Veteran tradeswomen are speaking up: The workload doesn’t drive them away, it’s the gap between “all are welcome” and an actually equitable career. To retain a future workforce, the skills trade needs to make proactive changes.
Judaline Cassidy
Founder, Tools and Tiaras
I recently met a tradeswoman working the sales floor at a home improvement store. She wasn’t there because she wanted a career change. She’d been out of work for nearly a year. She isn’t the only one — she’s just the one I happened to meet. After I shared her story on social media, tradeswomen from across the country filled my inbox. They thanked me for saying out loud what they’d been living for years: Different jobs. Different states. Different stories. The same message. I couldn’t stop wondering how someone with the skills, training, and determination to succeed in the trades ended up here instead.
Today, governments, unions, nonprofits, schools, and some of the world’s biggest companies are investing millions of dollars to recruit more people into the skilled trades. They should. Our nation needs the next generation of skilled workers. But while we’re working hard to bring more women into the trades, we’re not asking an equally important question: Why are we still losing so many of the women we’ve already recruited?
For years, we’ve celebrated every new apprentice, every workforce initiative, every recruitment campaign, and every announcement about expanding the pipeline. Those efforts matter. But after 30 years as a union plumber, I’ve come to believe we’re measuring the wrong success.
A call to accountability
I barely survived the trades for 30 years. Not because I couldn’t do the work — I loved being a plumber. I loved solving problems, working with my hands, and building something that mattered. What I struggled to survive was everything surrounding the work: the constant questioning of whether I belonged, the lack of support, the isolation, the harassment, and the feeling that I always had to prove I deserved to be there.
What I keep hearing from tradeswomen across the country isn’t that they can’t do the work. What I hear is exhaustion. Women don’t leave because the work is hard. We knew it would be hard when we signed up. We leave when the culture becomes harder than the job itself. We leave because we can’t see a future worth staying and fighting for. You can tell someone they’re welcome all day long, but action trumps words every time. I often compare it to inviting someone to dinner. If you know they’re vegetarian and every dish on the table has meat in it, what message are you really sending? You knew they were coming. You knew what they needed. Yet you made no effort to prepare for them.
A career where women belong
That’s what retention feels like for many women in the trades. We recruit women into the skilled trades, but too often we fail to make the necessary changes that allow them to succeed once they get here. I started Tools & Tiaras, because I wanted girls to know they belonged in the skilled trades. Today, I’m asking the industry to make sure they still feel that way when they get here.
Every skilled tradeswoman we lose is experience, leadership, and talent our industry can’t afford to replace. The talent is here. The skills are here. The commitment is here. The question is whether we’re willing to build workplaces where women can grow, lead, and thrive. We don’t have a pipeline problem if we’re losing talented women after they arrive. Recruitment opens the door. Retention determines whether they stay. Women have already proven they belong in the skilled trades, now it’s time for the industry to prove it deserves to keep them there.
