At the Top
Women in the Construction Industry

by Dave Platter

On a recent Friday morning, Jayne Warne was the last place you might expect the owner of a thriving business to be.

With her three children ages 6, 4 and 1 sick with the stomach flu, the Matrix Environmental & Geotechnical Services president was at home instead of her Florham Park, N.J. offices.

Despite the demands of her company - which has 45 employees and is growing - Warne doesn't let her role as a chief executive get in the way of her role as a mother.

And she is not alone. Like most of the entrepreneurs interviewed for this article, Warne relished being in a leadership position. In fact, she believes that only by being in charge could she have the freedom to arrange her schedule so she can be with her family when she needs to.

For Warne and others, the challenges of building and running their own multimillion dollar businesses in the construction field are not as intimidating as they are liberating.

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The construction industry is hard, admitted Warne. "I wanted to quit 100 times," she said. "But if somebody can stick it out, it's so nice to have the flexibility, especially if she wants to have a family."

The Chairman

Marilyn Jordan Taylor, the first female chairman and now a partner of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, said there have been moments in business during which her gender is held against her.

"I suppose that there have been a couple of times in my life," she said. "I had a governor once say to me, 'who is that girl?'" Rather than allow her to make a presentation for a project he opposed, a major once objected saying, "It's not fair to have her make the presentation."

For Taylor, being a woman often meant standing out in a field that was otherwise full of men. Being so noticeable put her in a delicate situation, where a single error could undermine her position.

At the age of 28, when she took over planning for the vast, $1.9 billion Northeast Corridor Improvement Project for the Federal Railroad Administration, she said, she entered a period of months in which she hardly saw another female.

"It was clear to me, because I was young and I was a woman, I could not make a mistake. Men could make a mistake, I could not. I worked at night, I did my homework. I probably worked 20 hours a day," Taylor said of that period.

A Family Business

For Beatrice Ortega, forming her own company was hard work, too. She founded Dot Construction in 1998 and still runs the painting and taping company out of her Bronx apartment, where she has fitted out a spare bedroom with three phones and three Dell computers.

"My first big success was to take my husband from a good position with a well-established firm and have him come work for me at a substantial pay cut," she said. She now employs 17, with annual revenue of more than $3 million.

With the Ortegas, there is never any doubt about which of the two is the boss. When they meet new customers, Ortega introduces herself as president of Dot Construction of New York. Her husband James presents himself as "Beatrice's wife."

"I always get a laugh when I introduce myself that way," James said.

It is a good line, but the title of wife is one that his supervisor seems loathe to give up. "My husband is an employee of mine," she said. "I can serve him breakfast as a wife and at the same time be his boss."

James is not the only husband working for his business-owing wife in the construction industry. Michele Medaglia was already comfortably in place as the second generation of her family to run ACC Construction, today a $20 million business, when she asked her husband John Bennardo to come work for her.

"When we decided to start a family, I asked him to come help me with sales," she said.

For Medaglia, "The only thing that's hard about working with your spouse is that you find yourself talking about business at midnight and as soon as you wake up," she added

In 1994, when Tricia Atallah and two partners founded SoundBuild Inc., there wasn't even a debate about who would become CEO of the project planning, management and advisory firm that now has 11 employees.

"I was the one that put together the whole concept of our business," Atallah said. "I really do run every aspect of the operation."

Suzanne Turtle Millard was a housewife in Greenwich, Conn., in 1970 when she inherited control of Turtle & Hughes Inc. The ailing company was only worth $125,000 at the time.

Turtle Millard's husband, Frank Millard, helped her revive and expand the electrical and industrial wholesaling business, which now has annual revenues of $224 million. He even took the title of executive vice president.

But, there was no talk of her deferring to him in running the company. The family business was just too close to her heart. "The company is probably one of the most important parts of my life," Turtle Millard added. "It's given me a lifetime of direction and purpose."

CEO as Housewife

Warne and her husband founded Matrix in 1990, the same year they got married and a difficult time for the economy. "It was tough," she said. The two enterprises "were either going to fail, or we were going to stay together and be successful."

At the office, Warne oversees her company's work on some of the largest building projects in the metropolitan area. At home, however, she doesn't get the star treatment.

Around the house, "men do help out more than they did 50 years ago, but I still think the burden is on the woman," she said. "I still have to do the laundry, the grocery shopping, pay the bills."

In the workplace, things have changed for women, there's still a long way to go. In 2003, fewer than 1 in 10 employees in construction were female, said Ryan Helwig, an economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number includes executive assistants and receptionists.

The number of women actually in professional and management positions in the industry is even smaller, he said.

Men dominate the construction industry, said Dot Construction's Ortega. "Masculine values are always part of a business that most people think is men's work."

Ortega added that when she goes onsite to inspect her employee's work, "A security guard is willing to allow my driver to walk the project but will stop me and ask, 'Who are you looking for at the jobsite?'"

Turtle Millard said: "I really feel that [women] have to work very hard to be recognized. If I have to exert myself in some way to handle a situation, I'll do it. Anybody will tell you, I'm not an easy mark. I'm a tough person if I have to be."

Medaglia said she doesn't let the obstacles affect her. "In fact, I feel I'm successful because I'm a woman," she added. "Nine times out of 10 I can get a meeting" because people are surprised to hear a female voice on the phone.

Atallah said even though she doesn't put on a hard hat and start hammering, she still understands the business and how to manage a project effectively and professionally.

She said that the small number of women in the construction industry is bringing fresh air into an otherwise stifling atmosphere. "The industry is stale because we're always hiring the same type of people," she added. "They don't realize that there is a goldmine out there of women who are good at marketing and management and finance."

Ortega agreed. "Women are smarter than men, women are better listeners than men, women are better problem solvers than men," she said. The only challenge facing women in the industry is a lack of respect, she added, but she has a method for dealing with that: "If the men will not give it, we must take it and demand it."

A Mixed Blessing

Women in construction agree that their business success is due in part to state and federal programs that require involvement by woman- or ethnic minority-owned businesses - M/WBEs in federal parlance and DBEs in New York State lingo.

Atallah's firm, SoundBuild, provides assistance to all minority- and woman-owned businesses in the metro New York area that are registered to work for the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York. "It does help them to get the opportunity to bid on something," she said.

Warne credits her involvement in the Second Avenue Subway, East Side Access and Access to the Region's Core projects - all multi-billion dollar efforts - to the governmental preference programs.

"I wouldn't have that opportunity if they didn't have that M/WBE requirement in there," she added.

There is no question that the governmental requirements do create opportunities for firms that might otherwise be squeezed out. However, the benefits of certification as a MWBE often come with baggage.

"Very soon after taking over as president, I remember going into someone's office and telling them I was a WBE," Medaglia said. "They asked me if I had a fax machine. I said, 'I have an office of 60 people. We have a few of those.'"

Warne said that colleagues at larger firms have told her of using DBEs whose work was so bad that it had to be redone. But, she said, "Most of our business is just repeat business from the same clients, so they have to be happy with our work or they would find somebody else."

Turtle Millard has established minority- and woman-owned preferences for suppliers to her own company. "That's been one of my objectives in the past couple of years," she said.

"I hope it will be easier for the next generation," said Taylor. "I think there is a fantastic network of women now. There's a broader group of us and we're learning to network and help each other."

And Medaglia added: "Women have come very far and I know we have a long way to go, but if you have confidence that shouldn't be a factor. If you're going to succeed, you're going to succeed no matter where you are."

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