Lessons from 1970s‒90s women’s skills projects

Rose Rickford

Today is UN International Day of Education. Women and girls still face barriers to accessing education and training around the world. Two thirds of adults who cannot read and write are female. Although basic education for girls is improving, young women are still more likely to be illiterate than young men are. When it comes to learning other skills for employment, girls and women also face barriers. One in four young women aged between 15 and 19 is not in education, employment or training (compared to one in ten young men).

In OECD countries, girls are outperforming boys when it comes to engagement in school, but there remains a very stark gap in vocational skills training. There is a big sex-based divide around which skills young people are learning. Far more boys than girls train in skills that equip them for work in construction and manufacturing, while far more girls train in care and beauty related skills.

When it comes to using these skills to earn a living, the skills that boys learn attract much higher earnings than those girls learn. For example, in the UK an experienced plumber earns nearly twice as much per year as an experienced childcare worker. This means that, for young people who do not go to university and instead go into vocational training, there is still a very big sex-based divide in what they are learning and the jobs they can go on to do. Part of the solution to this is of course to pay higher wages for the skills that women train in. But another part is to increase women’s participation in skills they are currently excluded from.

Back in the 1970s‒90s, groups of women in Britain organised courses and projects where they could teach one another some of these skills. I interviewed women from some of these projects, and they told me about the problems they faced when trying to train in construction back then. They also told me how their women’s skills projects were successful at creating opportunities for women to learn. Today’s statistics suggest things haven’t got much easier for women learning construction skills ‒ in the UK, women make up only 1.2% of carpenters and joiners, 1.5% of plumbers, 2.2% of electricians ‒ so I want to look back at how the skills sharing projects of the past were effective at breaking down barriers for those who took part.

Barbara Jones was interested in learning carpentry and joinery in the 1970s. She explained:

‘I went to an evening class, and it was run by a bloke, and it was full of blokes and me and it was pretty awful, to be honest. It really put me off. It left me feeling like I didn’t have any aptitude for this because the teacher didn’t know what to do with me…So I was very demoralised after doing that. It’s very, very tough being the only woman doing anything.” Barbara left the class feeling that carpentry wasn’t for her. Luckily, a few years later, she found Lambeth Women’s Workshop. “A brilliant, brilliant project…It was all women trainers, all women on the benches and they just didn’t expect you to have any prior knowledge…and it was just a brilliant learning environment. So I learned basic carpentry skills but I also learned I was very good at it, which was a revelation after my previous experience.’

Barbara has gone on to have a lifelong career in construction and has taught a lot more women in the process.

Bev Robinson has also had a long career in construction. She started out learning joinery at Tyneside Women’s Non-Traditional Skills Centre in the mid 1980s.

‘The women’s skills centre was fun. It was great. It was a group of women from very different backgrounds, different areas, different walks of life and we all learned socially from each other.’

Bev finished the course and wanted to continue her training so that she could work as a professional joiner. She and a friend signed up to a mixed-sex class at a local college, and it was quite a different experience.

‘They put us on a course with a group of 16-to-17-year-old boys… They demanded all the air in the room and all the attention… We just sort of gave what we got and we were both quite confident… But I think if you’d been there on your own... I wouldn’t have recommended to anybody to go through that.’

Brook Hobbins, a plasterer, had a similar experience at a college.

‘I did do a bit of City and Guilds and stuff, but I didn’t stick it out. Being the only woman in a plastering City and Guilds course was a bit intimidating and not terribly comfortable.’

Luckily Brook knew someone who was able to teach her informally, and after a few years working on building projects she went on to be an organiser and teacher at Women’s Education in Building, in London. I asked her why women’s skills projects were needed, and she explained that women’s exclusion from learning construction skills was so entrenched that trying to break through on an individual basis was almost impossible.

‘I suppose simply because all of us were kind of like pioneers in the field and realised it was ridiculous. This is something women could be making good careers out of… a whole world that women were almost completely excluded from… Well, it wasn’t going to happen if women tried individually… because we’d all tried it.’

I asked the women I interviewed what was different about women’s skills projects compared to mainstream training settings. A big difference was that the women-only environments were more supportive and collaborative, and did not have the macho, competitive culture that women experienced in male-dominated classes. Barbara said that at Lambeth Women’s Workshop ‘there was no sort of ridiculing or teasing or any of that joshing that goes on around young men’, and Bev said of the atmosphere at Tyneside Women’s Non-Traditional Skills Centre:

‘[It was] trusting and it was honest and open. We all made mistakes and we learned from them, and you had a laugh doing that. You felt supported. It felt a safe environment.’

Another difference was the practical support some projects organised to help women to attend. Cara Smith,[1]who attended an European Union (EU) funded women’s carpentry project in Bath, explained that the project provided free childcare, which made it accessible for mothers. Meanwhile, Tyneside Women’s Non-Traditional Skills Centre ran year-long full-time courses and was very successful at attracting local women who had had little formal education. Organisers Wendy Howdin and Jackie Collins explained that this had a lot to do with their provision of free childcare, free transport and a stipend for the year of the full-time course. This was all made possible with EU and local authority funding, and it meant women could afford to participate. The courses were heavily oversubscribed, and those who took part were committed ‒ there was a very low drop-out rate.

Women’s skills courses also seem to have differed from some mainstream settings in their approach to teaching. Janet Sutherland, a joinery instructor at a women-only evening class at Hackney Community College in the 1990s, explained that her approach was to support women to build something they wanted to make, from start to finish. They would learn all sorts of joints and techniques in the process, but the focus was on creating something that they could take home and be proud of. Tyneside and Bath women’s joinery courses both took similar approaches. In contrast, Bev explained that her City and Guilds joinery college course was based on learning joints one at a time, in isolation. That meant that the class didn’t involve actually building furniture, so it was less interesting and satisfying, and didn’t create the confidence boost that women got from making something they could keep.

Today, women and girls are still being systematically excluded from learning how to build things. Barbara told me that the culture on building sites is still very macho, and changing that culture is important for opening construction up to women. This perspective is supported by research into barriers for women in construction. The successes of the women’s skills projects of the 1970‒90s indicate that, with supportive woman-only environments, the right material resources and funding, and an approach to learning that is fulfilling and creative, women can thrive learning construction skills.

More women learning these skills would mean more women having opportunities to earn a living in manual trades, more women enjoying the independence to maintain our own living spaces, and perhaps, with a critical mass, a shift in the macho construction culture that makes it so hard for the few women who break through.

Rose Rickford is a Research Associate in the Women’s Equality and Inequality Research Programme, University of Oxford. Enormous thanks go to the women who gave their time to participate in interviews for this research.

[1] Name has been changed to protect anonymity.