Female Tradies Who Promote Gender Equality: “Men Don’t Own It, We Can Do What They Do”

There are hopes that a number of workshops across the country teaching young women how to use tools will be an effective way of breaking gender imbalances in the trade industry.

Fi Shrewing, the founder of Supporting and Linking Tradeswomen (SALT), said the goal of her workshops is to “teach girls and women how to use tools”. SALT is the first organisation to run mobile workshops for the sole purpose of teaching women these skills.

Even though the figures show women only make up a small percentage of trade jobs, Ms Shrewing told the ABC things are changing.

“Three years ago, if I’d had a 30-year-old woman come to me and say she wanted to change careers and go into the trades… I would have thought ‘well this is going to be difficult – now it’s possible,” she said.

She says a number of attitudes have changed and people now see the common sense of operating with a full workforce, rather than just half of it.

The ABC reports national findings show women make up just 14.7 per cent of technicians and trade workers. Groups are now working to boost the number of female tradies by implementing specialised classes in high schools across Australia.

One participant in the program, Year Nine student Jade Simpson, told the ABC taking up trade is something she’d been thinking about for a while. “Men don’t own it, we can do stuff… we can do what they can do,” she said.

SALT mentor Simone Curry also told the ABC her dad was upset when she told him she wanted to be a carpenter. “I asked him to apprentice me and he didn’t believe women were strong enough to be carpenters, so he said no,” Ms Curry recalled.

It wasn’t always smooth sailing navigating through a male dominated industry, though, Ms Curry says it was confronting to see naked pictures of women from magazines plastered all over the walls of worksites.

“I just started bringing pictures of men,” she said.

Check. Mate.

Photo: SALT Australia