Standing in a parking lot outside the Randolph campus of Vermont State University, Juanita Forant pointed to two students hovering 50 feet above her. “Those are my girls,” she laughed. Brooklyne Sanders, 18, and Danika Plattner, 17, wore matching firefighter suits and helmets and stood in the small compartment at the end of a fire truck ladder. They waved from up high.
Thursday’s 27th annual Vermont Works for Women event let 450 high school girls try on various trades and jobs considered nontraditional for women. Forant, a youth employment specialist at Lamoille Union High School, brings 20 girls to the “Women Can Do” event every year, eager to introduce them to the careers that they don’t realize they can pursue.
“You don’t know what kind of careers are out there unless you come here and try things on,” Forant said. “A lot of girls don’t know what’s available to them.”
Sixty percent of Vermont’s highest-paying, highest-demand jobs do not require a college degree, according to Rhoni Basden, executive director of Vermont Works for Women. Most of these fields are dominated by men, making it harder for women to crack into them: It’s hard to enter a field as the outlier. Notably, the gender wage gap still exists in Vermont, with women earning 90 cents for every man’s dollar; women of color earn even less. If more women secured roles in lucrative, nontraditional fields, the current gender wage gap could thin out.
Vermont also has the lowest percentage of women in construction in the country. Nationally, women make up 11.3% of the construction workforce, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, while in Vermont, they account for less than 10%, including office positions.
The lack of women in trade roles matters as much to the state as it does to the women missing out on lucrative jobs. Chris Winters, deputy commissioner of Vermont’s Department of Labor, pointed out that the state has an aging workforce, with many on the bubble of retirement. Vermont has more trade jobs than workers to fill them, and more women joining this branch of the workforce could help. Against a national backdrop of job market woes, Vermont’s Department of Labor estimated there will be 4,270 openings for carpentry work in the next 10 years. If Vermont Works for Women has its way, those jobs won’t all go to men.
“A lot of women were never pulled outside to fix a deck, or they were never told, ‘Hey, come help your dad or uncle or friend fix their car,'” Basden said. “The more we can just get them to do it and try it, the more women are apt to jump and want to try these careers.”
For Melissa Phillips, a graduate of the North County Career Center in Newport, the conference had exactly the effect it was meant to. Phillips, a project engineer for PC Construction, spent Thursday helping teenage girls use power drills to build two chairs. Those chairs will be auctioned off in a fundraiser later this year.
“I used to come here every year in high school,” Phillips said, flipping a half-built chair onto its side. “Grab a B,” she told Jasmine Brunelle, a 16-year-old student at Lamoille Union. Phillips gestured at a short plank of wood and watched Brunelle figure out where it fit in on the chair.
Lex Thibault, 23, is one of 10 women — including office personnel — who work at Kingsbury, a company with around 100 total employees. A welder, Thibault is the only woman who works full-time in the field. She was the only girl in her 18-person welding school class, and “the oddball” at her large high school in Hinesburg when it came to career aspirations. Other girls, she said, didn’t see themselves as plumbers, electricians or construction workers.
That might be changing, slowly: When Kingsbury VP Michele Camire, 46, started in the industry 23 years ago, she was one of two women at the company, and both worked on the administrative side. When Melinda Furse, 44, first started to work in the industry 12 years ago, she was “THE woman in asphalt in New England.”
“When I was younger in the industry, you almost didn’t want anyone to notice you were a woman,” Furse said. Now, though, she’s a proud member of Women of Asphalt, a national association connecting women who work in the various jobs connected to the paving material.
To Abigail Serra, representation in the workplace matters. Serra, 37, grew up on a farm and always wanted to find a job that meant being outside — so she became a game warden. When she joined the force in 2017, it was hard to find a uniform that properly fit. Things have gotten a bit easier as more women have joined, though Serra is one of just four among about 30 men who serve as game wardens in the state.
“The more females we get in the department, the better it gets for new ones coming on,” she said.
On the table in front of Serra lay the hides of 14 animals, spread out for attendees to touch. She had everything from a long-tail weasel to a beaver, plus three bats in plastic cases. On her right, another table displayed their skulls, and a cardboard sign asked: “Interested in taxidermy as a career?”
Her idiosyncratic setup didn’t seem so out of place at Women Can Do. A few yards away, a 15-year-old girl in a crop top revved a chainsaw. Another one floated above the parking lot in a power-line bucket truck. Fourteen-year-old Natalie Flannery, mounted in the driver’s seat of a large orange excavator, held a joystick in each hand. She locked her gaze on the second of three large traffic cones and started steering.
“Pull up with your left,” Djeneba Bent-Huggins, a project engineer for Kingsbury, told her. “Take your right hand, and turn it towards me.”
Flannery dropped the cone on top of one of the others, and Bent-Huggins clapped. “You did it!”
Smiling, Flannery hopped down from the excavator and returned to her friends. In white sneakers, jeans and a pink top, she didn’t fit the stereotype of someone who operates large construction equipment — perhaps most of all because she’s a girl. But, clearly, she can.