Anna Bautista has heard the stories working in construction: penises and breasts drawn on porta-potty walls, sexist graffiti scrawled on job sites, photo calendars on break room walls featuring scantily clad women. She’s seen women assigned menial tasks such as cleaning, getting lunch or organizing materials rather than learning new skills of the trade.
This treatment is not limited to old-line construction sites. Bautista, the vice-president of construction for Grid Alternatives, the US’s largest non-profit solar installer, says these problems are also common in the rapidly growing green economy – to the point that she goes to great lengths to present herself as very masculine when on a job site. She’s even worn a wedding ring to a job site – despite not being married – so there would be no questions about what she was doing there. “I was not there to date,” she said.
