Gender engineering

Three women, three Monikas and one workplace - a building site. Why would they not want to change all this for a warm, comfortable office, and their outsized wellington boots for fashionable high heels?

Mladen Petrov

Her parents had wanted a son so much, and yet it was not to be: it was Monika who eventually came along. "To make matters worse, I was born on April Fools' Day. Not a bad joke, right?" says a smiling Monika Banasiak. In a way she has not disappointed her parents, choosing a profession usually considered to be masculine. We are talking in the container that serves as an office on a building site in 'Warsaw's Ochota district. A residential complex can be seen under construction through the container's "windows". At the most advanced stage of the project she will be managing a team of 200 employees, but at the moment she has a smaller number under her supervision. Her business card reads 'site manager' and she is the only woman out of seven people working in this position for RD Bud. During her studies - civil engineering structures at the Wrocław University of Technology - there were more girls: 20 of them to 100 boys. Out of these 20 girls she was the only one to choose a building site as her workplace. But she is not complaining.

Challenging environment
"A living organism." This is how the women we spoke to - a site engineer and two working as site managers - described their workplace. Nothing remains static; every day brings something different... new surprises, which can be good or bad. Monika Wołoszka, a site engineer for Budimex on the 'E' section of the A2 motorway (Stryków-Konotopa), arrived at a building site for the first time in the fourth year of her studies. The student of the Warsaw University of Technology was doing her apprenticeship on the site. "On the first day the site manager took me to a field where cows were grazing. This was to form part of the route of the Stojadła ring road. Soon the entire surroundings started to change. Every day something different happened. There was some stress, but I liked the dynamics of this work. It was then that I realised this was what I wanted to do. Wellies, a safety helmet, a warm jacket and then I'm off to work!" recalls Monika Wołoszka.
Work usually starts at seven o'clock. For a site manager it finishes later than for their workers. Monika Ogrodnik, a works manager for Mostostal Warszawa, which is leading the consortium constructing the Wrocław motorway ring road, has no grumbles about this. "There was a time in my career when after finishing one of my construction projects I was working in the head office of my company in Warsaw for two months. Unfortunately, I do not have good memories of this period. I am full of admiration for people who work in offices, but I am completely unused to such work and I do not feel fulfilled there. The building site is my place. Even though it is generally thought of as a man's environment, I can assure you that a woman can also be in her element here. There is always something happening on the building site, you get to know new people, and you face problems which appear at nearly every stage. I treat them as challenges and I am always curious to see how I will manage to solve another difficult issue," explains Monika Ogrodnik.

Giving it some welly
Ms Ogrodnik's original plan had been to end up in sports arenas rather than on building sites. "I applied to a sports academy because I wanted to train to be an athlete. I had good results, but they were not good enough to combine my life with this activity. So I found myself in a technical college and then, persuaded by my friends, in the Lublin University of Technology, which I graduated from in the field of engineering, specialising in 'roads, streets and airports'. Apart from this two-month break between one construction job and another, I have virtually spent not a single day in the office," she tells us. There were even fewer girls in her year - 3 out of 64 students, and only 2 of those finished their studies.
Monika Banasiak jokes that it was her parents' hopes regarding the gender of their offspring that determined her passion for masculine professions. After finishing her studies she started work in a design studio, but her heart was not in it and she soon had to give it up. She missed the challenges. "Here every day is different. I never look out of the window wondering what to do with my time. This might sound a bit strong, but this uniqueness at work makes the construction site almost addictive, despite the many inconveniences," she claims.
Boots are one example. On a building site you have to wear wellington boots. However, due to safety reasons a site manager cannot work in designer boots that do not conform to health and safety requirements. And the manufacturer of the required boots has not thought about women, so Monika walks around the site in boots that are three sizes too big for her, even though this is the smallest size available in specialist shops. Other - much more serious - inconveniences include the fact that Monika spends only every second week with her family.

Playing with the boys
"When I was growing up I did not have any girl-friends my age, so I played football with the boys. I would always be the goalkeeper," recollects Monika Banasiak. Now she is playing once again with the boys - but on the building site, and this time she has got much more to say. Predictably, not all of them are willing to listen to her, but she has her own way round this. "It of course sometimes happens that somebody wants to do something out of spite. But I can sense this in an employee straight away and I know whether we will be able to understand each other. I let them know that they are right, but in the end I do things my way anyway, without them realising it. Of course, as a last resort I sometimes have to shout at somebody. Gender issues are not always helpful on a building site, but this is not so important for me. On the site I am first of all an engineer and this is how I want to be treated."
Every day Monika Ogrodnik learns something new about the interpersonal relations on the building site. "Contacts with people are the best school you could go to. I try to have good relations with my workers. I believe that an individual approach to each person is very important. At the beginning of my career when I worked as a master builder, some of my subordinates wanted me to call them by their first names. I wasn't sure whether this was a good idea, but when I saw that it had a positive effect on the progress of the work, I agreed to do just that," Mostostal Warszawa's Monika Ogrodnik recalls.
"At first the guys would laugh at me a little. A girl on a building site was a shock, especially for the older workers," she remembers. But I was very lucky to work with some very cool people. I have never had any unpleasant situations. If there were any snarky remarks, they were usually jokes. It could also be my character. I try to turn many things into a joke. Besides, I won't be pushed around," Budimex's Monika Wołoszka warns. What have these women learnt on the constuction site? One thing is for certain: working on a building site for example has helped Monika Ogrodnik to develop her self-confidence.

Pros and cons
"When I was looking for a job I often heard this kind of argument from employers: "This is all very good Ms Banasiak, but there are problems with women because we need to rent a separate apartment for them as they cannot live with men." Some bosses look at employing women from the angle of higher employment costs, but fortunately this has been changing," remarks Monika Banasiak.
According to recent industry salary reports published by the Warsaw-based Engineer Data Bank, women holding the title of engineer employed in the 'construction, property and development' industry constituted 13.4 pct of the total in the last quarter of 2010. By comparison, women made up 19.7 pct of engineers in the sector in 2009.
"Disproportions in the employment and remuneration of women and men in the construction industry are still evident. Over the last year a 4 pct fall was registered in the number of women employed in the sector. What is the reason? Due to the strong competition on the job market last year, fewer female graduates in the field of ?construction' found jobs in their profession, while some of the women already employed in engineering positions (in 2009 they were mainly women aged 26-30) temporarily gave up their jobs after starting families," comments Anna Strożek, a senior analysis specialist at the Engineer Data Bank.
The average gross remuneration of women in the sector amounted to PLN 5,485 a month at the end of 2010. Over the year women's salaries in the industry increased by 5.2 pct. Compared to the average Polish salary, which amounted to PLN 3,605 (Central Statistical Office data), this is not bad. Unfortunately, women in the construction industry are employed mostly in specialist positions (78 pct) and are much more rarely in managerial posts (22 pct). On average, specialists earned PLN 4,983 at the end of last year while managers took home PLN 7,255. By comparison men in specialist positions earned on average PLN 5,597 while managers received PLN 8,464.
And who do women like to work for most? In a survey entitled 'Companies for Engineers 2010' by the Engineer Data Bank, ranking the companies which are the most popular with women, Skanska took first place and second place was taken by Mostostal Warsaw, with Warbud in third, followed by P.R.I. Pol-Aqua and Budimex.
"There are more and more of us on building sites. Nobody looks at a woman as if she was a giraffe in a zoo any more. There are quite a few of us on the A2 motorway, which is currently being built by my company. You come across girls both in the office and on the building site itself. And one good outcome of this is that women soothe the savage breast. So far I have never come across any aggression or discrimination," says Monika Wołoszka.
When Monika Banasiak hears remarks such as "a woman on a building site is like a woman behind the wheel" - she merely clenches her teeth and then simply has to prove one more time that she is a good specialist. She claims that a person who knows their worth will not be defeated by any old problem. Does she regret her choice? Of course not. "Female friends admire us and tell us that we have strong characters. It's just a shame that skirts are not suitable for working on the building site. I put them on only at the weekend".
A contribution to this article was made by Radek Górecki