Recently I was talking to a friend and we ended up discussing our internships. We had both worked in construction, her this past summer and me in the Spring of 2023. My experience working in construction hadn’t been great, but everyone knows that there’s a massive amount of sexism in the industry, so I wasn’t shocked when I discovered that it was true. What was strange though, was the effect that the environment had on me. It wasn’t until my friend and I talked about it though that we realized our experiences were eerily similar. Both of us are smart and neither of us are particularly quiet people, but working in construction turned us into “stupid little girls.”
Do you remember being younger and trying to ask an adult a question, how small and wrong it made you feel? Nothing has ever been more demoralizing than being a little kid in a place that wasn’t meant for kids. All you could do was play with the toys and games your parents brought to occupy you while people talked over your head. That’s also what being a female intern in construction feels like. Men refuse to curse in front of you but then say slurs in the hallway minutes later. If you ask for help with a task, some guy will just take it over, leaving you with nothing to do. You’re just seen as this quiet, innocent, idiot, and none of the men really know what to do or how to interact with you.
That internship was the only time I felt that I didn’t do my best work at a job. Usually I am actively involved with everything I do; I love to dive into a job and get as involved as possible, but I found myself just counting the minutes until I could go home everyday, doing the bare minimum to get through. In my last meeting with my supervisor on my last day, he asked me what I thought went wrong. I didn’t know how to tell him that I hated coming into work everyday, that I loved the work I was doing, but loathed everything else about it. So instead, I just told my boss that construction was more of a “boy’s club” than I expected and left it at that.
Going into engineering as a girl means going into uncomfortable spaces. It takes a really special kind of person to be able to thrive in those conditions, and I am not that kind of person… yet. As much as I disliked my first dip into the culture of the construction world, I’m graduating this upcoming spring which means applying for full time jobs, and I’m including construction jobs in that search. I’ve been able to find my footing at Stevens despite initially struggling with the gender ratio, and I think construction will be the same. It took a while for me to decide if it was worth it or not, but my friend and I also discovered something else we have in common, we loved working in construction. So, I think that I’ll try to push through the culture, who knows, maybe I’ll try to change it.
