A Woman Supervising in a Man's World

By Liat Pilo, Project Manager and Site Supervisor, Pilo Project Management

Walk onto almost any construction site on a weekday and count the women. The plumber, the electrician, the drywall crew, the tilers, the contractor: nearly all men. Part of my job, the part no job description mentions, is walking onto that site, giving those men instructions, and making it work. Not once, but every day.

It hasn't always been easy. I still wouldn't trade it for anything.

The first fifteen minutes

I know this moment by heart. At a first site meeting, someone sometimes raises an eyebrow when I walk in. It's a quick look that asks who this woman is and what she could possibly know about concrete, rebar or schedules. Nobody says it out loud. They don't need to.

Fifteen minutes later, it's gone.

I haven't raised my voice or tried to prove a point. We've just been talking about the work: the detail, the fix, what will hold and what won't. Somewhere in that conversation it becomes obvious that I know the job at least as well as anyone standing in front of me, and often better. From then on the conversation isn't about me anymore. It's about how to build the thing, which is all I wanted from the start.

The long road to those fifteen minutes

Those fifteen minutes took a quarter of a century to earn. For years, being good wasn't enough to be accepted. I had to be the best person in the room, better than every man there, with no allowances.

It was a daily fight, and mostly a quiet one. I didn't make a show of it. I just turned up the next morning and did it again. I'm not bitter about it, because those years made me who I am. But I want to say it plainly, since any young woman thinking about this industry deserves to hear both halves at once. It was harder than it should have been. And it was worth every bit of it.

Why it turned into an advantage

What nobody told me early on is that the qualities people doubted in me were the same ones that make a good supervisor.

I'm good with detail, with keeping the whole project in view while still spotting the one fixing that's wrong. But the real skill is moving between two languages. There is the architect's language, which is about vision and design intent, and there is the language of the site, which is what the electrician and the tiler need to hear at seven tomorrow morning. Translating between the people who imagine a house and the people who actually build it is the core of what I do. Maybe it's no coincidence that a woman, raised to pay attention to everyone in the room, turns out to be good at it.

Building well isn't about who's right. It's about working together and learning from each other. Even now, after seeing most of what this work can throw at you, I start every new site curious. Each project brings at least one problem I haven't met before, and honestly, that's the part I enjoy most.

Women can do anything. Even reach space

If this industry has taught me anything, it's that the limit is rarely ability. It's whether the people around you are willing to see it.

Golda Meir led Israel through a war. Marie Curie won two Nobel Prizes at a time when science had very little room for women. Ruth Bader Ginsburg reshaped equality law as a litigator, long before she joined the Supreme Court. Valentina Tereshkova went to space when few believed a woman could, and Eileen Collins later commanded a space shuttle. None of them waited for permission. They were simply too good to ignore.

If a woman can command a spacecraft, she can run a construction site. That was never really the question. The question was whether others would see it, and that is changing, slowly but clearly. I see it on my own sites every year.

What I've learned

I don't ask for respect because I'm a woman. I ask for it because I know the job, and I get it. The first fifteen minutes stopped worrying me a long time ago, because I know how they end.

After twenty-five years, the simplest thing I've learned is that on a good site nobody cares who gave the instruction, only whether it was right. Once a site gets there, people stop arguing and just build. That's what I work toward on every project I supervise.