Getting an entirely unprejudiced taste for a day of a job that is untypical for your own sex - that is the idea with which this gender inequality in working life is to be tackled. For this reason the national Future Day is taking place in Switzerland today. For one day, boys and girls in the fifth to seventh grades can gather impressions and experiences in a job untypical for their gender and get to know new fields of work.
In this way equality between men and women and an individual career choice independent of gender stereotypes are to be promoted at an early stage. While girls thus mainly get a taste of jobs in the IT, construction and technology sectors, the boys spend the day looking at work in caring or healthcare professions, for example.
We at Vanillaplan want to take today's Future Day as an occasion to address the work of women in construction. To that end we interviewed senior staff from various construction trades about the importance of women in this field. We also asked women working in the construction industry about their working lives, but also about possible difficulties and obstacles in a male-dominated working environment. We would now like to offer a few insights from these interviews.
As a consensus it can be said that, unfortunately, women are still the exception rather than the rule in most construction trades, but that they would be both needed and very welcome.
A road builder tells us that women are only very rarely found in their workplace, which he thinks is a great shame above all because the woman who previously worked there did, on average, even better work than the men. He can understand, however, why women do not feel comfortable among so many men. He does not know how this situation can be changed, but today the working conditions would actually no longer be a problem for women either, since much has been mechanised and, for example, you no longer have to lift as much as you used to.
A bricklaying foreman, by contrast, points out that the bricklayer's job is certainly strenuous and more difficult for women. Nevertheless every woman is more than welcome and he would be glad to do away with the cliché of bricklaying as a man's job. In his estimation there are now more women than before, but still too few.
From a trainee gardener we learn that although only two women work at her current workplace, roughly as many women as men are represented in the training. Asked about her path into the landscaping trade, she tells us that she grew up on a farm and so already had a certain connection to the work. She was later able to confirm her interest in this field through a holiday job and taster days. She does not have the feeling that there is a hurdle for women in landscaping.
Regarding women in the roofing and tinsmith trade, we learn from a trainee tinsmith that she is the only woman in tinsmith training in the whole of Baselland and Basel-Stadt. When she was facing her career choice, she was advised from all sides to go to grammar school rather than take an apprenticeship. In the end she chose the tinsmith trade after all, but thinks it is very good to take the vocational baccalaureate alongside it. From her personal experience as a woman in the tinsmith trade she tells us that she is often spoken to about it, but that this always happens in a positive context. Overall she sees few obstacles and hurdles - in the tinsmith trade in particular the working conditions for a woman are very good, because the work is not so heavy but rather more creative.
Asked about her path into her trade, a carpenter tells us that she spontaneously went for a taster session there because she did not want to go to grammar school. After that she could imagine going in this direction professionally. Regarding her search for an apprenticeship, we learn that she looked at various businesses but that there were also some that did not take women or were not so open-minded about it. She was very satisfied with the apprenticeship she eventually got. The fact that she works as a woman in carpentry has, by her account, often been a topic. She says that she can work well with some people, whereas with others she first had to learn how to deal with them, to keep out of their way or to confront them about it. While it was still difficult during her apprenticeship, she now has enough self-confidence to handle it.
At the careers fair in Liestal at the end of October, at which various companies and associations presented their fields of work to young people, we interviewed two girls we met at the joinery stand about their career wishes. While one of them was already sure she wanted to go in a medical direction, the other was interested in the joiner's trade. She likes it because she enjoys working with wood. She did not think the joiner's trade was more difficult or more unusual for girls and women than for boys, especially since there had been just as many girls as boys at the joinery stand.
It remains to be hoped, then, that the image of construction as a typically male domain will change step by step among the younger generations. The advancing mechanisation, which makes work in the construction industry less physically demanding, a company culture that is friendly to women from the start of the apprenticeship, and offerings such as Future Day, through which girls recognise early on that a career choice can be made independently of gender, will certainly help. The importance of girls and women for construction becomes relevant above all in view of the shortage of young people in construction trades that many have mentioned. By appealing specifically to young women, a way may open up here for construction companies to fill their gaps in young talent better.
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