Sharon Gordon has spent 23 years in the industry and has gained the respect of her male colleagues. But, as she tells Sarah Richardson, it ainât been easy âŠ
Everybody makes a bargain with their job, and everybodyâs bargain involves a loss and a gain. The demands construction makes of workers at the sharp end is well known to anybody whoâs been on a site at eight on a February morning. The compensations are the camaraderie and the sense of being up to a rough-tough job, of doing manâs work.
But what if you happen to be a woman?
A diversity report for the Construction Industry Council (CIC), published in May, found that 13.5% of constructionâs workers were women, compared with 46% in the working population as a whole. And that includes white collar professions such as architecture and quantity surveying, where women make up a much higher percentage of the workforce than contracting.
But the industry is part of society and reflects its attitudes and assumptions. So, the only professional body with anything like sexual equality is the Landscape Institute, because, presumably, of its congruence with gardening. When it comes to site work, dealing with the behaviour often exhibited by groups of men â laddishness, aggression and a quest for dominance â must play a part in determining the industryâs bargain with a woman who enters that environment.
To find more about how extreme these pressures can be, șĂÉ«ÏÈÉúTV spent a day with Sharon Gordon, a 39-year-old contracts manager for Osborne. During her 23 years in the industry she has had to deal with colleagues who have bullied her, residents who have sexually threatened her, and employers who have made it clear they donât believe she is up to the job. She has also established herself as a force to be reckoned with on the sites where she works.
Banter
Sharon is a little over five feet tall, smartly but casually dressed, with gold hoop earrings, and impeccable groomed. She is also black, which puts her in an extremely select group: according to the CIC report, the âblack, Asian and ethnic minoritiesâ make up 2% of the workforce.
The working day begins in a site hut in the middle of a notorious Camden estate, which is being upgraded to the governmentâs Decent Homes standard. The hut is an office and a canteen, and the burning issue that morning is the mysterious disappearance of the spoons. A steady stream of men come in looking for one.
âAre you here for the day, or is it a flying visit?â asks one.
âWhy?â Sharon asks, âDonât you want me?â
âOhhh, donât ask me that,â he says, looking her ostentatiously up and down.
The exchange sets the tone for much of Sharonâs chat. âYou have to both be a woman and not a woman, if that makes sense,â she tells me once the worker has left. âBut most of the banter isnât personal.â Sharon is generally addressed as âloveâ or âdarlingâ, but she doesnât mind that either. âTheyâre all my loves and darlings,â she says. âWhen I started, people tried to be really PC, but I prefer it like this. I donât take offence.â
How did I get here?
The banter hasnât always been this benign, particularly when Sharon started out in the industry. She began as an apprentice electrician in 1986 after her school found her a placement with Islington council. Sharon, who had an interest in electronics, quickly got the hang of the job and was encouraged to apply for a traineeship. The council took on two girls and two boys that year, but Sharon says the progressive attitude of her employer was not shared by her colleagues.
âThe men on site tried to see which girl they could break, and if they didnât, theyâd say you were a lesbian. Two years in, I had a terrible day. They sent me to five cafes for their tea order, and I went home and told my mum I wasnât doing it any more.â Sharonâs mum, a chef, wasnât having it. âShe said: âYou finish the course, then you can leaveâ.â
Sharon stuck it out, but it wasnât easy. âThe men would tell us: âYouâre taking these jobs away from our sons.â It was the eighties, I thought things had changed for women, but there they hadnât at all.â The men would take delight in giving her the most unglamorous jobs. âI got filthy dirty, covered in soot. But every time I was told I wouldnât be able to do something, Iâd do it. I used to have a thing about beetles and spiders, but not any more.â
Sharon completed the course, and began her progress from reactive maintenance worker to contracts manager on Decent Homes programmes. On the way, she has worked at Kier and Balfour Beatty, and has sat a number of tests in the industryâs school of hard knocks. At Balfour, for example, she was given three months to get one of its divisions its NICEIC accreditation, even though her predecessor had tried and failed to do it in a year. She did it with two days to spare. âI asked what I should do next and they said enjoy it, put your feet up. That wasnât for me, so I left.â Another contractor, which she declines to name, told her frankly that sheâd hit the glass ceiling, so she left and got a better position elsewhere.
Sex and violence
Iâve realised that I can manipulate men â and I do. I donât mean Iâm overly flirtatious, I just behave ordinarily. I enjoy the fact that Iâm a woman rather than hiding it
Women who show aggression tend to be regarded as emotional, if not hysterical. But of course the construction industry, with its recognisably military, or perhaps mercenary, culture tends to communicate through barked commands and finger-in-the-chest bollockings. So how does Sharon handle that side of the job?
One method is calculated blandness. âWhen I started taking apprentices to jobs the resident would speak to them because they were the man. That annoyed me â particularly when they answered back. So Iâd tell them, if you know so much, you go in there and do the job yourself. When they couldnât, I got more respect.â
Business relationships are dealt with in a businesslike way. Back in the site cabin, Sharonâs phone rings. Itâs a call about a contract on which sheâs having problems. She is clipped and to the point. âItâs a difficult one, that: Iâm thinking of suspending one of the subcontractors.â
But what about the type of men who had resented her existence when she was taking their malicious lunch orders? Her first line of defence is her technical competence: once sheâs in a flat she gives a brisk but authoritative commentary on areas she doesnât consider up to scratch. Also, the industry is fairly hierarchical, and direct challenges are unpleasant, but obviously out of order. âOnce we were all out on a Friday, and one guy who had a chip on his shoulder about me had too much to drink. He started having a go and then went to swing at me.â She pauses and smiles. âBut of course, the other guys stepped in and told him off.â
The other difficult question for women is the extent to which they can express their sexual identity. One problem here is that men have been known to confuse patronising comments, or indeed crude innuendo, with flirtation, and in a predominantly male workplace this can take on a competitive character. Some women try to pre-empt this by wearing more unisex clothes than they would in another job. Not Sharon. Apart from her personal protective equipment, her clothes, hair and make-up are no different to the average office worker.
She was a tomboy as a teenager and a fairly militant feminist in her twenties: âIf a man said I looked lovely, Iâd threaten to report him.â These days she has a more sophisticated strategy. âIâve realised that I can manipulate men â and I do.â The skill, of course, is not to take things too far. âI donât mean Iâm overly flirtatious, I just behave ordinarily. I enjoy the fact that Iâm a woman rather than hide it.â The men seem to know this too, and enjoy their role in the game â while Sharon has been âfessing up, Shaun, another worker on the hunt for spoons, winks at me behind her back and shakes his head sadly.
As with the belligerent drinker, there are cruder dangers to being a woman in Sharonâs position. In previous jobs she has had her share of bad experiences in flats on the estates where sheâs been working.
âThereâve been a few times Iâve felt uncomfortable,â she says. This is an understatement. âIâve been locked in a flat by a resident who was approaching me in a sexual way.â Then there was the time that a tenant met her wearing a towel, and then sat on the sofa. âI knew something wasnât right, so I said I needed to pop to the office and thankfully my boss agreed to come back with me. The man was naked when we arrived.â
Saffron
The problem of combining family life with working life are pretty much universal for women, but construction, with its deadline-driven, 12-hour-day culture, drives a harder bargain than most. Sharonâs daughter, Saffron, is 10, and Sharon has been a single mother for the past six years. That means the school run in the morning and relying on her parents and Saffronâs father to handle the afternoons. âSheâll stay at her dadâs tonight because I have a 7am start. I need to plan things. Mum and Dad have to know where I am all the time. It can be invasive, but I need to do it. I donât plan my weekends, though.â
Saffron sometimes complains if she isnât there, âbut I tell her, just give mum a couple of weeks and itâll be okayâ. And it seems she is aware that Sharonâs job is prestigious: the virtues of toughness, self-reliance, knowing how to handle yourself are as much feminine as masculine qualities, but few industries allow women to display them so visibly. So, Saffron is proud of her mum. âWhen I worked at Kier she used to come in with me a lot, and she knew all the men there. Sheâs going into school and saying: âMummyâs a builder; Iâd like to be like herâ.â
Saffronâs father was more of a problem. Sharon moved to a new job when six weeks pregnant, and didnât stay long: Saffron beat her delivery deadline by two months. While this was happening her new employer was making redundancies, and she felt compelled to return to work within two months of the birth. This may have saved her job, but her partner resented her decision. Nor did he like the amount of time she spent with men. One Friday, he turned up unexpectedly when she was having an after-work drink. âIt was just me and 20 men, and he started trouble. It was not long after that we split up.â Sharonâs current boyfriend is the first that doesnât have a problem with her working with men.
Attracting women
Despite the obvious difficulties, Sharon says sheâd like to see more women in the industry. She says she only knows one other female contracts manager, and that many of the women she has met in the sector have now left âto become estate agents or mumsâ. She says more girls ought to realise the independence the industry can offer them. âMy brother [now a carpenter] and I decided when we were young that if we started a day with no money, we wanted to be able to earn something by the end.â Now, she says, she earns more than many of her friends.
Sharon says the lack of role models puts girls off the idea of a career in construction. âI donât see women going into schools and telling kids about the industry.â This, unfortunately, is a circular argument: why do few women go into construction? Because of its macho culture. Why does it have a macho culture? Because so few women go into it.
What is clear after spending a day with Sharon is that those who do carve out a career require a range of personal, social and technical skills that women in other professions may have, but donât need in the same way. For most women, there are easier bargains to be made elsewhere.
The CIC report mentioned earlier commented that there are 62% more female doctors and dentists in 2007 than there were in 1997. One factor here may be the cracks appearing in the glass ceiling: there has been a steady rise in the number of women doctors who reach the rank of consultant (21% of them were female in 1997, 27% in 2007); by contrast, the best 50 employers in construction, as listed by șĂÉ«ÏÈÉúTVâs Good Employer Guide, averaged precisely one female equity partner or board member apiece. So, next week we will be looking at the pressures on women at the highest echelons of the industry.
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