Mikyla Hall doesn’t see a lot of barriers ahead of her.
Twenty years old and a first-year carpenter, she crawls under houses to install floor joists, cuts lumber with a power miter saw and is learning blower-door testing.
“She can get into places that I’m too big to get into,” said supervisor Arty Taylor.
Hall stills struggles to lift a half-inch sheet of plywood by herself.
“She’s kind of a little thing,” project manager Susan Giddens said. “I tell the men they’re going to have to work with that until she builds up her strength.”
Hall is one of three women in the Northeast Florida Builders Association’s apprenticeship program. The other two are electrical apprentices.
With building permits up and labor stretched thin, NEFBA has boosted its apprenticeship program to 200 participants, twice that of two years ago.
The last time a woman graduated from the program was 2009.
Women still face barriers to entering and staying in construction, according to the National Women’s Law Center.
The share of women in the industry is less than 3 percent and has remained virtually unchanged for three decades, the organization said in a 2014 report.
Even women’s participation in dirty and dangerous jobs, such as correctional officers and firefighters, has doubled or more over the same period.
The Women’s Law Center faults “gender stereotypes, sexual harassment, a lack of awareness about opportunities in construction and insufficient instruction” as reasons why the number of women in the industry has remained consistently low.
Hall said she doesn’t see any of that at her job with St. Johns Housing Partnership, a St. Augustine nonprofit that remodels homes for low-income residents.
“I’m younger than some of the other workers, so I can sometimes do things they can’t do,” she said. “I don’t think they care that I’m a woman. But I play it cool.”
Her first day on the job, she was framing. It’s something many of her male counterparts in apprenticeship still haven’t done.
Hall benefits in that everyone at St. Johns Housing Partnership is respectful, Giddens said.
Also Giddens, who worked two decades as a commercial project manager, sets the tone.
“I tell the men, don’t cut her any slack just because she’s a woman,” she said.
Giddens remembers using walkie talkies in the early days of her own career. When crew members talked to her, it would always be “Honey this” and “Honey that.”
“I’d tell them — ‘Hey, I am not your honey,’” she said.
Cursing was another thing she would not tolerate, unless she had walked up on the men already in conversation.
Kim DeBerry of Kim’s Electric has seen women struggle more recently.
One of her best electrical journeymen was a woman. But she’s also seen female apprentices who didn’t make it.
Her advice: Don’t contribute to the gender gap.
Women sometimes fall into unprofessional behavior, like “too much body language” and flirting, instead of earning respect.
“They should prove themselves by working hard and leave some of that alone,” DeBerry said.
The male culture can be a tough place to mix.
Some hazing is normal and women shouldn’t over-react to it, DeBerry said.
Even young men can be sent to fetch a tool that doesn’t exist, just to “break them in.”
DeBerry, who also is an apprenticeship program board member, said she’d like to see more women in construction. And men, too.
“There’s such a shortage of manpower right now,” she said.
Electrical journeymen can earn $20 to $25 per hour, said DeBerry, who trained through the NEFBA program in 1993.
The pay gap between men and women tends to be narrower for construction jobs.
Women earn on average 93 cents on the dollar compared to men in construction, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Across all industries, pay for women is 82 cents on the dollar compared to men.
Pay is what got Rashawndra Jones, 23, to apply for a NEFBA apprenticeship as an electrician. A young mother, Jones had worked in a distribution center for three years.
“The opportunity to advance was very limited,” she said. “You’re supposed to get a raise every year. But it’s like 15 cents or 20 cents (an hour) and sometimes they try to not give it to you.”
After applying for the apprenticeship program, she was hired by a contractor.
Jones’s father, who is an electrician, told her the career was hard work. But Jones said she likes working with her hands and seeing physical results.
“I understand why it’s a man’s world, because it’s not easy,” she said. “But I think it means nothing if you’re determined to do the job.”
Both Jones and Hall say they think upbringing steers women away from construction.
“Girls aren’t taught to play with hammers and saws,” Hall said. “I grew up with Polly Pocket. I didn’t have Legos.”
By the time she was a teen, though, her interests had changed to SIM games.
She studied architecture and design for a year at the University of Florida, then left to find something more hands-on.
Eventually, she’d like to run her own remodeling or design-build company.
It was a little strange at first to work around all men, Hall said.
But she found the difference in her background was more of a challenge than her gender.
“After we got to know each other, I could see they’re just like me.” Hall said. “You figure them out and then you just work with them.”
She’s been thrown in to some pretty worn down houses. Half the time she’s tearing off an old porch that’s fallen down, said St. Johns Housing Partnership executive director Bill Lazar.
But she’s working out great.
He supposes some wonder what a young woman is doing on the job site. And he’s known some builders to say “What does she know?” at the idea of a woman on a crew.
“I say, ‘Well, what does anybody know when they’re starting out?’” Lazar said. “Just give someone a chance.”
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