Hacia Atherton, the founder of Empowered Women in Trades, discusses how her organisation is aiming to encourage more women into the industry by challenging misconceptions about learning a trade
It’s becoming less unusual to find women working in construction and trades, with women making up 15 per cent of the building and construction workforce in 2023. However, only three per cent of these women were working on the tools and the majority work in administrative and clerical roles.
With the construction trades facing a national skills shortage, the question of how to attract more women into trades to help alleviate this shortfall is a hot topic.
One organisation looking to improve access to training and education for women around the wide variety of trade careers that are available is Empowered Women in Trades (EWIT), founded by Hacia Atherton in 2020.
Aiming to encourage more women to take up apprenticeships and enter skilled trades, Atherton founded EWIT to provide advice and encouragement to women wanting to give a trade a try, but also to change the perception of trades as being merely something that boys do if they’re not academic enough for university.
“I was working as a chief commercial officer at my family’s manufacturing company and I was looking at how we could future proof the factory floor,” Atherton says.
“I reached out to a number of the local schools, saying it’d be great to do an excursion or a career day to show the kids manufacturing trades, such as fitter and turner, boilermaker, etc. But the general feedback was ‘we’ll send you our non-academic boys’.
“I found the double bias there to be very interesting. I always knew that there was a lack of female representation in trades, but that started my deep dive into why this is happening and what the challenges and obstacles are.
“I want apprenticeships to be seen as just another qualification equal to that of a university career pathway and get rid of this idea that going into a trade is a second class ‘you didn’t make it’ option.”
Entry pathway
Atherton says there are different aspects to the issue of how to get more women to work in trades, from the initial barrier of getting women to see trades as a viable option to how to keep them in the industry once women are undertaking an apprenticeship or working in a trade.
On the attraction side, she says there is still a significant lack of awareness and understanding amongst young women around what an apprenticeship is, how to get into one, what jobs are available under the trades umbrella or even the basic idea of them physically being able to use a power tool.
One aim of EWIT’s training programs is to demystify trades and show the huge breadth of possibilities available.
“If you take the plumbing industry for example, women may think it’s just dealing with blocked toilets, but you could be a fitter, a mechanical service plumber, a maintenance plumber, a new construction plumber, a sanitary plumber or a roofage plumber,” Atherton says.
“The plumbing industry has so much diversity of where you can go with your trade, and all of the different licenses you can get, so for a woman who’s never even picked up a power tool that’s very overwhelming for them to try and navigate the complexities of that trade and becoming licensed.
“So that’s where we do a lot of work in the schools. We’ll bring in a hot water unit, and the students get to take it apart and put it back together. They often make their school’s name using a system called B press where they follow a drawing of the letters to cut pipes to length and use a B press machine to join them together, just to give them an understanding of what that’s like.”
Atherton says the work of EWIT is bearing fruit, with more and more young women interested in undertaking a trade apprenticeship once they find out more about the different career paths that they could go down and the demand from employers for skilled staff.
“A lot of female students are very aware of not wanting to start their lives in debt, so they are not necessarily interested in spending $80,000 on a piece of paper that doesn’t guarantee them a job,” she says.
“Particularly when the work landscape is shifting with the increased use of AI, which means a lot of careers like marketing, or even law, are starting to change.
“Along with not wanting to put themselves in debt, they don’t want to put themselves in the potential situation where they don’t have the financial freedom to leave unhealthy relationships, or they can’t buy a home and so on. So the concept of an apprenticeship – where they’re getting paid to learn, they’re starting to get their superannuation paid for them, and they’re learning real life practical skills, along with the need for skilled workers making it a lot easier to get a job – is becoming more attractive.”
Retention
On the retention side of things, Atherton points to the culture in construction and trades being challenging for many apprentices and workers, not just women. A rethink of how to approach work/life balance and aspects of workplace culture such as hazing apprentices will therefore make the industry more attractive and better for a lot of people.
“It’s very evident, when we look at the mental wellbeing statistics of men in these trades, that the industry is not set up to support human beings. For example, having to work six days a week,” Atherton says.
“Apprentice hazing in general is also an issue. If we look at the completion rates of apprenticeships, around 55 per cent of people that start apprenticeships don’t finish them, so retention isn’t just a female problem, it is an industry problem. This idea of ‘we’ve just got to toughen them up’ isn’t resonating with the younger generation and you have to ask, who is it actually benefitting?
“Loneliness and isolation are major issues. It’s tough to be the only woman on the work site, especially when there aren’t appropriate sanitary or changing room facilities. A lot of women in the maintenance trade constantly get the ‘oh, you’re a female’ reaction too when they go to someone’s house to do plumbing work, which wears you down when you get that reaction eight times a day.
“That’s why I established Empowered Women in Trades, because I think a lot of work is needed to be done across the industry.”
Trade Academy
EWIT runs a Trade Academy for those interested in becoming tradies, but unsure where to start.
Atherton says this could be a one-day training session or up to three weeks, not only covering information about trades and interviews with industry professionals, but also positive psychology and mindset tools to support women entering the industry.
“The whole concept is to bring in positive psychology to help women overcome negative self-talk,” Atherton says.
“A lot of women struggling to do something on the tools will blame their gender and say, ‘I can’t do this because I’m a woman’, and that’s reinforced in wider society as well, so we use positive psychology to overcome that negative narrative.
“Participants will generally rotate through three different experiences. If we’re working with a client, it might be three different career pathways that client can provide, such as a technician role, a maintenance role and a sales role, etc.
“Or, if it’s cross-industry, they’ll come in and experience plumbing, welding, carpentry, etc. and then they can work out which career pathway they want to go down.
“Longer programs are generally done in collaboration with an employer where participants will get things like their white cards or working at heights training – whatever they need to then go do some work experience. So, they’ll spend a few days at TAFE learning basic trade skills, they’ll get all of their OH&S qualifications, and then go out with the firm that we’ve partnered with for some work experience.”
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Atherton says the trade taster sessions have been a revelation for a lot of young women, many of which have never used power tools previously.
“Once they get their hands on tools and immersed in the environment, they often have an ‘aha, I can do this’ moment,” she says.
“It could be something as simple as they don’t understand the weight of the tools. A lot of women think that they’re going to be really heavy, so they can’t use them, whereas tools are often a lot lighter than they expect.
“I find having that immersive experience overcomes a lot of the objections that they’re telling themselves. Also meeting and engaging with positive men in the industry, and hearing from men that are really championing this cause means that women can see that there are allies there who will back them up.
“The other thing is getting them inside trade schools to understand what a trade school looks like, feels like, the facilities and everything like that. It takes away uncertainty for them.”
Building a community
Looking ahead to what’s in store for EWIT in 2025, Atherton says a key focus will be growing the EWIT Trades Alliance, building a corporate membership base for cross-industry collaboration so best practices can be shared.
“We want to break down the siloing that’s happened between construction, manufacturing, automotive, new energy and so on,” Atherton says.
“I’m very excited to bring that community together, but also keep growing that community so women know that there are organisations out there that have the mindset of creating workplaces and practices that work for females that are coming into the industry.
“We’re also going to focus on our education programs. I think it’s really important to get all students, not just female students, but from year seven and upwards, understanding what a career in skilled trades looks like.”
For more information, visit https://ewitrades.com. EWIT will be attending Converge Expo, taking place September 17–18 in Melbourne: convergeexpo.com.au