Gayle LaFosse attended a college where skirts were mandatory attire for women. The options for women in 1969 were narrow, with career paths tailored to education and nursing.
But LaFosse knew she was going to be a homebuilder since she was a little girl making treehouses in her backyard. Now, as the owner of LaFosse Construction Company, there’s no room for skirts and heels at the job site.
“As a teenager I knew I wanted to go into real estate,” she says, “but I never dreamed I would be able to do what I’m doing now.”
It isn’t uncommon for women to own a business, especially as females have outnumbered males in colleges and universities for the past four years.
While women flourish in areas like communications, design, marketing and retail, in construction and other businesses that require manual labor, men continue to dominate.
Little by little, however, women are breaking down barriers by moving into nontraditional jobs and proving they can excel in any industry.
“It gradually unfolded but it did take awhile,” LaFosse says. “Now it’s easier for young people to get into contracting or almost anything. There aren’t boy jobs and girl jobs. The sky’s the limit.”
LaFosse recently built five townhomes in the Settlement at Willow Grove, a Perkins Road TND developed by her brother, Richard Carmouche. But she didn’t ride his coattails: She has 30 years’ experience in construction, including the successful River Ranch development in Lafayette.
Still, breaking into a highly competitive market can be a challenge, especially if you’re a woman, says Ann Jackson, owner of Gray Two Construction, a concrete company.
“There are lots of men out there who will say, ‘She doesn’t know what she’s doing because she’s a woman,’” says Jackson, who has owned the company for six years.
Earlier this summer, Jackson oversaw parking lot construction at the Cobblestone at Essen apartments. Other projects include road and driveway work in southeast Louisiana.
It’s easier for her company to gain private work than public work because the state’s bid process is so competitive, and it’s difficult to grow without the ability to win some of the large projects. The state stipulates that some work must be awarded to minority- and women-owned businesses, but Jackson wishes more could be done to help set those companies apart.
LaFosse says being a woman has led to some of her success. And being a contractor is a natural fit for a woman, she says, because it involves organizing, supervising, multi-tasking and communicating to help someone move into his or her dream home.
“There’s tons of men builders, and they all compete against each other,” she says. “But when a woman wants to get a house and sees a woman builder, there’s not that many of us. They like to talk to me about their houses, and I understand what they want. The men, too, they like a women’s point of view because they want their wives to like the houses.”
Janice Pellar, president of EMCO Technologies, also works in a male-dominated industry that began with repairing two-way radios and grew into information technology service, engineering, and emergency warning and safety systems sales.
When she took over the company in 1988 from her parents, she says, “there were literally no other women in the U.S. in that line of work,” and the men who worked for her had never experienced working with a woman—much less for one.
“I had to prove myself,” Pellar says. “Some of it was self-imposed. But I wanted to prove I wasn’t just daddy’s little girl. Especially in the early days, you had to prove yourself to gain the right to be heard and respected.”
Still, she adds, there will be the occasional customer who comes in asking for the “man in charge.”
Bobette Apple worked for the state’s Office of Women’s Services before it was dismantled under former Gov. Mike Foster. She says job opportunities have come a long way for women, but there’s still a stigma attached to women who join male-dominated industries.
“We’ve made a lot of positive strides, but for every five steps forward, we take two steps back,” she says. “There are still pockets of resistance. It’s not nearly what we used to encounter, but sometimes men are still uncomfortable.”
Apple was the director of a program designed to train women to do labor and plant work in the 1980s.
“Women who were in clerical and housekeeping made one-third of the salary that they could make in nontraditional employment,” she says. “Some of them were single mothers who needed the salary a man needed. It was a really radical concept for women working in plants and stuff like that.”
Apple says women received training in physical fitness, plant jargon and tool skills, and many of them have gone on to successful careers in industry and other blue-collar jobs.
Today, women constantly are reminded that they make about 77 cents for every dollar earned by men, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, a figure that does not take occupation, hours or education into consideration. According to the Independent Women’s Forum, a nonprofit women’s research and education institute, part of the discrepancy could be the pay because men work longer hours or work in riskier jobs that women outside the home.
Pellar, a member of the Women’s Business Enterprise Council South, says more women are entering—and dominating—industries such as demolition, engineering and science.
“Women are capable of every task that a man can do,” she says. “It’s really important for women to get out there and get the proper training, because there’s a lot of good money and good opportunity in a lot of things you just don’t think of.”
WHAT THEY DO [MORE AND LESS]
Top 10 nontraditional occupations for women:
Architects [except naval] 24.8% female
Farmers and ranchers 24.4% female
Network systems and data communication analysts 23.7% female
Security guards and gaming surveillance officers 23.6% female
Drafters 23.4% female
Chief executive 23.4% female
Dishwashers 22.7% female
Computer programmers 22.4% female
Supervisors, protective service workers 21.7% female
Network and computer systems administrators 21.4% female
Bottom 10 nontraditional occupations for women:
Dredge, excavating and loading machine operators 1.2% female
Heavy vehicle and mobile equipment service technicians and mechanics 1.1% female
Tool and die makers 1.0% female
Electricians 1.0% female
Logging workers 1.0% female
Bus and truck mechanics and diesel engine specialists 0.9% female
Millwrights 0.9% female
Structural iron and steel workers 0.9% female
Maintenance workers and machinery 0.7% female
Brickmasons, blockmasons and stonemasons 0.4% female
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Annual Averages 2008
