Challenges persist for women, minorities breaking into Illinois’ skilled trades

PEORIA – For 60 years, SkillsUSA Illinois has held workforce development competitions for young people entering the trades. For 60 years, there has never been an all-female team competing in the architecture and construction team competition.

Until now, that is.

This April, students competed at the Peoria Civic Center in a bid to showcase their trades work skills, from barbering and cosmetics to house building and fixing cars. First-place winners in the Illinois competition earned eligibility to travel to Atlanta to compete in the national SkillsUSA Championships this week.

Amid the fanfare and cheer, however, the state competition highlighted some of the persistent challenges facing the Illinois workforce. As employers continue searching for skilled tradespeople to combat national worker shortages, entry into fields like construction remains strikingly low for women and people of color, particularly in higher paying and leadership positions.

SkillsUSA Illinois’ first all-girls team – Aubrey Levin, Kayhl Miles, Catelin Wesley and team captain Amyla Walls – did not know they were breaking boundaries until after they had finished their competition this spring in Peoria.

The team from the Bloomington Area Career Center reacted to the news with shocked laughter, followed by near immediate dread as they anticipated the heightened expectations and scrutiny of their work this title would bring.

“They’re going to be like, ‘You’re the first all-female team,’ and I’m going to be like, ‘Please don’t look at my electrical,’” Levin said, half laughing.

Although it may seem late for the existence of the first all-female team, it is consistent with the construction industry demographic trends in Illinois. Over the past 10 years, women have held fewer than one in 10 construction jobs. Prior to 2021, fewer than 5% of new construction apprentices in Illinois were women, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor.

The problem is a national one. Although 2020 saw the largest number of women working in trades, only one in 20 U.S. construction workers was a woman, according to a report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Male construction workers were also better compensated than female construction workers in 2024, even for entry-level apprenticeship positions. New male apprentices earned an average wage of $23.76 per hour, 36 cents more than the average pay for their female counterparts.

The discrepancy grew for those who completed their apprenticeships, with an average hourly gender pay gap of $1.41.

Participation rates for workers of color also remained low, with white apprentices accounting for over three quarters of new registered apprenticeships in 2024.

Apprentices of color earn less on average than white apprentices, both at entry and completion. In 2024, newly registered Black apprentices earned on average 36 cents less in hourly wages than their white counterparts. For those who completed apprenticeships, the gap grew to almost $4 per hour.

As limited as the progress is, much of it has come in the last few years, said Jayne Vellinga, executive director of the nonprofit Chicago Women in Trades.

Vellinga attributes the momentum to “a perfect storm” of an expected construction boom and worker shortage, infrastructure investment and federal leadership on diversity initiatives.

“It did get people to think sort of outside the box in terms of how they were going to recruit a sufficient workforce to meet a large number of projects projected to come to the area and the retirement of experienced workers,” Vellinga said.

Since 2021, the state has invested heavily in the Illinois Works pre-apprenticeship program, which seeks to create a “qualified talent pipeline of diverse candidates in the construction and building trades.” Gov. JB Pritzker’s office announced an additional $19 million funding allocation to the program in April.

However, Vellinga said she is seeing a rollback in progress, pointing to President Donald Trump’s decision to rescind an executive order that had been in place since enacted by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, which prohibited federal contractors from engaging in employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or national origin.

“I don’t know how it’s going to impact opportunities for women, but there is definitely a change in narrative also at the federal level, from ‘we need diversity on publicly funded projects’ to ‘don’t engage in diversity, equity and inclusion activities,’” Vellinga said.

In addition to outright hiring discrimination, Vellinga said many women’s careers are limited by gender stereotypes and harassment on job sites.

“Some women are doing well and are having an opportunity to move up, and other women do face discrimination, are unable to cobble together enough work during the year to make it a viable career, or perhaps the works site is so hostile that they walk away from it,” Vellinga said.

The hostility is something that the team of high schoolers was already familiar with.

As SkillsUSA Illinois’ first all-girls team spent two days using their carpentry, roofing, electrical and plumbing skills to build a small house, they were subjected to disparaging, gender-based comments, which the team diplomatically referred to as “construction language.”

It is not something unique to this competition, they said. Levin recalled asking women in the construction unions about their advice on entering tradework. They told her she would need to have thick skin.

“Even now?” Levin asked. Especially now, they replied.

The team described their male peers making jokes with double meanings, and then getting irritated if the girls did not laugh.

“You’re like a bad person for not laughing at a really bad joke,” Miles said.

One such joke came at Levin’s expense, while she was standing on a ladder and trying not to cry from pain after being hit in the back by something on site. A team nearby pointed and laughed at her, she said. A teacher walked by and told Levin to let it out if she needed to.

“Not here,” Levin said. “You can’t cry, because then you’re soft.”

On the other hand, if they got mad, Levin said, a male peer would inevitably ask, “What, are you on your period or something?”

The girls said they are held to a higher standard, as any sign of emotion will be used to prove that they are incapable of matching their male peers. If they stop for a second, they will be called lazy or asked whether they broke a nail, the team said. The job requires a strong poker face, Miles added.

And, Walls said, their judgment is constantly called into question. She recounted a male peer repeatedly correcting her and speaking to her like a child, before eventually concluding she was correct all along.

A national survey of women exiting the trades found that the most common reason women left the trades was due to harassment and lack of respect; nearly half of those who left or had strong intentions to leave marked this as their reason for doing so. Over a quarter of women in the study also indicated that they frequently or always saw sexually explicit and racist graffiti; a fifth responded the same for anti-semitic graffiti.

The second most common reason for exiting, selected by over 40% of those with strong intentions to leave, was a lack of prospects for promotion and advancement. The least selected option was that the work was too physically demanding.

The perception that women are less competent exacerbates other structural barriers to employment, said Manny Rodriguez, executive director of the Chicago-based nonprofit Revolution Workshop, which offers workforce development programs targeted at communities of color who have been underrepresented in the trades.

Construction is a tough business for anyone, Rodriguez said. A recent paper by the RAND Corporation found that almost 40% of apprentices drop out of their programs before completion, regardless of race or gender, with almost half of those dropping out in the first six months.

Part of the issue is stability of work, such as making it through the cold season when opportunities for new construction projects dip, according to Rodriguez.

“In the wintertime, you can’t pour concrete. You can’t weld. If the structure is not already up, you pretty much got to wait until spring,” Rodriguez said.

Employer biases mean that women and people of color may be hired for jobs, but not retained for the next one, resulting in more instability for those workers, Rodriguez said. As a result, apprenticeship completion rates for women and people of color are even lower.

In 2023, women accounted for 4.5% of U.S. construction apprentices, but 6% of cancellations, according to U.S. Department of Labor data. A study by The Institute for Construction Employment Research found that over the last two decades, around two-thirds of Black construction apprentices did not complete their programs.

Hispanic workers have maintained a high share of workforce participation in the construction industry, but often in lower paying, physically intensive roles, resulting in higher rates of both fatal and nonfatal injuries on the job.

“Latinos are represented in construction, but where?” Rodriquez asked. “I’m not the electrician, I’m not the plumber, I’m not the heavy equipment operator, I’m not the pipe fitter. So you got no problem breaking my brown body, but you’re not letting me do the other things.”

Many women and people of color who do make it in construction attribute their success, at least in part, to having others who look like them in the field.

In the survey of tradeswomen, almost two thirds of respondents identified mentorship from senior tradeswomen as important to their recruitment and advancement. It was something the all-girls team said was valuable as well.

“If we passed a construction site, and they were working, I always got excited when I saw a girl,” said Miles. “I was happy about it, because I’m like, I’m not the only one who actually enjoys this.” Other members of the team agreed.

But Walls, the only Black member of the team, sees fewer women in construction who look like her.

“I don’t see a lot of women, let alone,Black women, doing construction,” Walls said. “I wish I had someone to relate to.”

That is part of the reason why breaking this barrier was important, for the girls on the team and for those who will come after them.

“It doesn’t matter if we win,” Wesley said. “The fact that we have taken a step like this for us, but also for other females in the trades, it’s a huge deal.”

Maggie Dougherty is a graduate student in journalism with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, and a fellow in its Medill Illinois News Bureau working in partnership with Capitol News Illinois.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.