A former wedding cake baker, childcare worker, and building surveyor all have one thing in common - they are now tradies.
Australian trades lag behind in gender diversity, with women making up 2 to 3 per cent of trade workers, but Hunter women are not giving up on the industry just yet.
Starting out as a wedding cake baker in Aberdeen, Jacinta Ferris was struggling to pay rent.
While she loved baking, not many were willing to pay upwards of $600 to $700 for an intricate wedding cake, often taking six days of work, she sometimes only made $60 to $70 profit.
Wanting a career change, she looked into trades and settled on an electrical apprenticeship because it had a mix of hands-on, intellectual skills and possibilities of future pathways in engineering and instrumentation technology, she said.
"I didn't have a lot of support, for the most part people didn't think that someone who was making cakes, that they could actually do a trade job," she said.
"But that's what really drove me to want to do an apprenticeship."
'Give it a go'
In her first year as a qualified electrician, Ms Ferris works as an Coal Handling Preparation Plant (CHPP) electrical process technician at Mount Arthur coal mine with BHP.
The 25-year-old said every day on her job was different from maintenance work to identifying potential faults and trips in the CHPP control room to operating smaller equipment like loaders and dozers for stockpile operations.
"Jumping from making cakes where it was kind of the same thing every day, to where I am now where no two days are exactly the same, I'm learning so much," she said.
"I was absolutely terrified at the start, and when I first got onsite in the first year of my apprenticeship, I had no idea what I'd gotten myself into."
"Some days it is a pretty frustrating learning curve but at the end of it, I wouldn't change it."
She had not experienced any mistreatment as a female in the trades industry and she encouraged women to go for it if they were interested.
"There's really nothing to lose . . . the worst that can happen is you give it a go."
Navigating a male-dominated space
Newcastle local Lou Blackwell had always loved woodworking but growing up she didn't really see many women who were builders or carpenters.
"For me, I felt quite alone in pursuing that," she said.
After working as a surveyor for five years, she decided to follow in her dad's footsteps and start a carpentry apprenticeship.
"It was about pursuing a passion that I thought was out of reach for me as a female," she said.
Ms Blackwell is in her third year of her apprenticeship working on the Central Coast with construction company Scenic Building and Design.
Her favourite part of her job was getting to stand back and take in what she had made.
"I've always been a pretty hands-on person, I like to make stuff, to fix things," she said.
"I'm where I'm meant to be."
New electrical apprentice, 21-year-old Lucy Young agreed that being involved in a "hands-on" job was a highlight.
A former childcare worker, she started her first year of her apprenticeship in 2024 with an all-women team in Gillieston Heights.
She had mostly had a positive experience but some male customers thought they knew better than her and tried to tell her how to do her job.
"It is such a male-dominated industry, that you need to be mindful that men put their backs up because chicks are doing it, and killing it," she said.
Breaking ground
According to Master Builders Australia, in 2023, women made up 15 per cent of the building and construction workforce, but only about three per cent were trade workers.
Similarly, the National Electrical and Communications Association found women made up two per cent of the electrical industry in 2023.
The trade gender imbalance was concerning as the "industry is screaming out for trades", executive director of Masters Builder Association NSW Brian Seidler said.
Jobs and Skills Australia found in 2023 that 50 per cent of technicians and trade workers occupations were assessed as being in national shortage.
Mr Seidler said the number of women in the industry was "terribly low", and it was not representative of the general population at all.
"We've got a target of nationally 1.2 million homes to build and in NSW 377,000 over the next five years, yet we don't have enough trades," he said.
He said the industry needed to target female tradies and specifically focus on getting more women involved.
"To attract more women, particularly if they are the caregivers, they want flexibility, they want hours of work that reflects their needs and that of their families," he said.
Tradeswomen Australia CEO Clea Smith said the low number of women in the industry went back to failures in the school system.
"A quote from our research shows that a student said 'I want to be a carpenter' and their career advisor said 'that's lovely dear, how about a teacher?'," Ms Smith said.
She said because the trades sector was built by men, organisations needed to make a conscious effort to create a more supportive environment for women.
"Some are dangerous whether that is unconscious bias right through outright discrimination," she said.
There were, however, a lot of real positives for women in trades including job security, varied career opportunities, and good wages past the apprenticeship stage, she said.
Ms Smith said by adding women into a workforce, it makes the sector more inclusive and forces organisations to reevaluate their policies and processes.
"The women that choose to get into the trades in 2024 are still role models and are still breaking ground for those around them," she said.
