There’s fewer tradeswomen than we thought, but their potential is greater than anyone has imagined

Labor Insights
Written By Fraser Patterson

We have a problem in the trades.

During my decade-long career as a carpenter, I didn’t work alongside a single tradeswoman—not one. It wasn’t until 20 years later as a GC in New York, that I was finally able to hire two incredible female carpenters into our team. 

Everyone agrees we need more tradeswomen, lots more, but nobody seems to agree on how many there actually are. 

When U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo launched the Million Women in Construction initiative, aiming to double the number of women in the trades over the next decade from 5 to 10%, it felt like we might just have a shot at building the skilled workforce we need to rebuild American infrastructure.

But it turns out there’s another problem—the numbers underpinning our assumptions are wrong. 

There aren’t even close to 5% of women in the skilled trades today.

Skillit’s dataset is arguably the most accurate picture of America’s skilled trade workforce because the data is sourced directly from our craft member’s anonymized profiles, not via employers or government agency surveys. 

Here’s what our data reveals:

  • Women make up just 3.4% of skilled trades. From Heavy Equipment Operators (2.5%) to carpenters (2.7%) and pipefitters (4.3% – the most female represented trade of all), we are far from having 5% of women in the trades. 

  • The only occupation that breaches 5% is general laborers (6.1%), however they’re not classified as a skilled trade (e.g. have specialized training, certification, licensing, OTJ training or formal apprenticeship). Women are highly overrepresented in this entry level role with a ratio of 1.8X the number of female general laborers as female skilled trades (6.1% : 3.4%). The same ratio is 0.94X for men.

In hard numbers, 5% of all skilled trades would see the U.S. have 277,222 women in the trades today and doubling that number would give 554,444. Unfortunately, at 189,620, we’re short 87,602 as a starting point and need to literally triple (2.92X), not double today’s number to reach the goal. 

But here’s where things get interesting—and why there’s reason to feel bullish about the future of skilled tradeswomen—our dataset also shows that:

  • Despite having 4.5 years less experience than their male counterparts, women score 27% higher on skilled trade assessments (averaging a score of 72% vs. 57%). 

  • And unlike the broader gender wage gap of 16.3% reported by the BLS, the skilled trade gender wage gap is three times smaller at just 5.3%.

 
 
 

So the kicker is, the hurdle is bigger than we realize—but the potential for skilled tradeswomen is enormous. Women have the aptitude in spades to excel in these roles, potentially ramping up faster than their male counterparts. And once they break into the higher skilled roles, they’re stepping into a more equitable future than they would find in most other industries.

 

About Skillit’s Share of skilled tradeswomen data: we analyzed ~80,000 Skillit member profiles and estimate our assumptions to have a 90% confidence level and 10% margin of error.

Kudos to everyone out there helping push the million women initiative forward 🙌 👷‍♀️

 
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Fraser Patterson
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