Whether they grew up around job sites or came to the industry another way, women in Maine are chipping away at the construction field’s glass ceiling.
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A deadly oil refinery explosion in Texas City, Texas, prompted Shannon Wiley to pursue a career in safety. She and her mother were employed at the BP site when the accident occurred on March 23, 2005, killing 15 workers and injuring 180.
“That’s when I decided I needed to see what kind of degrees I can get to help avoid a catastrophe like that,” she says. Today, the 43-year-old is a safety coordinator at Landry/French Construction, and one of eight women at the 64-employee Scarborough firm.
“I still get a little pushback being a woman,” Wiley says on a break from her site work at 201 Federal St., a mixed-use building under construction in Portland that will be 18 stories tall. “A lot of guys don’t like being told what to do, but I try not to be too demanding and say things like, ‘Don’t you think it would be safer to do something like this?’ That’s a better approach and builds good morale.”
Miss Shannon, as the guys have come to call her, also offers reassurance when a crew member has been injured; one even fainted at the sight of blood. “You have to baby them,” she says.
Another theory, from colleague Michaela Curley: “It’s more about distracting them so they don’t over panic about it,” the 24-year-old safety coordinator says. Both are making their mark in a male-dominated $1.9 trillion industry that’s attracting more women.
More jobs, but still a gender pay gap
Out of 34,166 people employed in construction in Maine, 14% are women, according to Maine Department of Labor data. The proportion has gradually increased over the last two decades, from 11% in 2000.
Nationwide, women make up 18% of the construction workforce, up from 15% in 2000, which Maine labor economist Glenn Mills says may be partly because construction companies in major metropolitan areas tend to be larger with more administrative staff. The pay gap is narrower in Maine, where women make 27% less on average than their male peers, compared to a 35% average difference nationwide.
Mills notes that the differences in pay are due in part to different occupations and hours, and that anecdotes also suggest that more young women with less experience are joining the trades.
On the ground in Maine, “I am already seeing more women in numerous roles in the built environment than when I started in the 1980s,” says Lisa Whited, the Portland-based author of a recently published book called “Work Better, Save the Planet” and a senior associate with U.K.-based Advanced Workplace Associates.
Whited counts more women engineers of all stripes — structural, civil, mechanical and electrical — as well as registered architects, project managers on construction sites and pre-construction service providers. “I am also seeing more non-binary and trans professionals in my work and that, too, is both refreshing and welcome.”
With the construction industry continuing to grow, there may be more opportunities for women, as employers seek to fill jobs in an industry with an average age of 41. The need is highest in Maine, which at 47 holds the country’s oldest median age of construction workers, according to a National Association of Home Builders analysis published last year.
Employers with openings include Landry/French, currently seeking to fill a dozen positions at various levels.
“Our jobs seem to be getting larger and more complex, which takes a bigger team,” says Chairman and CEO Kevin French. He says he pays women the same as men, adding: “I don’t care if you’re male or female — here’s the job, here’s the responsibility that goes along with it.”
Women at the Maine DOT
At the Maine Department of Transportation, women make up close to 18% of the workforce. That includes 45 women on road crews (out of 878 total) and 253 women (out of 786) in all other jobs, which are mostly engineers, finance staff and planners.
Women in senior management roles include Deputy Director Nina Fisher, Chief Engineer Joyce Taylor, HR Director Beth Getchell and Karen Doyle, the agency’s chief financial officer.
Kayla Stickney, one of several engineers at the agency, estimates that she’s worked on 15 or more projects in her 12 years in construction. That includes a $28 million bridge replacement project in Yarmouth that Stickney says is a year ahead of schedule.
“I started as an inspector working for other people and now I have my own team,” says Stickney, who majored in construction management technology at the University of Maine while “working my butt off” as a summer laborer at RJ Grondin & Sons before going to the MDOT.
As project resident engineer, she acts as a conduit between the designer and contractors during construction and ensures projects are built according to plan and the agency’s specifications.
“I am still one of the only women in the room, if not the only one,” she says, adding that that’s gotten easier with experience. “I have met a lot of people in the industry, so I am much more familiar with the people at the meetings, and I know what to expect.”
Stickney says the Yarmouth project, which she expects to wrap up a year ahead of schedule at the end of 2024, to be her longest ever, adding that “it’s kind of cool to see a whole project from start to finish, and there’s no time to get bored.” She finds that she thrives when juggling several projects, and points to the ability to multitask as a vital skill for anyone working in construction.
“I think that more women would be interested in pursuing a career in construction if it wasn’t stereotyped as a male industry,” she says. “I want women to know that there are a lot of opportunities for them in this industry, and if they have any interest at all, to go for it.”
‘Growing up in dirt piles’
Like a lot of women in construction, Landry/French’s Curley got her first taste of construction at a young age, with uncles in the trades and a mother who worked for a demolition company.
“Instead of putting me in day care, she would bring me to her demo sites,” says Curley, who recently got her master’s degree in occupational health and safety from Keene State College in New Hampshire. Just two years into her construction career, she started as a safety intern for Reed & Reed in the Hancock County town of Aurora inspecting 400-foot-tall wind turbines.
“I was petrified at first, but once I got up there, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I never want to climb down,’” says Curley, a safety coordinator at Landry/French since December 2020.
“Safety isn’t always the easiest job, to have to tell somebody,’ You can’t do that,’ but you have to know how to talk to people, and I love talking a lot,” she says.
Building sites were also a childhood backdrop for Christina Consigli, whose great-great grandfather founded Milford, Mass.-based Consigli Construction Co. Inc. in 1905. The daughter of CEO Anthony Consigli and niece of President Matthew Consigli, she’s a Portland-based senior project manager at the firm, which is owned by its 1,600 employees, including 120 in Maine.
“I grew up in a bunch of dirt piles, so I was exposed to what construction is,” she says. Currently working on two projects at Colby College in Waterville, she jokes about having a “glamorous” trailer with a bathroom — “which as a female is very exciting.”
She says she also appreciates d being involved in the firm’s women’s employee resource group for “more of a voice at Consigli and the industry” and culture that allowed her to return part-time after her maternity leave.
Colleague Stacey Harris took a different route into the profession, recalling the time in high school she first heard the word “engineering” and thinking it meant driving trains. Later as a college student, she knew civil engineering was for her when a professor asked who in the class had played with Legos as a kid. “That’s when I knew it was going to be home.”
Today she’s a general superintendent at Consigli though the job hasn’t always been easy, like when she pumped breast milk using a wireless device under her safety vest that she now laughs about. She finds the work rewarding and is keen to see more women join the industry.
“We need more people in construction, and women can be the answer if they see that as an option,” she says. “Let’s find the girls who like Legos, put them on a job site and see if they like it.”
Rising to the top
While women represent only 1.4% of construction CEOs worldwide and do not lead any large Maine-based construction companies, some are blazing trails leading smaller companies.
They include Deirdre Wadsworth, who succeeded her father as president of Portland-based Hardypond Construction in 2019. The company, currently at 15 employees and 20 openings, is working on projects including renovation of the Reiche Elementary School in Portland and of the Westbrook Armory, on behalf of the Maine Army National Guard.
While Wadsworth hasn’t actively sought out fellow female business owners in the industry to compare notes with, she will go over and talk to any woman she spots working on a building site she visits, saying, “I try to make a point of thanking them for getting into the industry because it’s important.”
Similarly, developer Catherine Culley of Portland’s Redfern Properties says she finds it “invigorating” to see women on a job site, like the 18-story building currently being built by Landry/French.
“There’s a confidence in the project when women are on the job site,” she says.
Meanwhile at Landry/French, Curley says she eventually wants to end up in a director position, while Wiley has dreams of business ownership — though not in construction, but running a food truck delivering hot lunches to workers at job sites.
