It has been over a quarter century since the Carter administration set a goal of increasing the number of women working in the construction industry to 6.9% of the workforce. It is often overlooked that the stated intent of this policy initiative was for women to make up 25% of construction workers by the year 2000 (Eisenberg, 1999). While some isolated projects have met or exceeded the 6.9% target, the number of women working in the construction trades nationally increased in the first few years after 1979, but leveled off at under 3% in the early 1980’s and has stayed at that level for over two decades (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2003). In fact, recent reports show that while the number of women moving into management and ownership positions in the construction industry has gone up sharply in the past few years, the number of tradeswomen has gone down.
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