Voices of Women in Construction

Carlson, who harbored fond memories of the lumberyard in Minnesota where her dad worked, started her own career as a building materials manager for Menards, a Midwestern home improvement store. There, she experienced her first encounter with defying expectations. As a twenty-something young woman, she often got asked—usually by men—to get her manager. Customers were surprised to hear she was the manager—and that she actually knew what she was talking about.

Today, Carlson is a project engineer with UIC Nappairit; in April, she’ll become project manager. While she was inspired by the men in her family, and by a male teacher, to go into construction, she’s been gratified to see more and more women entering the industry.

“I have seen more women in leadership roles and out in the field and in the trades, and I think that’s great. When I first moved [to Alaska], I didn’t really see that. Now that I work here, half of our team is women, and there’s more women upstairs in our other construction division,” Carlson says.

She points out that, even at 14 percent, the portion of Alaska’s construction professionals who are women is still greater than the national average, which is only 10 percent.

As co-chair for Women in Construction week, she’s hoping the event inspires more women to explore careers in construction and related fields. One of the ways to defy stereotypes and establish credibility, she says, is for women to rely on the networks they create to keep learning and growing.

“Continuing my education and joining the National Association of Women in Construction [NAWIC] has really helped me advance in my career, especially networking,” she says. “I feel like there’s this perception that women can be catty, but that’s not my experience in construction at all. We’re all here to support each other.”

Focusing on the Work

Like Carlson, Randi DelReal of STG Pacific found a doorway into construction through family. A summer in high school spent working in Florida with her land surveyor grandfather convinced her that the field was for her. But when she couldn’t find land surveying work straight out of college, her dad encouraged her to try working as a project engineer at STG Pacific just to get her feet wet.

Six years later, she’s a quality control manager with the company and gets most excited by the variety of projects she’s been able to work on.

“Each project is different, and so I learn new things all the time,” DelReal says.

In the beginning of her career, she says, finding a balance between work and personal time was a challenge. DelReal recalls, “It was just work, work, work, all the time. It can be stressful at the beginning, as you’re getting your career going.”

This is especially true for women balancing the demands of family with career—and it’s one of the barriers that can keep women from considering entering the construction field. Women acting as the primary caretakers for children or other relatives can’t always square the needs of their families with working long shifts or being away from home for extended periods on remote work sites.

As Alaska faces a growing need for construction workers, one possible solution to the tight labor market is to make the field more attractive to female workers. Companies could explore ways to make work more flexible—a benefit for all workers, not just women—in addition to providing protective gear designed for women and creating environments protected from harassment.

DelReal also encourages women to pursue the parts of their work that excite them, as she did while working on the Long Range Discrimination Radar foundation at Clear Space Force Station, one of her earliest projects. She says, “I really grew from that project and learned a lot about concrete and reinforcement and testing. Focusing on the work alone will get you far.”

Being the Mentor She Never Had

As a single mother earlier in her career, Nichelle Smith kept her stints on remote Alaska sites short, which allowed her to be home more often for her children. Smith recalls, “I was able to raise [my kids] doing that work. Doing what I do now, it probably wouldn’t work—so I got lucky in that respect.”

These days, the senior project engineer for R&M Consultants spends a lot of time in villages across the state, doing quality assurance on airport projects for the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities.

To this day, she’s not exactly what people expect to see on construction sites in remote Alaska.

“Especially being a Black woman, they’re not used to seeing that. I still get, ‘Are you the secretary?’ I’ve had to prove myself over and over,” she says.

Smith came up during a time when she simply didn’t see women, especially women of color, in the construction industry. Her early mentors were men, like the engineer in charge of interns at the US Army Corps of Engineers, where she first got exposed to construction as a potential career path.

“He was another Black engineer, and older, too, so he had gone through a lot of stuff and always had my back,” she recalls.

Now Smith tries to be the mentor she never had. She encourages younger workers to get their hands dirty, learn as much as they can, and stay current with changing technologies. She notes that a lot of work done in the field on specialized equipment has become more digitized and streamlined.

In fact, better technology is steadily making construction a more woman-friendly industry. According to the June Alaska Economic Trends article, women are “more likely to use assistive tools rather than rely on strength,” resulting in fewer injuries for women on the job.

Smith sees evidence of women taking advantage of the tools available on job sites, observing that younger women are getting into the field as laborers and equipment operators. “I wish I could have learned how to operate the equipment as a younger worker,” she says. “It’s cool to see. I tell interns, just learn all the tools you can and have a broad range that you can use. The more tools you have, the better off you’re going to be.”

Seasonal Benefits

Dora Hughes went from flagger to truck driver while working one summer at the Cape Nome Quarry. She’d recently completed an internship with Bering Straits Native Corporation and had gained experience flagging and working in the weigh station.

“There was some lead time, so they were like, ‘We can load this rock truck up and teach you how to drive it,’” she remembers. “They started training me in the heavy equipment, and from there we got into office work, and I collectively started taking on different duties.”

While seasonal work and remote locations can be a challenge for some workers, Hughes was attracted to the lifestyle. Traveling to different villages throughout the state, she was able to partake in the traditional gathering activities she was used to from her upbringing in Teller.

“I remember one time, my friends landed a beluga on the beach out at Cape Nome,” she says. “I was able to go help cut it up between trucks. I loved the freedom to travel in wintertime when I was not in a salaried position. Even now, in a year-round position, I still maintain a balance between work and traditional gathering activities. It’s like, ‘Hey, I want to go fishing,’ if it’s available in the remote communities we work in.”

Her work primarily takes her to Yup’ik communities, where she’s become a familiar face doing safety audits and hands-on training at job sites. As the health and safety manager for Knik Construction, Hughes has a knack for zeroing in on people’s preferred learning styles, tailoring her instructions and trainings to their needs.

She’s been gratified to work on projects important to her, like the emergency storm repairs Knik Construction completed in Nome after a “mega-storm” caused massive destruction to the community in 2022. “Being from there and seeing the damage firsthand and helping repair things was pretty special,” she says.

Near the beginning of her career, she set herself a goal: work for Knik Construction for ten years. Now in her seventeenth year with the company, she’s become a leader whom other women in the industry can look up to as they forge their own careers.

A More Female-Friendly Industry

Maggy Desmond-Layral has come a long way since her pink-shoes incident. Now the vice president for Western Mechanical in Fairbanks, she is on NAWIC’s board and has the goal of recruiting more Fairbanks locals to the organization.

“For a long time, I was our token Fairbanks person, and that seemed odd. We have so many women in construction up here!” she says.

Even within the last decade, she points out, women-owned businesses and all-female crews have become less of an aberration in the industry. Western Mechanical itself is an emblem of changing times. Having started as Leonard Shaunce Plumbing and Heating, the company was renamed by Desmond-Layral’s grandfather when he purchased it. Now Desmond-Layral runs the business alongside her father and intends to take over when he eventually retires.

That wasn’t always the plan. Though she grew up sweeping, doing inventory, and learning to run the forklift at her dad’s shop, she went to school for wildlife biology. But on a break from university, she returned to the family business.

Though construction felt like a natural fit, she worked hard to demonstrate that she belonged in the field and wasn’t there just because of nepotism.

“I got a lot of those questions. ‘Are you supposed to be here? Do you know where you’re going?’ Understandably—it’s like seeing an alien coming into your community. It’s so weird for a lot of them to have a female come in,” she says.

One of the reasons Desmond-Layral joined NAWIC was to grow her sense of community. “When you’re in any sort of male-dominated industry, it’s very isolating. Having that group from NAWIC, they all get it. Or going to a job site and finding there’s a female project manager—which means at least one of the porta-potties is surprisingly clean!”

Finding tampons in a porta-potty, she adds, may sound like a silly thing to focus on. But it’s emblematic of a gradual change in culture within the construction industry in Alaska. For Desmond-Layral, it’s not about blending in or hiding who she is in order to be accepted on the job. Rather, she emphasizes that women in construction should embrace their role and allow their knowledge and experience to speak for itself.

“Wear the pink shoes!” she says. “You don’t have to wear more masculine clothes as armor. It’s not about what I’m wearing. It’s about what I know, and once I had enough confidence in that, the shoes didn’t matter. It’s about the confidence you have in your abilities.”