Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Inspiration: Women major part of team constructing new school

Construction of the new Rancho High School is providing more than the needed new classrooms -- it's providing a group of female students inspiration to pursue careers in construction and engineering.

The Martin-Harris Construction crew at the more than $46 million job site includes at least five women, some in upper management positions, and numerous women working for other subcontractors.

"For myself it's great," said Michele Grierson, Martin-Harris project manager. "We have a lot of opportunities many women never had before."

Women make up about 10 percent of the construction industry nationwide, with about 975,000 women employed in the sector in 2003. Of those, 56 percent are in sales and office positions and 17.5 percent are in natural resources/construction/maintenance positions, according to the National Association of Women in Construction (NAWIC). The remaining positions include management, service occupations and production/transportation.

Women also made up slightly more than 10 percent of engineers nationwide in 1999, the most recent statistics available, according to the Society of Women Engineers.

But the number of women in construction and engineering fields has declined slightly.

In the construction industry, the number of women has slipped since 2001, when there were just more than 1 million women in the industry, to 975,000 in 2003, NAWIC reported.

In the engineering industry, the number of employed women engineers declined slightly from 11 percent -- the highest since 1983 -- to just more than 10 percent in 1999, the Society of Women Engineers reported.

Those numbers won't dissuade the 10 girls -- many part of a calculus class at Rancho High School -- that met with women employed on Martin-Harris' job site this week.

The girls' future plans included everything from petroleum engineering to biomedical engineering.

While many of the girls expect that any type of the job will be open to them, the nagging question of whether or not they would be accepted, at both school and in the work force, was asked a number of different ways.

"How many jobs are open to women in engineering?" Meghann Petrocco, an 11th grade student, asked the women who were gathered in a roundtable discussion this week.

Grierson told the group of girls she didn't think that any jobs are not open to women.

"It's wide open now," she said.

Frank Martin, Martin-Harris president and chief executive, said he doesn't have quotas within his company regarding gender or race.

"What I choose to do is build the best possible team available to do the job," he said. "In this instance it turned out to be a large number of women."

Martin said since founding the company in 1976, the industry has opened up to women.

"The number of women in the construction industry has increased and the industry needs qualified people and in this industry women are constantly redefining their roles," he said.

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