Image: Tina Tiller

PartnersJuly 3, 2023

Beyond the boys’ club: Making the trades a more inclusive industry

Contributing writer

Image: Tina Tiller

Diversity and the trades haven’t always been phrases that fit together, and many would argue there’s still a long way to go to break down the ‘boys’ club’ attitude. Trade Careers is trying to bridge that gap by supporting underrepresented groups to enter the trades.

Eight years ago, during a night out at Splore, Genevieve Black received an offer that would unexpectedly change her life. A friend of a friend who worked in construction suggested she could help out on a job building a fence. At the time Black was training to join the fire brigade, but since she’d always liked being active she agreed to muck in.

“The next week he gave me a call and yeah, that was it. As soon as I picked up a nail gun I just knew. I just knew that this was what I wanted to do.”

Today Black works as a builder in Auckland and says she finds the job as rewarding as ever. But getting to where she is now hasn’t been an easy ride. As a woman working in a traditionally male-dominated industry, Black says she’s experienced sexism throughout her career, from the classroom studying for her qualification to the construction site while learning the tools of the trade.

“When I started doing my pre-trades course at Unitec, I really struggled with the other students. I think I was the only girl out of the three classes there at the time and there were these young boys who’d talk about women in such a derogatory way. It was horrible, and it was my first introduction to just how horrible it could be.”

“Then I started working for my current employer and, looking back, it didn’t really start off all that well. A few of the contractors that came through the company… I definitely felt sexism and bias [from them]. I’m a boyish girl, but I was never exposed to that kind of culture of how guys behaved. It was a real shock for me.”

Unfortunately, experiences like Black’s are all too common for women working in the trades. It’s an industry with a deeply entrenched “boys’ club” culture, and many women have struggled to enter and remain in the field due to the misogynistic attitudes and behaviour they encounter, ranging from degrading verbal comments to more serious physical abuse.

“We know from our research that about 30% of people in the sector in the last five years have experienced sexual harassment, and that’s mainly from men towards women,” says Phil Aldridge, chief executive of construction and infrastructure workforce development council Waihanga Ara Rau. “We also know that almost one person every week in the construction industry commits suicide, so there’s definitely a wider cultural issue that needs to be addressed.”

As of 2021, women make up just 13.5% of the construction and infrastructure industry – many of them working in the administrative side – and 15% of all apprenticeships and managed apprenticeships in the trades. The barriers facing women, as highlighted in Trade Careers’ Insight Research report, are clear: a lack of support from employers and colleagues, a lack of flexible working and home/life balance options, and the pay parity issues for women compared to men. The majority of the women surveyed in the report also believed that jobs in the trades were more likely to be offered to men, with very few perceiving the industry as suitable for a primary carer of children.

Thinking of joining the trades? Check out Trade Careers for resources to get you started, and help you through your trades journey.

Black says although she knew what to expect entering a heavily male-dominated industry, it didn’t make the experience any easier. She says she was confronted with sexism not only from other builders, but also discrimination from those in charge.

“I struggled with anxiety almost every day because I just felt like I had to be perfect. My mistakes felt like lasting mistakes compared to the other guys’. It’s hard to prove these things, but you just know. You get a sense for them,” she says.

“It was also really tiring being doubted for my skills and not being given the chance to prove myself. I’d often get given lesser tasks because they didn’t want to ‘risk’ me messing it up or they didn’t believe that I could do it.”

Despite the huge difficulties she encountered, Black refused to give up on pursuing a career that she loved, and instead used her frustrations to “fuel [her] determination to get through each day”. To make up for the lack of opportunities coming her way, she started to carve out her own, taking on extra jobs as a side hustle in order to get more time on the tools.

“Things definitely improved once I got more competent, but I feel like it took me longer to get competent because I wasn’t getting given the opportunities to learn.”

While Black admits there’s still an “underlying sexist mindset” present in many men from her field, she says she’s also seen some improvements over the years with things like men’s mental health (“a lot of the bad treatment comes from toxic masculinity”) being talked about in the industry more openly and more often.

Part of this comes down to a wider generational shift among those in the industry and society as a whole, but also the concerted efforts made by organisations and employers across the country to better conditions for women in the workforce. For example, Waihanga Ara Rau in partnership with Hanga-Aro-Rau (workforce development council for manufacturing, engineering, and logistics), launched its Keep It Decent guidelines last year aimed at creating safer and more respectful workplaces. They’re the first industry-wide guidelines to address sexual harassment and bullying in the trades.

“What we’re trying to do is work with a lot of different groups in the industry and talk about what they need in order to encourage more women to enter the sector,” says Aldridge. “Recently we’ve been working on some guidelines focused on things like recruitment, retention, and diversity to help employers create a more supportive culture.”

“It’s very much a long term game, which is hard because you won’t see [the results] for a long time,” says Aldridge. “But we know it makes a massive difference to the culture of an organisation having more women on board.

“And with such a massive labour shortage in the industry right now, there are lots of opportunities for more women to come in and build a good career and make good money. So a lot of employers are really keen to support more women into a career and make it a safer environment for everyone, regardless of their gender, background or ethnicity.”

From better protections against bullying and harassment to simply having access to clean toilets, there are still plenty of improvements to be made for the trades to become a truly inclusive and equitable industry. And while it might still be an uphill battle for most now, having more women entering the field (up 1.5% from 2020 to 2021) is a slow but sure sign that things are changing for the better.

“I definitely recommend [a career in the trades] because you’ll feel so empowered and strong,” says Black. “I’m so confident and solid now. You feel like you can do anything. And the skills that you learn are so transferable to your own life as well.

“You’re going to come across some battles, but you just have to be strong. Hang in there and stand your ground. It’ll be worth it in the end.”

Thinking of joining the trades? Check out Trade Careers for resources to get you started, and help you through your trades journey.

Keep going!

(Image: Tina Tiller)

PartnersJune 29, 2023

Pati Tyrell answers the world’s call

Pati Tyrell

Guest Writer

(Image: Tina Tiller)

With his arts collective FAFSWAG, Pati Tyrell has toured the world showcasing queer Pacific arts. In the third instalment of our Art Work series, he talks about the highs and lows of creating content for international audiences.

Pati Solomona Tyrell is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on performance, videography and photography. He is a founding member of arts collective FAFSWAG, who were awarded an Arts Laureate award in 2020. In 2018, he became the youngest nominee for the Walters Prize, New Zealand’s most prestigious contemporary art prize. This year has seen FAFSWAG travel to Manchester for an arts festival residency, and Tyrell’s short film Tulounga Le Lagi was selected as a finalist for the New Zealand International Arts’ Festival’s Ngā Whanaunga Māori Pasifika Shorts competition.

His ‘average’ work week

To be honest, it’s a lot of admin work, because we’re working on multiple international projects. I just got back from Germany – I was there presenting my short film at a film festival – so a lot of the time we’re communicating with people on the other side of the world.

The time difference is annoying because that often means Zoom meetings after 11pm in New Zealand. So recently I’ve felt a little nocturnal in that sense trying to keep on the same timeline as our projects overseas. That could look like anything from writing funding proposals to writing budgets.

I’m the main contact person for FAFSWAG during this residency in Manchester at the end of June, so a lot of the time it’s going back and forth around flights, around invoicing. I don’t know how to quantify the amount of time I spend on that. It takes a couple of hours of my day, depending on what they request in terms of information, and then I have to collate with my people, FAFSWAG members, which is 10 people, and say “Hey, can we all look at this information, is this OK with all of us?”.

If you could imagine trying to manage that many people, and then taking all of that information from the collective and bring it back to the management team on the other side of the world who are probably asleep at that time, and then waiting for that to come back and then doing that process back and forth. That takes a lot of my day.

In terms of my fine art practice I haven’t made anything specific for that since 2016, which was Fāgogo, the work that got into the Walters (Prize) and has created ongoing work for the past six years. Now, I’m finally in the space of doing a lot of research that looks at artists and academics, historians, dancers, and spending a lot of time at collections at different institutions like the museum and libraries.

What it takes to make work collectively with FAFSWAG

If we’re in proper production, we try to keep it in the hours of nine to five. Our most recent example would probably be Documenta. We hired a venue over a period of five weeks, so we used that as our base and everyone would come in from 9am, and depending on what we’re working on, start filming, start creating, costumes or even just writing or conceptualising the work.

Tanu (Gago) is kind of our main producer, and he takes a lot of the burden of having to organise everyone. Not everyone is a full time artist, so people have their regular nine-to-fives that they go to every day and a lot of the time those of us who are [full time artists] – so me, Tanu and sometimes Elyssia (Ra’nee Wilson-Heti) – have more time to take on more of the management roles. So trying to get us into the same room is actually quite hard. Working around everyone’s schedules alone is one of the hardest things.

We’ve been around for about 10 years now and we were a group of friends who wanted to make art together, but now that everyone’s grown up, having families and climbing the ladder in their personal lives, it’s really hard to just be with each other.

In one of our hui that we had recently, we thought “What if the goal was to try and spend more time together?” That’s our national goal, to spend time together, and then we can also come together for these big international projects.

We know that everyone’s capacity for the FAFSWAG work is different, and it’s really hard, as well as on our mental health. There was a moment around 2018 where we were going back to back to back to back. It was ridiculous, so no wonder now everyone wants to chill and hang out because at the end of the day we’re just a group of friends who have this common thing of art to bring us together.

How international projects are crucial to sustaining his practice

FAFSWAG hasn’t really been making work nationally, we’ve been taking on all of our international appointments. This year we have Manchester from June to July, we return for 10 days, and then we fly to Bangkok. We’re there for two weeks and then we’re doing our 10 year anniversary show at the end of September. Then, depending on our funding, we’ll be going to Canada for ImagineNATIVE for two weeks.

What kind of support has been crucial

I’ve been fortunate in the last year to get funding for my research, which has helped me survive that year.

We’re trying to formalise FAFSWAG as a business, so that comes with figuring out lawyers and accountants, as well as trying to find an actual venue to work from. We’ve been living and working out of our homes for the last 10 years, making all of this film and digital work – it’s all in the same room. We’re working at an international level, and we’re working from home, that’s ridiculous.

The hardest part of the work week

The admin. It’s the most boring thing. As an artist you just want to make, you want to be on the creation road and you want to be doing that stuff but you’ve got to do admin.

Maybe [also] looking at your bank. Looking at your bank account and realising “Oh, maybe I need to do a bit more.” We recently made a budget as part of our business plan to figure out what our weekly and monthly spending looks like, and we realised how much money we actually need to stay afloat, and that was shocking.

What would make his life as an artist easier

The thing that would make it easier, just knowing how I experience audiences, is probably people understanding the value of art and how much it actually costs. Specifically for photography – one time someone asked me if I could shoot a wedding for like $300, and I was like “what?”. It’s just that disconnect of what my craft is.

Who is doing $300 weddings? That’s crazy!

What makes it worth it

The ability to manifest and create into the physical world the art that we have in our minds.

I just came from a meeting where we were talking about how we might not be the most financially stable people in our families, but the experiences that art allows us to have, especially when we’re thinking about international travel – there’s so much art that I get to experience across Europe, across America and Asia.

– As told to Sam Brooks