Apprenticeships have been around nearly as long as work itself, but in recent years policy makers on both sides of the aisle have begun to embrace them as an alternative to four-year college.  The programs, which are often run in partnerships between unions and contractors, give workers free classroom training and on-the-job instruction while they work for gradually increasing wages. But apprenticeships in fields that have been typically perceived as women’s work, such as early childhood education, pay very little. It’s only in male-dominated fields like construction that apprenticeships have historically offered a true portal to the middle class. And for women, these training programs are often hostile, even dangerous, environments.

Men, who make up more than 97 percent of the employees in construction and nearly all of its leadership, have tended to view females entering the trades as intruders, routinely denying them equal opportunities for training and work. “Every woman has faced discrimination; if she hasn’t yet, she will,” Meg Vasey, a former electrician who now runs Tradeswomen Inc., an Oakland, California, nonprofit, told me.

In my interviews with more than 40 tradeswomen, most told me they had been mistreated because of their sex. I heard stories of men grabbing and groping women with impunity, of women being told to go home and work in the kitchen, of being given the most dangerous jobs and the jobs that kept them from learning valuable skills necessary for their careers. The uniformity of some of the stories of abuse was striking: Women who did speak up said they’d had their tools stolen or destroyed, that they been denied dispatches to jobs by their union, or that they’d been blackballed across their trade.

Read the full article about sexism in the trades by Caroline Preston at The Hechinger Report.