From the outbox of Meyer’s inbox –
For women who are considering a career in the trades, it is important to know that you won’t be working alone. More and more women are entering into the sections of the workforce once dominated by men. Here is a great profile of two such hardworking women.
NEWARK FEMALE FIREFIGHTER AND CONSTRUCTION WORKER BLAZE TRAILS by Chanta L. Jackson writing for the Newark Star Ledger
When Katrina Hall and Pierriette Hopkins go to the bathroom, they make sure they lock the door, because nobody expects them to be there. In the midst of putting out fires and knocking down walls, this is something they have to think about as they infiltrate the male-dominated work force.
Hall, 34, is one of two women serving in the Newark Fire Department. Sworn in last July, she has helped put out three fires to date, while continuing to raise her two daughters, 14 years and 15 months.
Hopkins, 30, chose the construction industry after her father died and she couldn’t afford to pay her tuition at New York University. She is the youngest of 17 children and watched many of her siblings fall victim to drugs and crime. Construction gave her a career and a future.
With Women’s History Month under way, Hall and Hopkins represent modern-day women’s history. The concept for Women’s History Month is actually more than 150 years old, born in 1857 when women working in a New York City factory protested their working conditions. Ironically, these two women are keen on proving that women can perform any job, despite the difficulty of the working conditions, or the lack of privacy in the bathroom.
“We don’t have too many firefighters who are women in the city,” Hall said. “My accomplishment lets a lot of women know, look, you can have this job.” But Hall didn’t always believe this day would come. In 2005, she took the written test. Then came the physical training, which involves running an obstacle course carrying a 50-pound weight, fire hose and dummy in under three minutes. She finished in just over three minutes, becoming the first woman to beat some of the guys, but paperwork held her back with an address discrepancy. When it looked like she would have to repeat her training, she thought that could be it.
“It was either ‘I’m going to get it based on what I did then, or I’m not going to get it at all’ because that (the training) was not something that I wanted to do again,” Hall said. “I had doubts about wanting to do it after going through litigation to fight for it. Being a woman it was like, okay, I’m putting my life on hold.”
Hopkins also went through brutal training, but her lessons were learned on the job — knocking down walls and carrying heavy materials up a ladder while coping with her fear of heights. These were some of her obstacles, and like Hall, she had to fight for her job, not through the legal system, but through the informal laws set up by men.
Check out the rest of this great read here.
