Repost: Women building careers in construction

Julie Palmer, president of Charlie Allen Restorations, at a condo remodeling project in Cambridge.

When Julie Palmer answered a classified ad for an office manager at Cambridge-based Charlie Allen Restorations in 1999, her management experience was in accounting, not kitchen and bathroom renovations.

But she managed transportation for a book distribution company prior to joining Charlie Allen, so the male-dominated setting didn’t faze her. It’s not unusual for her to be the only female on the job site except possibly for the homeowner, she said.

In February, Palmer was promoted to president of the company, one of only a handful of Boston women who hold leadership positions in the building and renovations industry. For some, this gender divide starts in childhood.

“They’re not always teaching girls how to hammer nails,” said Palmer, who oversees Charlie Allen’s projects that have included the restoration of period homes and several churches.

Palmer is among a few women who have chosen a career in construction, according to the National Association of Women in Construction. Of the 9 million trade workers in the U.S., only about 830,000 or 9 percent are women. The number of females in construction peaked in 2006 at 1.1 million. Gerry-Lynn Darcy, executive officer at the Builders and Remodelers Association of Greater Boston, said she doesn’t have local numbers, but anecdotal evidence suggests women in the industry are on the rise. The national trade group noted that the number of women increased by 2.6 percent in 2011, the most recent year for which data is available.

Allison Quinn Guido, general manager at Hanover-based Almar Building & Remodeling, is a notable exception to the stereotype of girls not using a hammer. Almar is a family business, and Guido’s parents built their house in Hanson when Guido was 10. “The smell of cut wood has always stayed with me,” she said.

While studying theater arts management at West Virginia Wesleyan College, Guido spent summers supervising vinyl-siding crews. After graduating college in 2002, she had planned to work at the family business for a year or two while job hunting. But she liked the work, stayed on and now runs it as a 50/50 partnership with her father, Terry Quinn.

Guido acknowledged the physical challenges. “There are some things that are much more difficult for me as a 5-foot, 2-inch woman as opposed to a 6-foot-tall contractor,” she said

But some clients who don’t want her advice at the beginning of a project wind up asking for her by the end, because she sees the potential in their vision and doesn’t belittle their ideas, she added.

Like Guido, Allison Iantosca studied theater in college and entered the industry through a family business. Iantosca joined her father at Hopkinton-based F.H. Perry Builder Inc. in 2000, initially accompanying clients to showrooms and helping them select materials for home improvement projects. She’s now a partner and works on business development, marketing and strategic planning.

Iantosca sees an increasing number of women getting involved in all levels of building and renovation, thanks, in part, to the focus on craftsmanship at places like the North Bennet Street School in Boston’s North End. “Just about all the companies that I know that we compete with have women involved,” she said.

Women with strong management skills bring valuable insight to the construction site, Palmer said. “We tend to look at a project as more than construction, we approach it as a relationship,” she said. “I also think that without the construction background, it can be easier to understand what a client wants, because I’m not always thinking of the constructability first, but the clients’ wants and needs.”

Article from the Boston Business Journal. View the original at www.bizjournals.com.