more welcoming to women. Last year, the NDP government created BC Infrastructure Ben- efits (BCIB), a Crown agency that oversees the Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) cover- Laying the Foundation