Red Seal carpenter Barbara James says it’s a career highlight to work on their community’s bighouse, located in northern Vancouver Island.Geoff Heith/The Globe and Mail
Carpenter Barbara James is working their dream job: helping to build their community’s long-awaited bighouse, a 11,500-square-foot, cedar-constructed place for ceremony for the Gwa’sala-’Nakwaxda’xw Nations, in northern Vancouver Island.
The federal government promised a new bighouse when it forcibly relocated and amalgamated the Gwa’sala and ‘Nakwaxda’xw nations in the 1960s. To be part of the project as it is finally happening is “definitely a highlight of my career,” says James, 36, who identifies as two-spirit.
But getting to this stage was not without challenges, they say.
When James started a trades discovery course for women at British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) in 2005, they hardly ever saw other Indigenous people on campus, let alone Indigenous women or gender-diverse people. It was the same when they started working.
“I used to be the only woman on site,” says James, whose ancestral name is Ma̲lidzas.
Since then, they’ve become a Red Seal carpenter and instructor and have trained numerous Indigenous folks interested in the trade, including many women. They believe their presence in the classroom and on the jobsite has helped open the minds of others in a sector that has long been the domain of white men.
“If we reach them at a young age and we normalize having female or Indigenous or two-spirit instructors, they leave school with this understanding,” James says. “It’s definitely progressed.”
Slow and steady gains
It’s a little less lonely than it used to be for women entering the trades: Statistics Canada says that in 2022, about 8.7 per cent of “trades, transport and equipment operators and related occupations, except management” were occupied by women, a number that has increased very slowly but steadily since 1987, when it was 5.9 per cent.
Several women who are leaders in their trades say having a community of support and female experts to look up to is driving recruitment and retention of even more women. It’s also changing attitudes about what a tradesperson looks like – even among men.
“It’s hard to describe how hard it was when I started out,” says Cecile Bukmeier, 31, an auto body technician and the first female instructor of the trade at Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) in Edmonton. When trying to land her first job, Bukmeier says she was declined by more than 10 auto body shops before someone gave her a chance.
“I would almost get the job, [then] they’d go ask the guys in the back if they were okay with me working there, and they’d come back and be like, ‘No.’”
Then, as an instructor, “I would go into the classes and they would think I was a teaching assistant,” Bukmeier says. It would take her showing off her considerable skill – she’s won gold at the Skills Canada National Competition – before some male students would truly believe she was an expert.
“I think some of the stigma started to fizzle out just having them see someone who had been successful,” she says, noting she now has several women in each of her classes, something “unheard” of when she was in school.
‘Massive’ room for advancement
Despite the positive change she’s seen over the years, Bukmeier would like to see a day where there’s gender parity in the trades, and a point where women don’t feel “counted out” for having children, something she has witnessed among her peers.
Joiner Brandy Kawulka has seen those attitudes as well, noting accommodations for pregnant workers and access to child care in the early hours when many tradespeople start shifts remain barriers. Kawulka, 50, runs a general contracting business in Vancouver, Wood Be Art, where she goes by the title “Boss Lady.”
“When it comes to retention of women in the trades, a lot of it has to do with the harassment we face,” she notes.
Kawulka’s trying to do her part to support women workers in her shop. Her second-in-command is also a woman, and she strives to work with as many women-led crews as she can. Kawulka also gives back by funding an annual bursary for women in joinery and carpentry programs at BCIT.
When she meets women considering a trade, she tells them that “the hourly rates are sky-high” and there’s “massive” room for advancement.
“It’s a great field to be in, we just need to get more of us in there so we can create a tipping point where it’s not a big deal any more,” she says.
Sheet metal worker Samara Sampson, 32, says having support from other tradeswomen can go a long way in retention. She co-founded networking and advocacy group Women On Site and says the community she’s built there has gone a long way in staving off the isolation she felt earlier in her career.
“I remember feeling very lonely and [saying] to my sister-in-law, ‘I can’t believe there’s no group.’ She said, ‘Maybe you just have to start one.’”
Now, the organization has chapters in eight cities across the country. “All of these women [were] reaching out to us from all parts of North America,” says Sampson, who is based in Mississauga, Ont. “The way that we’ve grown, it’s given us more passion to keep going.”
Sampson says she’s gone from being the only woman in her union local to one of four, and it’s been exciting seeing more women turning up on her job sites.
“The biggest impact I think I make, or the thing I do [that] is the best representation, is just being a woman on site and taking up space and doing a good job.”
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