Abstract
Women make up just under three percent of the US construction workforce and of that statistic, Black women comprise a mere 0.4 percent. This chapter is based on in-depth interviews with Black tradeswomen from different parts of the United States with a focus on understanding how they navigated the realities of racism and sexism in the building trades. Women share their experiences of gender and racial microaggressions encountered during their apprenticeships, the official technical training path for construction, progressing as journey-level workers, and promotion. Women outline the nuanced crisis points in their apprenticeships where combined microaggressions from peers, management, and/or industry have impacted their careers in small and major ways. They also share some strategies they have used to address microaggressions at the interpersonal level. Their strategies offer some recommendations for industry, foremen, and apprenticeship centers to interrupt microaggressions at the level of peers, and management.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Collins, P. (1989). The social construction of black feminist thought. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 14(4), 745–773.
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex. In Scratching the Surface: Democracy, Traditions, Gender (Vol. 20). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.
Eisenberg, S. (1998). We’ll Call You if We Need You: Experiences of Women Working Construction. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.
Hughes, D., & Dodge, M. (1997). African American women in the workplace: The relationships between job conditions, racial bias at work, and perceived job quality. American Journal of Community Psychology, 25(5), 581–599.
Hunte, R., & Senehi, J. (2012). “My Walk Has Never Been Average”: Black Tradeswomen Negotiating Intersections of Race and Gender in Long-Term Careers in the U.S. Building Trades. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.
Jones, C., & Shorter-Gooden, K. (2003). Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America. New York: Perrenial.
Moccio, F. (2009). Live Wire Women and Brotherhood in the Electrical Industry. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) calculations using Miriam King et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Current Population Survey 2013: Version 3.0, IPUMS-CPS: Minnesota Population Center (March 2013), available at http://cps.ipums.org/cps/index.shtml (Machine readable data).
Sue, D. W. (2010). Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender and Sexual Orientation. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Woods, J. (2010). The black male privileges checklist. In M. Kimmel & A. Ferber (Eds.), Privilege: A Reader (2nd ed., pp. 27–38). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hunte, R. (2018). “You Can Show a Person Better Than You Can Tell ‘em”: Black Tradeswomen Mitigate Racial and Gender Microaggressions in Construction. In: Cho, C., Corkett, J., Steele, A. (eds) Exploring the Toxicity of Lateral Violence and Microaggressions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74760-6_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74760-6_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-74759-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-74760-6
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)