Happy New Year, friends.
Aside from a little bit of holiday travel, I’ve spent most of my winter weekends in Detroit wearing insulated duck down bibs and work gloves. I’ve been helping renovate a home in the Northwest Goldberg neighborhood of Detroit and let me tell you, January is a heck of a time to install siding on a 110 year old house. I’ve learned a ton working on this house, but one things stands out: men have been gatekeeping skilled trades for far too long.
A few weeks ago, I was outside on a ladder putting up siding when a woman walking down the sidewalk stopped and said, “are ya’ll doing this by yourselves??” My partner and I told her that we were and we started chatting about the project. She told us that a contractor put up siding on her house two years ago and it is now falling down and coming apart. We told her that we were new at it and that it only requires four basic tools: a measuring tape, a jigsaw to cut the wood, a nail gun to put it up, and a level to make sure it’s straight. We all got a good laugh when we told her that our faces looked exactly like hers when we found out how easy it was. Since then, we have had several others stop by and have almost the exact same conversation. It’s got me thinking. Semi-obsessively.
For as long as I can remember, there has been a lot of talk about the lack of the interest in the skilled trades and how hard it is to find people who want to learn. I just don’t buy the argument that it’s a lack of interest. Having worked on this issue here in Detroit, I have seen a laundry list of barriers that exist for willing and able people including everything from exclusionary lending practices to blatant racism. Women in particular are at an increased risk of discrimination and sexual harassment in the trades industry. Instead of blaming untapped talent, we ought to be taking a hard look at our own comfort with the status quo.
Carman, who is a muscular 5’8’’ with raven hair, had endured a litany of injustices since entering construction. On her first job as an apprentice, in 2008, men called her “the pookie princess” after the sealant she used to close ducts that snaked along the ceilings of the tract homes where she worked south of Seattle. Sometimes, her foreman had her stand for hours next to his ladder, handing him screws. On the next job, a 30-story condo tower in nearby Bellevue, her male coworkers sliced off the padlocks and vandalized the site’s women-only port-a-potty. Men hit on her, yelled at her, groped her and pushed their groins against her while ascending in aerial platforms known as scissor lifts. She white-knuckled her way through the work, hoping that, as a journeywoman, things would get easier.
We can do better. We have to do better.
What might happen if we started to introducing women to small home-improvement projects on a neighborhood scale? Nearly every homeowner needs something fixed in their house. What if we invited our neighbors to come learn while we fix something in our house and help them with their repair in return? Can you imagine the impact at scale? I could write a lot more on this topic, but I’ll stop there for now.
If I were to start another business today, it would be aimed at solving this problem. The market is wide open for a really creative and clever entrepreneur to find a way to quickly up-skill women as handy ma’ams and get them out into the field. It’s a career that lends itself well to flexible work hours, making it accessible to women who are also caretakers. Reliable, trustworthy, and tidy handy ma’ams would shine so brightly and give the male-dominated status quo a run for its money. If one of you decides to quit your day job and start this business, count me in as your first cheerleader.
Until next time,
Alex
Here are the most interesting things happening this week in cities:
What would it be like to live in a city designed by the disabled? This Curbed article shines a light on standard design practices that are hostile to people with disabilities. Instead of treating accessibility as an add-on or amenity, advocates make the case for it to be a fundamental standard of good design.
Homeownership rates on tribal lands are startling low. The technical aspects of owning a home on trust land make financing difficult - a challenge that many traditional lenders are unwilling to navigate. Five CDFIs are taking on the challenge with the Rosebud Homeownership and Wealth Building Initiative in hopes of building wealth in Native American communities.
What I’m Reading: The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman
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Cool, thanks🙂. Well, right now it seems Pro-Lab and Amazon have the market cornered for most à la carte home testing kits, but they are expensive and do not include soil contaminant tests. Hmm, perhaps the soil contaminant test (mostly done by universities) could be the product part (remotely scaleable) and the inspection could be the service part (locale-dependent).
Greetings. You know, I was thinking there might be room in the market (especially in Detroit) for more efficient home testing kits and services. Right now it’s expensive and tiresome to test for asbestos, lead, mold, water pollutants, soil contaminants, soil composition, the list goes on. Wouldn’t it be great to simply get all that done at one time in a home inspection? There’s got to be a better way. Just an idea.