Encourage your daughters to use tools.
We work in an industry with gender and equality issues of its own, but we are very aware of how these issues are magnified in another group that we interact with daily: tradespeople.
“Deeply embedded cultural attitudes and practices influence how girls perceive work in non-traditional trades, how employers and workers view female workers, and how the jobs themselves are structured, often having been designed to suit men’s rather than women’s lives. Research suggests that the education and training system tends to reproduce the labour market divisions between ‘women’s’ and ‘men’s’ jobs”
In 2009 a group called SALT (Supporting and Linking Tradeswomen) formed to support and promote women entering trades, and two of their initiatives caught our eye:
1. Encouraging dads to teach their young daughters how to use tools. The simple confidence of knowing how to hold a hammer can change a young girl's circle of comfort and how she sees herself as she is considering future career paths.
2. Workshops for women. SALT run two types of workshops for women of all ages to introduce women to a range of tools and increase their confidence with tools.
We agree with SALT that "jobs do not have a gender" and congratulate them on the work they do.