Women Now Hold 4.4% of US Skilled Trade Jobs, Up From 2.9%

Women made up about 4.4 percent of workers in America's skilled trades last year, federal data shows, up from 2.9 percent a decade earlier. That shift is being driven by six-figure salaries, new workplace accommodations and a wave of technology that has reshaped what these jobs demand.

Sammy Cossairt, a 36-year-old tower crane operator in Nashville, Tennessee, is part of that shift. She never thought she would end up in the field. Now, most days, she sits hundreds of feet in the air moving buckets of concrete — and earns $120,000 a year doing it.

"I'm out in the sun, making my mark on the world," Cossairt told The Wall Street Journal. "I think more women would love to get in and make men's money doing this work, if they only knew."

Her point about pay cuts to the heart of the industry's pitch. The trades, once described as a boy's club, are gaining female workers as women discover salaries that rival many white-collar careers, alongside increasing access and accommodations.

How are companies recruiting women into the trades?

Across America and Canada, companies and schools are courting women with new benefits and perks. The list includes:

• Paid maternity leave
• Added flexibility in schedules and work arrangements
• New efforts to address discrimination that is widely found in male-dominated fields

Work sites are also honing in on bias itself. Discrimination remains a persistent barrier in male-dominated industries, and employers and training programs are treating it as a problem to fix rather than a condition to accept.

The federal government tracks female participation in skilled trade jobs, a category that includes construction, plumbing, carpentry and auto tech. The 4.4 percent figure from last year is still low in absolute terms. But the growth from 2.9 percent a decade earlier signals a durable trend rather than a one-year blip.

Why is technology changing who gets hired?

One of the biggest draws for women entering the industry today is the infusion of technology. Katie Yurick, career services director at Universal Technical Institute in Exton, Pennsylvania, explains that the trades now demand brains and attention to detail as much as muscle.

The work itself has changed, too. An automotive technician, for example, hooks up cars to computers to help run diagnostics. The image of grease-covered manual labor is increasingly out of date.

"These jobs aren't even dirty anymore," Yurick told the WSJ.

She went further, explaining that many trade employers are actively trying to hire women because of their attention to detail — a quality she says men don't always possess. That hiring preference marks a reversal from decades in which the industry barely recruited women at all.

What does this mean for the labor shortage?

The skilled trades face a well-documented worker shortage, and the industry's own data suggests the pipeline of male workers alone can't fill it. Doubling female participation over ten years — even to a still-modest 4.4 percent — shows the pool can expand when pay, conditions and recruitment actually change.

For employers, the calculus is straightforward. Women bring attention to detail that customers and quality standards reward, according to Yurick, and the technology now central to the work rewards precision over raw strength.

For workers like Cossairt, the appeal is even simpler: a $120,000 salary and a visible result at the end of every day. "If they only knew," she said — a line that recruiters across the continent are now betting on as they sell the trades to a generation of women who never considered them.