Women builders small, growing group

PART OF THE COOL CLUB: Mary B. Cool, a designer for California Closets, has been a member of the local chapter of the Professional Women in Building for about a year. Pictured above is Cool, left, with homeowner and client Arletta Ashe and master installer Dave Kazvkiewicz. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
PART OF THE COOL CLUB: Mary B. Cool, a designer for California Closets, has been a member of the local chapter of the Professional Women in Building for about a year. Pictured above is Cool, left, with homeowner and client Arletta Ashe and master installer Dave Kazvkiewicz. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

Before the Great Recession took hold in 2009, a group known here as Professional Women in Building had 20 members. By 2012, that number had plummeted to seven.
Today, the group, a local chapter of the National Association of Home Builders PWB and a counterpart to the Rhode Island Builders Association, has 26 members and like RIBA, is growing, says Cheryl Boyd, an immediate past president who led the professional development group through the downturn and beyond.
The years of 2012 and 2013 were rebuilding years, Boyd said.
“We kept a very high profile,” she said. “The networking was really key. Everybody had a renewed interest in networking because, before, you didn’t have to advertise; you were just busy. Now people realize the importance of making connections professionally and for their business.”
The method to reinvigorating the organization included an awareness campaign dedicated to persistently promoting the group’s programs to women.
“RIBA has an award-winning magazine,” Boyd said. “We took advantage of that to promote our programs and meetings and keep content relevant to women and promote networking.”
Professional Women in Building’s 26 members are a fraction of the 1,087 women members in the national organization, said Sheronda L. Carr, NAHB Professional Women in Building director.
That total, in turn, is about 7 percent of the national association, she said in an email, a ratio that’s held steady since 2010.
Mary B. Cool, a designer for California Closets, values her new Rhode Island PWB membership, which is about a year old.
“I think it’s very important, because the building trades have been an all-male environment for a long time and now women are coming in and adding a whole other perspective, bringing the consumer and user into the equation,” she said. “It’s like the Yin and Yang: you need men and women in building to make it work.” Though it’s a stereotype, Cool said, certain strengths like collaboration and using intuition emerge more regularly in women – strengths that tend to improve the working environment.
“Women seem to work very collaboratively and tend to be intuitive in working with the client to make their spaces function better,” Cool said. “It’s not that men lack it, but we’re very strong in that [way].”
Annual dues for Rhode Island’s PWB are $60, but membership in RIBA, which ranges between $400 and $450, is required, Boyd said.
John Marcantonio, executive director of RIBA, said three of his 60-member board of directors are women, but the agency is working toward improving diversity. RIBA has about 900 member companies, he added.
“Our land-use attorney is a woman,” Marcantonio said. “Women are playing a bigger and bigger role. You don’t just see them in Home & Garden Network. You really will see many women contractors not just on television, but in the real world.”
The recession did not discriminate between women builders and men builders, Boyd and Marcantonio added, though the women’s group was nearly wiped out, she said.
“There were a lot of companies that weren’t able to renew their membership because they may have had to reinvent themselves and go into a [totally] different trade,” Boyd said. “We did lose members. Some moved out of state, some changed their business structure totally and some just went out of business. We also had an aging membership and some women had retired.”
Added Marcantonio: “We took a 35 or 40 percent hit in membership in 2009. Our membership is very stable now and is growing. We have new members coming in every month. I don’t see that showing up in permits yet, but I think we’ve hit bottom for our industry. People within the industry are a little more confident.” RIBA supports the PWB, Marcantonio added, pointing to builder Carol O’Donnell’s recent contributions to the Home Show, typically held in the spring, when she and her colleagues piece together a modular home and then work to sell it.
The women’s group is “invaluable to the association both [for] the energy they bring and the perspectives they’ve brought to the group,” Marcantonio said. “The one thing people think of when they think of construction is: it’s a male-dominated thing. But they might be surprised to know women have played a very dominant role in the industry, and that is a growing trend.”
O’Donnell owns and runs three Johnston-based companies: CRM Modular Homes, Emerald Reconstruction and Construction & Rehab Inc.
In addition, she just became treasurer of PWB, where she’s been a member for about six years. She has been on RIBA’s board of directors for two years and is regional director for the National Association of Women in Construction.
The regional chapter covers Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire, she said.
O’Donnell values the connections she makes through her local chapter, noting the collaboration that occurred after meeting Karen Corinha, a designer from Mansfield. The independent contractor “came in and volunteered her interior expertise for two years in a row in the modular home that I put in the home show,” said O’Donnell. Cool also participated, O’Donnell said.
O’Donnell believes that women contractors who support their peers benefit greatly from the networking that results.
“It’s always good for women to support one another,” she said. “Sometimes, men don’t support you as much as women support one another.” •

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