Upon reading the second part of Senior Editor Kelly Faloon's superb Recruiting For The Trades Series (“Women In Plumbing Revisited,” Page 58), I thought of all the conversations I've had with contractors about this topic over the years. The industry began addressing the subject in a serious way around the time PM got started in 1984, and I wrote some articles about it that long ago. Female plumbers were very much a novelty back then. As Kelly's article points out, they still are.
However, you hear different takes on the issue now compared with back then. Two decades ago, discrimination was a major stumbling block to women in the trades. Our society at-large was culturally conditioned to define certain occupations as either women's or men's work, and the pipe trades were among the most definitively male oriented. The female pioneers who did manage to land construction jobs had to put up with a lot of cold shoulders at best, verbal abuse and sexual harassment at worst.