Hiring women is good for business

Based on feedback from the employers we spoke to, here are four things you can expect when you hire a female tradie:

1. She’ll go easier on the tools and equipment.
   “Women are lighter on the tools and not as hard on some of the gear – not as rough. They just seem to care a little bit more”
2. She’ll have an eye for detail.
   “When you tell her to do something, it’s perfect. I mean, she’ll listen to the spec and I think that’s a difference with women – they’re more pedantic about getting it right.”
3. She’ll be great with your customers.
   “You’ll find women can be a good point of contact for a client. Sometimes men don’t always have a filter that they need, where women can sometimes smooth things over a bit. So in this industry, that’s probably a role, and people are screaming out for it”
4. She’ll offer a different perspective.
   “She’s actually putting a lot of ideas in like, why don’t we try this other way? Normally, you’d say no, we’ve always done it this way. But she’s actually said things that have made jobs easier and saved time.”

From real feedback, from real employers in the trades, here are four reasons why hiring more women makes good business sense.

1. Women are dedicated.
   “Both the girls, they took home offcuts of power-point cable, wire strippers and things, and they go home and practice at it at night. I think they wanted to prove a point a little bit.”
2. Women are better at completing tasks.
   “Females just take care with everything they touch, you know? They see jobs all the way through.”
3. Women are good at time management.
   "When you get on the job, you must assess the time that you believe you’re going to do it in. There’s no use turning up to a job and saying, Oh well, might be here tomorrow, might be here the next day — that doesn’t work in business. I think maybe the women are better at that.”
4. Women can change the workplace environment by lifting the quality of work.
   “It was really good having the females against the blokes because they tended to cross the T’s and dot the I’s, especially on the academic side of things, so they created a bit of competitiveness and it was really good.”