Anna Stern and Holly Hawkins.
One hot morning last summer, 33-year-old Holly Hawkins, president of Milwaukee operations at Tri-North Builders, arrived at her team’s construction site. She was sporting a hard hat, safety glasses and an extremely pregnant stomach.
“What are you doing here?” her superintendent asked incredulously. “Go home. We don’t need you.”
Hawkins, knowing her baby was due any day, had spent the previous week working from home, finishing three weeks worth of work in one. But she showed up at the site that day anyway. “I knew it was a larger project,” Hawkins says. “Maybe it was just intuition that I knew I would be out soon, but I wanted to check it out one more time.”
In a long black maternity dress and shoes that had to be unbuckled to accommodate her swollen feet, Hawkins waddled around the site directing her employees, cell phone in one hand and water bottle in the other. Four hours later, she finally succumbed to the urging of her staff and returned home. And just a couple of hours after that, she was heading to the hospital to give birth to her daughter Lilian.
“I have never taken a maternity leave,” Hawkins says with a proud smile. And indeed, she was back on site with Lilian just two weeks later, this time to bid farewell to the company’s summer intern and thank him for his help.
Despite the challenges, Hawkins says she belongs in construction. She began her time at Milwaukee School of Engineering studying structural engineering before realizing that she wanted more person-to-person interaction on a daily basis. So she changed her focus and graduated with a degree in construction management. She started in the industry at the age of 22. She was hired as a project manager – the only female out of 25 project managers – at Tri-North in 2005. Today, she is the president of the company’s Milwaukee office.
While women holding construction jobs is becoming more common, women only make up 13 percent of the industry’s employees. Women in leadership positions is even more rare.
Another such woman is 32-year-old Anna Stern, the vice president of Tri-North. Her father is one of the founders of the company, so Stern chose to work outside the company for a few years after getting her law degree.
While Hawkins and Stern both grew up around construction and knew they ultimately wanted to pursue positions in the industry themselves, the notion of women in construction doesn’t come quite as naturally to some in the business.
Two years ago, Stern was working with a client in his mid-50s. In their first meeting with the team, Stern had been introduced to the group as vice president of the company and had passed her business card around to everyone there. During the second meeting, an issue arose around the need for a spreadsheet. Indicating Stern, the client asked, “Shouldn’t she be able to do it? Isn’t she the meeting minute-taker?”
Stern finds that older generations still come into the business with these kinds of preconceptions about women in construction. She thinks, however, that the industry as a whole is changing and becoming more modern, reaching a kind of “changing of the guard” point, so to the younger generation, being a woman is less of a big deal.
“There’s still a little bit of the traditional, ‘Here, schedule this appointment for me,’ attitude sometimes,” Hawkins says. “When that happens, we both just roll our eyes.” Her philosophy: If you do your job and do it well, you will gain respect.
Though the challenges don’t end at discrimination, they’re more in line with those faced by women in other industries. Hawkins says her biggest challenges are trying to be a good mom and do a good job at work – and just trying to get everything done in a day. Because of the economy, she has had to take on more roles, or, as they say in the construction business, more “hats.”
As a woman, she finds that she is very capable of multitasking, which she says partly comes from having two children and one on the way. She says she does notice a difference between her leadership style and that of her male peers. Stern agrees: “Females just generally think differently than men, and that’s not a bad thing. When we’re sitting with the executive team, I love having [Hawkins] in the room. Sometimes I will say something and the men will look at me like I’m insane, and it’s helped me to have her.”
Earlier this summer, Stern and Hawkins noticed this difference during a hiring decision. They had not attended the first interview for a particular candidate, and, according to Stern, those who had were singing this candidate’s praises and wanted to hire him immediately. When she and Hawkins met him, however, they both were nonplussed. “We just evaluated him very differently than everyone else did,” Stern says. “We thought the person could give nice answers but didn’t delve down into the meat of the question. We would bring it up later, and the guys would say, ‘Oh, you’re right.’ It was very interesting. It was totally divided down the room between the men and the women.”
Hawkins has discovered that there are even some perks to being a woman in a male-dominated field. “I don’t have to say who I am when I call other people in the company,” she says. “I can just say, ‘Hey, it’s Holly calling.’ It’s easier to gain a reputation. You may even have the benefit of succeeding faster because of that recognition. And at construction events, I never have to wait in line for the bathroom!”
Hawkins agrees: “My younger daughter was on site for her fourth time by the time she was two months old. I’ve taken them out when we are demolishing buildings because I think it’s a great experience for them. My four-and-a-half-year-old daughter Emma can look at a building and say ‘Mama built that.’ She’s got a hard hat and princess sunglasses.”
