Ralph Gardner Jr. finds out why more women are donning the hard hats
Xiaojie Cui, an assistant project manager with Plaza Construction, a construction-management firm, was sitting in a conference room at Pacific Park in Brooklyn, formerly known as Atlantic Yards, surrounded by shop drawings.
A conversation incorporating a common expletive wafted over from an adjoining office. Twice.
“I get used to that,” she said nonchalantly. “They just express their feelings.”
If you’ve passed a construction site lately, you may have noticed that not all the heads inside hard hats belong to men. Women are joining the business in increasing numbers and for understandable reason. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, women’s earnings as a percentage of men’s—91.3%—are higher in construction than in any other profession.
“Young project managers, coming in as assistants, make $50,000 to $75,000,” said Richard Wood, president of Plaza Construction, whose clients include Greenland Forest City Partners, Pacific Park’s developer. “Once you get to a senior project manager you can make over $175,000 a year.”
My first question, even before where do I sign up, was, “What’s a project manager?”
Construction sites are as much a part of the fabric of this perpetually changing city as any park or museum. And while I pass them daily, and chart their progress, I can confidently state that I have absolutely no idea what the intricacies of erecting a building entail.
ENLARGE“When they’re doing the foundation and the superstructure concrete my main duty is to communicate with the subcontractors and schedule and communicate with other trades,” explained Ms. Cui, 25 years old.
She moved to the U.S. from China in 2013 and graduated with a master’s degree in Construction Engineering and Management from Columbia University.
“Now I’m more focused on managing the change orders. If there’s a design change there will be costs associated,” she said.
Ms. Cui’s current project is 550 Vanderbilt Ave., a 17-story luxury condominium.
With the possible exception of jobs that require heavy lifting, Mr. Wood said there are few assignments in construction that a woman couldn’t do as well as a man. And perhaps better.
“You’ve got to interface with so many strata of people—workers, contractors, owners of subcontracting companies, architects, engineers, surveyors, CEOs,” Mr. Wood said. “You don’t become a psychologist but you become a student of human nature. There are probably a lot of women who have the right personality and fill all those needs.”
Ayana Goore is a senior project manager at 70 Pine Street, a 1931 landmark building in the Financial District being transformed into a 66-story luxury residential tower. “It feels real,” said Ms. Goore.
She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in civil engineering from Stanford University. “You don’t dress up. It’s just who you are. Being in school in California, we were pretty casual,” she said.
Ms. Goore said she met some resistance from male co-workers when she started in the business in the 1990s. “One of my first days to the site a supervisor said to me, ‘You didn’t bring any treats; you didn’t bring any home-baked goods.’ He was serious.
“I said, ‘Doesn’t your wife make them for you?’ I try to make a joke of it.”
It also helps that she grew up in East Orange, N.J., playing sports with boys and riding motorcycles. She said she isn’t bothered when a hard hat opens a toolbox decorated with pictures from Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue. “Being on a construction site with a lot of guys was nothing new to me.”
The people that Ms. Cui meets at parties, among them her boyfriend, are surprised to discover she works in construction. “A lot of people in New York work in finance or a software company,” she said.
Her engineering expertise has made her something of a critic of other construction projects. Such as the one she can see from her living room window on West 42nd Street.
“Compared to our project the progress is really slow,” she said. “I’ve been living there six months. Where there was a three-story building, now it’s only eight. In the equivalent time we have finished 17 stories.”
One of the satisfactions of the job is strolling past completed skyscrapers you had a hand in constructing. Ms. Goore said it’s a special feeling, “going from drawings to two or three years later people are living there.”
Even better, she added, is “walking with friends and saying, ‘Hey, I helped build this building.’ ”
—ralph.gardner@wsj.com